← Wiki

Place

Barre

Also known as: Barre, MA, Barre, Massachusetts

A small town (~5,500) in Worcester County, Central Massachusetts, near the Quabbin Reservoir — and the U.S. home of the Insight Meditation Society (1976) and the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies (1990), the two principal Western institutions of the Theravada-derived insight-meditation tradition. Together the two centers make Barre one of the most consequential meditation-retreat towns in North America.

What this is

Barre is a small [[central-massachusetts|Worcester County]] town in [[central-massachusetts|central Massachusetts]], near the Quabbin Reservoir. The town’s national significance comes from two adjoining institutions: the Insight Meditation Society (IMS, founded 1976) on Pleasant Street, and the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies (BCBS, founded 1990) on adjoining land. Together they constitute the U.S. institutional home of the Western insight-meditation tradition — the lineage carried by Sharon Salzberg, Jack Kornfield, Joseph Goldstein, and Jacqueline Schwartz from their training in Burma, India, and Thailand in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Listings in Barre

  • [[insight-meditation-society]] — Theravada-derived insight meditation; founded 1976 by Salzberg, Goldstein, Kornfield, and Schwartz

Bioregional context

Files under [[central-massachusetts]] (a new bioregion for [[directory|the directory]]).

See also

Auto-generated from this entry’s typed relations: frontmatter, grouped by relation type so the editorial signal isn’t flattened.

  • Member of: [[place]]
  • Contained by: [[central-massachusetts]]
  • Contains: [[insight-meditation-society]]

Sources

What links here, and how

Inbound connections from across the wiki, grouped by lens and by relationship. These appear automatically — every entity page declares what it links to, and that data populates here on the targets.

Practical

contained by

General

shares approach with

2 inbound links · 2 outbound