Welcome!

Established in 1998, Insight Meditation Center of Pioneer Valley is a Buddhist center in the Insight Meditation tradition serving western Massachusetts. Our mission is to share the Buddha's teachings with those who are interested. Insight PV is a non-residential center offering sittings, classes & retreats and special events to help sustain and deepen meditation practice and bring wisdom and compassion into daily life. Click About Us to learn more.

Welcoming Statement

We are firmly committed to welcoming diversity of cultural or religious background, race, socio-economic class, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, education, or physical ability within our midst, so that all might feel included and comfortable in practicing here. In addition, we ask that participants not wear fragrances or scented body care products here, so that our members who have chemical allergies are able to attend. 

Jan Frazier: Rethinking Thought
An Interfaith Event
Sunday, April 21
9:30 am – 4:30 pm
Suggested contribution: $20 – 30 plus Teacher Dana

We are not our thoughts.  But we often move through our lives as though we were.  Thought happens, but we needn’t orient to it in an unfriendly way.  We will explore ways to look at thought, to defuse its power to determine how life feels. This is a gentle practice, absent strain.  It is radically freeing.  When thought is seen for what it is, without engaging with it, we are able to sense the calm that is always with us.  We sense the vastness rather than being caught up in the confines of the narrowly-defined person each of us appears to be.

Jan Frazier experienced a radical transformation of consciousness in August 2003. Fear fell away from her, and she was immersed in a state of causeless joy that has never left her. While she has continued her life as writer, teacher, and mother, she has discovered it is possible to live a richly human life free of suffering. Her wish now is to communicate the truth that within every person is a pool of calm well-being that waits patiently to be stirred to life.

When Fear Falls Away: The Story of a Sudden Awakening (Weiser Books, 2007) is Jan’s day-by-day account of the shift in consciousness and its alteration of her life. The Freedom of Being: At Ease with What Is (Weiser Books, 2012) looks at the nature of suffering and explores ways beyond it. Opening the Door: JanFrazier Teachings on Awakening (eBookIt, 2012) is an eBook collection of essays. It opens the reader’s awareness to the possibility of a richly human life, beyond what appears possible to the ego and the mind.