I’m back from the Mind and Life Retreat at the Insight Meditation Society 7-day retreat in Barre, Massachusetts! What a trip! I'll probably write more about this, but here's a short overview:

This retreat was attended by around 100 neuroscientists, psychiatrists and other physicians, academic and clinical psychologists, and a few others (at least one philosopher, for example, and a microbiologist, and an Army chaplain) from 8 countries, and from all over the United States.

Richard Davidson, who would I think is accurately described as the leading researcher on meditation and the brain, was a participant, along with several other researchers from his lab (University of Wisconsin), and from other labs (Princeton, for example), now doing similar work.

Kristin Neff (University of Texas), who is the leading researcher in self-compassion, and who developed the Self-Compassion Scale, was also a participant. We used her Self-Compassion Scale (and her protocol for developing self-compassion) in the Mindfulness-Based Wellness program at Avila last semester, and found significant increases in self-compassion among our participants (with no significant changes in the control group on that measure).

Several individuals from Alan Marlatt’s addiction research lab in Washington were there; they are actively involved in using mindfulness-based (meditation) interventions in the treatment of addiction.

Chris Mace, a British psychiatrist, has just published his new book: Mindfulness and Mental Health (Routledge). He and I had several wonderful discussions about how “mindfulness” might fruitfully and properly be defined and measured.

We all did about 14 hours of sitting and walking meditation every day, in silence: no talking, no reading, no television, no music, no computers, no telephone. We also had work assignments in various areas: I washed the breakfast dishes every morning (with Vicente Simon, a Spanish microbiologist from the University of Valencia, who recently published a paper called: Mindfulness and Neurobiology, in the Spanish journal Mindfulness and Psychotherapy). The schedule was quite demanding and, accordingly, very fruitful. Our retreat leaders were Joseph Goldstein, Sharon Salzberg, Guy Armstrong, and Susan O'Brien. Joseph and Sharon, of course, have been extraordinarily influential leaders and teachers in the field of Vipassana, or Insight meditation (mindfulness), and in training in compassion, for over 30 years. They gave talks and instruction every day; it was quite an unusual gift to be in contact with them, and to interact with them at the interface of science and meditation.

There's a link over to the left under del.icio.us that will take you to the Dharma Seed website, where you can listen to and/or download some of the great talks from this retreat.