Final update (for the 3.5 people paying attention to this thread :P)
The class was 8 weeks in total, with a 5.5 hour mini retreat (silent) after week 6. Daily homework was 30 minutes a day...um, most days? Like 5 days a week, usually?
Progress: I think the best way to look at the situation, like almost every situation, is through the lens of poker.
(God where would I be without poker.) Take a noob who knows the rules of poker but not much else. Give them 2 hours a week of videos to watch, they play 30 min a day max, 4-5 days a week, and what do you have? Still a drooler.
I think that's probably a fair assessment of where I'm at, but I actually think that looking at it through this lens is helpful. If I thought after 8 weeks on this schedule I would shave my head and wear a robe, go live in Tibet, well that's about as realistic as the noob's dreams of winning WSOP after 2 months of playing and studying practically zero. My goal should have been and was to drool less, or to put it in the class' terms, "to drool mindfully." I think I got there, but the catch is that I need to keep up with the practice, faithfully, if it's going to have any real effect.
I took the class in order to reduce chronic pain, there's a fair bit of evidence mindfulness work for this. So far I haven't had any difference, but I also need to be honest with how dedicated I've been, and need to be going forward. I didn't learn poker this quickly, no one picks up a foreign language taking a class 1x/week, so I hope that I keep at it. For those interested in the science of meditation, the quick and dirty answer is 'neuroplasticity'. Meditation rewires our brains, and it will take more than 40 hours of work to overwrite 40 years of patterns.
Any other Q's, feel free to ask. otherwise, thanks for accompanying me this far, and namaste, mofos.