Last month I did the "Selves and not Self" weekend workshop/retreat with Venerable Thanissaro at SFU Vancouver.  It wasn't what I expected, but it's had a discernable positive effect on my life so I'm writing out what I learned, lest I forget.

1.  BREATHING MAKES HAPPY 

I'd previously thought Buddhism was not about happiness, but rather about getting out of the happy/miserable rollercoaster.  I had been conceiving a serious dharma commitment as a tough thing, a difficult life adjustment that would initially be hard, harsh, and difficult, but that would yield equanimity on the other side.  (To be honest, I probably also understood it as a way to throw a very subdued temper tantrum to spite the universe for not gifting me with everything I want.)  If a dharma-trip involved pleasure, it would be--at best--the sort of pleasure that comes from eating broccoli, and not the real pleasure of eating coconut macaroons.  Jerry Brown one praised "happy asceticism"; I understood that to be a paradox, but it's inching towards redundancy.

VT repeatedly pointed out that the main objective to all of this is that you be truly happy.  You _will not_ give up an activity, he said, for a new activity that brings you less happiness.  Each meditation begins with wishing happiness for yourself and others, starting with people you love, and working your way out to people you don't like so much (which for me has turned out to be politicians and people who block subway car doors!).  The rest of the meditation is an observation of breathing.  I imagine that each breath makes me happy (sometimes picturing Dennis Hopper huffing from a nitrous-oxide tank in Blue Velvet).  When the mind returns from a little wander, VT says, you can reward it with a particularly good breath.  I'm learning that breathing is a pleasurable thing, coconut-macaroon pleasurable, sortof.

MAD SKILLZ

Being happy is a skill.  Concentrating on breathing is a skill.  VT points out that this makes them difficult for westerners, who tend to have fewer skills than Thais.  I'm fortunate in that I've recently been learning skills that I have zero natural aptitude for (paramedics, erhu), and have learned that mindlessly practicing the erhu for the recommended thirty minutes per day doesn't do much--I have to intelligently, strategically practice (what isn't working? why not? what can I do to fix that?).

So I'm collecting strategies and tactics for breath meditation:  Breathing focused on one part of the body for five minutes before moving to the next part of the body.  Focussing on two body parts at once.  Imagining external noise passes through you.  Breathing with the entire body for added stability.  Most usefully, when the prodigal mind returns, reward it with a good breath.  And then that ability to focus on breath becomes a tool for keeping steady for the rest of the day; it's always right there ready to jump in.  And it feels really good.

I'm reading dog manuals in preparation of my new refugee roommate (arriving Monday!), and am impressed by how similar training the mind is to training a dog: consistency, discipline, patience, and rewards.  Again, it's all a skill.  (Sometimes I'm struck by how much my mind is like a dog, and sometimes by how much it's like a faculty curriculum committee--apt to cause trouble when bored).  Sometimes when I'm trying to decide (usually not too consciously) between skillful and unskillful action, I remember that I'm breathing, and a quick focus clears my head, allowing me to make a more objective (though not necessarily skillful) decision.

A couple weeks ago, yet another monk was giving a lecture in the same building:  Matthieu Ricard, in discussing the "Roots of Altruism," pointed out that compassion is also a skill, that we shouldn't be surprised when people aren't compassionate if they haven't been working at it, and that we might want to spend time in compassion gyms rather than "working out on bicycles that don't go anywhere."

OUTCOMES
I'm meditating more often, longer, and better.  With a busy day, I sometimes have to force myself to sit, and the first bit of sit can sometimes involve a lot of mental commotion, but almost always it settles down and is really nice.  

I would like to try a proper retreat at one of the monasteries.  VT's home monastery is in a avocado grove an hour E of my parents', so convenient, and there's a sister monastery about three hours E of here.

Last thought:  The fictitous Quendelton State University has a commercial to persuade its unhappy students not to transfer elsewhere--mostly because moving is too much work--and it ends with the slogan, "Because it's easier to be lazy than happy."  Indeed.

APPENDIX:  M. Carrither's description of Forest-Tradition Buddhists
	The Buddha held the human consitution to be such that it could be laid bare to fruitful investigation through insight meditation and decisively transformed through the Buddhist training.  The internal coherence of this view is difficult to fault, but our ultimate assent must be founded in experience, in empirical evidence.  I can offer only my experience from fieldwork with meditating forest monks in contemporary Sri Lanka.  Many monks were evidently healthy and content, 'radiant' and 'without remorse', and this in itself impressed me.  Yet to be fair this may have been only the fruit of a quiet life, since I simply was not with any of the monks for the long years necessary to have witnessed and understood some slow metamorphosis of character through Buddhist discipline.
	There were, however, three traits of monks which did seem directly persuant upon the Buddhist training.  The first was an interested, indeed fascinated, absorption in what they called their 'work', which referred to the hour-by-hour, minute-by-minute prosecution of the daily round--study, careful eating, hygiene, meditation, exercise--which makes up the monk's life.  In the reflective execution of these oridnary tasks they clearly found tremendous satisfaction.  But, second, some did nevertheless also pour tremendous energy and years of their lives into long-term projects, such as the founding of forest hermitages.  Yet they still remained without anxiety and relatively indifferent to the results of their efforts.  They were both remarkable sucessful and remarkablely uninterested in sucess.  These deep-seated attitudes were far enough from ordinary life and close enough to the Buddhist ideal of living in the present that I had no difficulty in attributing them to the monastic discipline.
	It was the third trait, however, which most persuaded me of the discipline's effectiveness, and that was the monks' courage in the face of wild forest animals.  On two occassions while on foot in the jungle there stood between me and a surprised and threatened animal--once a wild boar and once an elephant--only the slight body and unmoving equanimity of a monk.  On both occassions the monk tool a firm but unagressive stance and spoke calmly to the animal, which crashed off into the underbrush.  No behaviour could be further from ordinary expectations, and it attested vividly to the depth of transformation achievable through the Buddhist trainning.  None of this, of course, proves the truth of the Buddha's teaching, but it does invite us to consider his philosophy seriously as one which has something to tell us about the nature and capacities of the human constitution.