What a Great Four Years!

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It’s time for a celebration! After nearly four years, we’ll be transitioning from our Blue Mountain Blog to our new Wednesdays With the BMCM email. With the launch of Wednesdays With the BMCM, we’re able to expand the scope of our offerings and share these stories as part of bmcm.org. This week, we want to celebrate a beautiful four years together here at yameditation.org by highlighting some of our favorite blog stories. We look forward to seeing you all next week (just as normal!) over at bmcm.org.

The Early Days: YA Blog

When the Blog launched in the Spring of 2013 it was part of the Young Adult (YA) Outreach initiative. Our goal was to help YAs see how passage meditation fits into a YA lifestyle, and to build a platform to share inspiration and practical tips about starting and sustaining a practice.

What tips and inspiration we’ve had! Here are some highlights:

  • Carlos shared how passage meditation integrates with his faith tradition.
  • Sarah wrote about how the mantram is part of her daily commute.
  • Derek gave examples of how he integrates his spiritual practice into his daily technology use.
  • Logan shared how she works on training the senses . . . “YA style.”
  • Adam & Emily shared their “Passage Portfolio” – a digital tool for organizing your passages.

Throughout this time we’ve also published photo essays sharing an inside look at our YA retreats, summer internships, and Cohort Programs. It was a wonderful way to showcase the vibrant BMCM community of young adults in their teens, 20s and 30s.

A Blog for Everyone: The Blue Mountain Blog

A year ago, in early 2016, we announced the launch of the Blue Mountain Blog. We’d found that YAs really enjoyed, and benefited, from stories from older meditators. We’d also heard from many older friends that they enjoyed the personal stories.

Over the past year, we’ve enjoyed hearing stories from our broader community. The topics have showcased the variety of ways people live out the eight points in their day-to-day life, and we’ve benefited from hearing from a wider range of voices. Here are a few highlights:

  • Hasmita wrote about how she hosted an event to share passage meditation with her friends.
  • Dick shared how he sees parallels between his passage meditation practice and, surprisingly, his hobby of magic!
  • Inspired by attending a retreat in Tomales, Paige wrote about how she created a personal retreat in her own home.
  • We experimented with video, interviewing YAs to hear about how they first found the book Passage Meditation and how it’s influenced their lives.
  • Ken wrote about how he’s used pictures of Easwaran to help him deepen his spiritual practice.
  • Sandy shared how her practice supported her through the medical crisis of a family member.
  • Gretchen shared wonderful insights about the benefits, and challenges, of practicing slowing down.

Wednesdays With the BMCM

Next week, we’ll launch Wednesdays With the BMCM. The email will arrive to your inbox as normal, and we’re all looking forward to moving our community over to the bmcm.org website. Though we won’t continue publishing new content on yameditation.org, the URL will remain active for the coming months.

We are looking forward to continuing conversations, now with the content published on bmcm.org. Just like on this site, you can comment by scrolling down to the bottom of the article where you’ll find a comment box. You have the option to comment anonymously or to create a profile. We’re always eager to hear from you.

Thank YOU!

We want to thank you for all your support and participation over the past four years. Just scrolling through the archive we are stunned to see all the amazing stories that have come from all of YOU in the Blue Mountain Blog Community. We’re grateful for the time you’ve spent with us in this incarnation of the blog, and look forward to many years to come!