This year I attended my second silent meditation retreat at Spirit Rock Meditation Center, ten days focusing on vipassanā (insight) meditation. Since people generally ask about or react to the “silence” aspect of attending a silent meditation retreat, picturing the challenge being going ten days without talking, I’ll say that’s not the challenge or point of a retreat at all. If interested, it’s easy to understand it this way. For people that meditate on a regular basis, attending a silent retreat is really no different than students heading to the library to study, or upholding the no talking rule during a college exam.

You and everyone around you needs and wants to maintain the quiet in order to focus on the actual task at hand. As such, there’s no challenge in “not talking.” It’s just the opposite. It becomes pretty difficult if others start talking around you. The real challenge is keeping undivided attention on the material or exam directly in front of you, or in the case of insight meditation, being quiet enough, creating enough stillness to explore the depths and to observe the basic workings of your mind and experience. Like a library, the quiet atmosphere and others studying around you is the favorable condition which makes the challenging process of studying your mind a little easier.

Understanding this, a better question about an insight retreat experience is not “what is it like to not talk for ten days” but “what did you learn?” Of course, that’s often asking a deeply personal question so I wouldn’t expect an answer but you can look for changes in a person’s pre and post retreat behavior or way of being.

If curious, you can try an insight retreat, but only if you can picture eating vegetarian food for a week, amazing food, can summon a student mentality and not talk for a short period, ten days is really nothing, and at the core of it, the real challenge — face yourself — commit to sitting with and carefully observe your mind for ten days and not move, no matter what comes, the good and difficult, and what you find and learn about yourself in the process. This is, at least in part, the challenge and opportunity of a vipassana (insight) meditation retreat.

And if you’re afraid of not talking for ten days or what might happen, that is a perfectly reasonable place to begin looking at your mind.

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As some know, I started taking Lindy Hop swing dance lessons in 2009. Since then I’ve bookmarked and shared a number of dance related videos with friends in and outside of class. Recently, it occurred to me to post a top 10 list. With so many amazing videos online it was difficult to narrow it down but here they are, my top ten favorite Lindy Hop videos.

You many have seen the Bonnie Tyler, Total Eclipse of the Heart literal music video make the rounds several months ago but did you know there are more…many more…literal music videos out there? For your entertainment, I’ve compiled the top ten best. They are…

Music director for the Joffrey Ballet School, Colin Huggins (aka – “The Crazy Piano Guy”) is a Manhattan based musician known for dragging real pianos to subways, parks, street corners, and other locations and giving impromptu performances. Check out the great Lindy Hop moves in Colin’s new video “Until It’s You!”

I learned about Colin Huggins via Rik Panganiban’s blog. You can purchase the single “Until It’s You” on Amazon MP3, and follow Colin Huggins on Twitter and Facebook.

Click here to view the embedded video.

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Coming in Disney IMAX 3D in 2010. Starring Jeff Bridges, Garrett Hedlund, Olivia Wild, Bruce Boxleitner. Directed by Joseph Kosinski. Can’t wait to see it!

Bobby McFerrin demonstrates the power of the pentatonic scale, using audience participation, from the June 12, 2009 World Science Festival event “Notes & Neurons: In Search of the Common Chorus“. Also on stage are panelists Jamshed Bharucha, Provost and Senior Vice President of Tufts University; the James McGill Professor of Psychology and Neurosciences at McGill University, Daniel Levitin; Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Sheffield, Lawrence Parsons; and host of WNYC’s music/talk show Soundcheck, John Schaefer.

If you missed the Google I/O conference last week, here is the video of Google’s largest announcement, Google Wave, which in short aims to replace the 40 year old email standard and become a new open standard for electronic communication and real-time collaboration. It’s a whole new way of thinking about online communication and there are a number of components to the system so if you work in tech it’s worth watching the video from beginning to end. Google Wave is a major power play by Google, and the biggest question is how Microsoft will embrace or deflect HTML5 in it’s browsers, a requirement for Wave, and the new Wave protocol itself.

As a side note, I was hoping Google would talk about how the new Wave system potentially ends the largest current issue with email — SPAM. It’s implied by the architecture of the system but I’m not sure everyone will grasp this and in my mind is a huge selling point for any protocol, as least in-part, aiming to replace email.