I haven't served either, but my impression is that the servers are supposed to limit themselves to functionally necessary talk only. So serving a course will be less isolating, but I don't think you're supposed to discuss meditation, or your feelings, or the weather.

Agreed that meditation in real life is hard to maintain. I find that I quickly lose the ability to do the body-scanning technique effectively, and with that I lose the motivation to put in the 2x 1 hour.