Dharma Treasure Community

Hello Everyone!

I was hoping to get some suggestions for the practice of connecting. I feel like most of the time I’m around stage 3, verging on 4, yet I rarely make use of the practice of connecting suggested during stage 3 (though I know Culadasa does say that it may not be useful at first), and stick to just following, which I enjoy very much, and which I feel like I’m increasingly learning to balance with stronger introspective awareness. Checking in is also going great, and labelling is good too! Anyway, my issue with connecting is that it feels like I have to disengage my attention with the raw sensations of the breath, hold a mental snapshot in mind of, for example, the duration of my in-breath, and then compare it with the next in-breath, out-breath, or what have you. This feels like a distraction from the actual sensations themselves, and for some reason it feels like it requires a degree of mental effort, like trying to hold multiple digits in mind whilst doing a calculation (although less difficult!), that doesn’t feel quite right.
Another difficulty I have with it is that there are a lot of variables; I could compare the in and out breaths, in-breath with the next in-breath, pauses between in and out to the pauses between out and in, and so on and so on. I think with all the options my mind gets a little agitated with deciding what to compare next.
Is it that I’m trying to be a little too precise in comparing the lengths of each breath, and I should simply try to let a general sense of the comparisons emerge from paying a little more intentional attention to the duration of the parts of breathing?

Any advice or suggestions are very welcome! 🙂

Many thanks,
Ollie