A Happy YA New Year

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In the YA eSatsang, our online fellowship group, we have a tradition of asking people to write in and share a holiday message. In the email calling for holiday messages, the YA eSatsang team asked YAs to share an overview of their year, successes, challenges, and benefits they've seen from a year of passage meditation practice.

We at YA Blog HQ wanted to share some of the amazing things we've learned this year, so we decided to kick off 2014 with our own holiday message!

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Bay Area YAs at a recent gathering in San Francisco

An Overview of 2013

At the close of 2012, the BMCM put forward a new strategic plan for the whole of the organization. The top priority of this new initiative? Finding new ways to share passage meditation and Eknath Easwaran's teachings with young people. Many YA schemes were hatched, lots of YA plans were made, and in February 2013, the YA Blog Team was born!

At the end of April, with the help of our wider YA community, we began sharing stories and tips from YAs around the world practicing passage meditation. We've been just amazed at these posts. Lofty, practical, sincere, and often funny, we've learned a lot from all our contributors and been inspired to work on our own daily practice.

By now, eight months later, YA Blog HQ has settled into a nice routine of writing, editing, emailing, and posting - none of which would be possible without the support of the broader YA and BMCM community. We're so grateful for all the help!

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Successes and Challenges

We've been so pleased with the reach the blog has had in its first months. Here are some stats from the blog's first eight months of activity:

  • We've had visitors from over 35 countries. Most visits come from the US, India, Germany, the UK, and Canada.
  • We've had a total of just overe 2,000 unique visitors, with an average rate of 500 unique visitors per month.
  • The month of November brought us the most visitors so far: 635 unique visitors, and 1,167 total visits (we think it might be that Passage Portfolio thing. . .)
  • One-third of our audience comes via the Timeless Wisdom Blog or the Eknath Easwaran Facebook page.

We've been so pleased to hear from many of our non-YA friends from the passage meditation community. Keep it up!

As with any endeavor, the main challenge on our end is curating content. There is such a wealth of material out there, from YA stories to inspiration from Easwaran to passages. . . it's a wonderful challenge to have. 

What do YOU think?

Now we'd love to hear from you! In the comments below, we'd love to hear from you on any, or all, of the these topics. Or just drop a comment saying "hi". We'd love to hear from you!

  • What post from 2013 really inspired you?
  • Was there a tip you picked up from a post that helped your practice?
  • Is there anything specific you'd like to see on the blog in 2014?

Best wishes,

Your YA Blog Team