Tushita’s Annual Report 2011

A big, busy, beautiful, beneficial year! Our biggest courses ever, special guests and events galore, enormous amounts of productive work being done behind the scenes – Tushita contines to thrive.

You can see that since we started keeping records in 2009, Tushita has grown a lot, particularly since we began to offer our daily guided meditation sessions in April 2010 (therefore the jump in 2011 partly reflects the fact that these sessions ran throughout the full 2011 season, 2 months more than in 2010).

These records show a 420% increase in people coming here to learn about Buddhism in the last 3 years!

And so our Introduction to Buddhism courses clearly continue to be the most popular, in terms of student numbers, with 73% of our students taking part in them during 2011. Although we have seen a marked decline in participation in Tantric Retreats this year, one factor is that 2010’s Hayagriva Retreat with Lama Zopa Rinpoche boosted the previous years’ figure.

In relation to Intermediate Level courses, unfortunately we suffered a shortage of Teachers in the second half of 2011 and were unable to offer many courses for more experienced students after Monsoon. We always make great efforts to find qualified teachers, and we pray that we will have more teachers in the future.

Our experience of Intermediate Level courses and Non-Residential Courses is offer it and they will come! 

Who are Tushita’s Students?

Our students are a very diverse group of people!

As you can see above, in 2011 we had students between the ages of 18 and 81!

This has been almost exactly the same age range in each year we’ve looked at, as is the pattern of the age range; while with our Intermediate Level students (those who have taken one of our Introduction courses, or equivalent, before) there is a very even spread of age groups (from 20 – 81), on our Introduction to Buddhism courses there is a huge peak in students in their 20s and 30s, the highest being age 23 – just around about the time of University graduation… We looked more closely at the age breakdown on Introduction courses:

As you can see, 59% of students on our Introduction to Buddhism courses were under 30 years of age, while 26% were aged between 31 – 40 and 15% were aged over 40.

It’s an important consideration for us, as most of our accommodation is dormitory-style and we have very of the few single-occupancy rooms that most people (and almost everyone over 30!) want. We continue to fund-raise and make plans for a new accommodation block, but it won’t materialise for another few years yet!

The gender balance has also remained steady throughout the past 3 years – there are always slightly more women than men on our courses.

And then we get to Tushita’s International diversity…!

2011 Thanks!

We hope that these figures will give you a sense of how Tushita has been keeping busy!

2011 was a big, busy, beautiful, beneficial year. Since we opened doors in February, it was a year of abundance and dedicated effort. We were able to offer Dharma courses to an ever record-breaking number of students, with several Introduction to Buddhism courses attracting over 90 students each, as well as an array of special events and guest Teachers.

So many thanks to all our Teachers and Meditation Leaders in 2011; Venerable Robina Courtin, Glen Svensson, Ondy Willson, Jimi Neal, Sister Jotika, Venerable Rita Riniker, Mark Smith, Richard Meijers, Jonas Andersson, Lee Purser and Losang Rinchen, and our Guest Teachers, Dagri Rinpoche, Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo and Geshe Pema Dorjee for providing such a rich and diverse texture to the year.

Without their generosity, discipline, patience, energy, meditation experience and wisdom, more than 8,500 people would not have been able to explore Buddhist wisdom in such inspiring circumstances. Principal among these of course being Lama Zopa Rinpoche, who as well as founding and providing spiritual guidance to Tushita, was so kind as to come and spend the last weeks of the year with us, and bringing many special guests to support us with their practice.

We have also been extremely blessed this year, not only by the continued dedication of our long-term staff and volunteers, but by the expansion of our volunteer team. The volunteers who have joined us for this season have included several dedicated Dharma practitioners who have contributed a lot to the amazingly smooth running of the centre, as well as enabling key projects behind the scenes. In all areas of Tushita we have been able to raise standards.

But above all, thanks go to all our students and visitors. Everybody here at Tushita finds their interest, determination, and openness truly inspiring, we thank them for their support in the thriving of Tushita and the increased accessibility of authentic Dharma to all. We sincerely hope and pray that their experience here will continue to enrich their lives, and in consequence, those of all beings.

Tushita International!

We’re always interested to know where our students are coming from… So, we keep track.

Question: How many different nationalities have taken one of our residential courses since 2011?
Answer: 78!

We’ve listed the nationalites by number of total students from each, over the 3 years 2009 + 2010 + 2011, so although there were slightly more students from Israel in 2011, overall in the 3 years we’ve been keeping records, the largest number of students from one country was the USA.

We then looked at the nationalities who had more than 100 students here between 2009 – 2011, as a percentage of the whole.

Through Google Analytics, we can also get a visual representation of where visitors to our website are. In the year since we launched our new website, we’ve had more than 66,000 visits from 168 countries!