Who Are We? 

Serenity Sangha of Charlottesville is a small, informal, virtual community of Buddhist practitioners based in Charlottesville, VA.  Because we are a virtual Sangha, we have members who live throughout the United States and Canada. All that is required to join us is an Internet connection and the Zoom app! 

We welcome all those interested in pursuing a path of reduced suffering and full engagement with life as taught by Gautama Buddha 2700 years ago in what is now Northern India. Our emphasis is on practical Dharma from a Therevadan perspective, the oldest recorded Buddhist tradition. Practical Dharma emphasizes teachings which have pragmatic and accessible applications to the challenges of daily living. It is the marriage of the ancient teachings of the Buddha, as recorded in the Pali Canon, and modern psychology. 

Our teacher is Jeffrey Fracher, Ph.D., a retired Clinical Psychologist, who was in practice as a psychologist for 44 years. He has practiced Buddhism since 1992 when he took the lay precepts, committing to the Buddhist path under the guidance of the late Thich Nhat Hanh. In 2013 he completed a 2-year Buddhist teacher training program at the Meditation Teachers Training Institute in Washington, D.C. as taught by Tara Brach, Jonathan Foust, Hugh Byrne, and Pat Coffey. He was a senior teacher at the Insight Meditation Community of Charlottesville for 10 years before his retirement in early 2022. He is the author of Practical Dharma, published in 2022, and available on Amazon and wherever books are sold. His second book, More Practical Dharma, forthcoming in early 2025, will be available on Amazon. 

For questions, comments, or suggestions, please email us at SerenitySanghaCville@gmail.com or call/text Jeff at (434) 260-8992.