On YA Stats

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This month we're continuing to celebrate the blog's two-year anniversary and wanted to share with you some stats on the blog itself, and the BMCM's other big online endeavor over the past year, the webinars.

YA Blog
We have an average of 612 unique monthly visitors (up from 532 a year ago). Since January of this year we've had visitors from over 68 countries, though the blog has the most visitors from the US, India, UK, Canada, Australia, Germany, and the Netherlands.

YA-Blog-Homepage

We've been pleased with the reception to our audio talks from Easwaran with nearly 250 plays on the audio talk "Harmony with Others and Oneself" and nearly 60 plays on the Gandhi talk posted just last week.

Anecdotally, we hear great stories at our retreats about friends, family, grandparents, and neighbors using the YA blog as a comfortable entry point for sharing passage meditation with YAs and non-YAs alike, as well as using the blog as a source of satsang when meditators don't have a physical community nearby. 

Webinars
Last year the BMCM hosted its first ever webinar and we're so pleased to be able to reach out to a new audience, and especially provide a way for our international friends to participate!

Since January 2014 we've held three introductory webinars introducing passage meditation and just four weeks ago we held our first ever "Webinar 2" focusing on the rest of the eight points and how they help you get the most out of your meditation.

YA-BMCM-Webinar

We got a lot of feedback from our "Webinar 1" curriculum and as a result integrated group brainstorms, self-reflection exercises, and an extended Q&A period into Webinar 2. We loved seeing all the questions and comments come in throughout the webinar and were pleased to hear from long-time friends as well as brand new folks. As the BMCM continues to develop its online offerings, we're so grateful for all our audience support and we'd like to share a bit about the webinar. Here are some statistics:

  • There were 394 registrations!
  • 19% of registrations came from outside the US from 20 countries.
  • 20% of registrants have no current meditation practice (and 30% of those were YAs!)
  • 71% of participants first became interested in passage meditation by reading one of Easwaran's books.
  • After attending the webinar, participants were asked what next steps they were going to take and visiting the YA Blog was the second most popular next step (attending a retreat was most popular).

We also heard directly from some participants:

From someone relatively new: "I appreciate this opportunity to have more connection with other passage meditators since I just started this practice in January. So far I have been mostly focusing on passage meditation and using a mantram. I was happy to get a better sense of how to expand into the use of the other points."

From a longer-term meditator: "It was a great experience to participate in this webinar. It was inspiring and enlightening. It motivated me to dig deeper in my practice - learn a new passage for meditation, meditate every day, go to a retreat, continue in satsang. "

What about year three?
We're queuing up more great posts for you from our broader YA community and curating more readings and audio content from Easwaran to continue the blog for its third year.

In the meantime, we'd love to hear from you! In the comments below, let us know if there's a particular topic you'd love to see on the YA blog, either from a YA or in Easwaran excerpts.