About
Janel Crooks began meditation practice through yoga in 1991 and took up insight meditation in the early 2000s, studying with Gil Fronsdal via AudioDharma. She has also studied with Jonathan Foust, Tara Brach, and Jack Kornfield. Crooks is a Mentor in Insight Meditation Center's Eightfold Path program and participates in IMC's Dharma Leader Training program. She has led the Munising Bay Meditation Circle in Michigan since 2013.
Teaching focus
Her teaching follows IMC-style insight practice with a yoga background that informs her attention to embodied work. She guides the Munising Bay Meditation Circle in Upper Peninsula Michigan, supporting a regional sangha in a part of the country with limited access to in-person dharma teaching. The work draws on the Insight Meditation lay-teacher lineage as the foundational framework, taught with care for the textures of present experience rather than as abstract doctrine. The four foundations of mindfulness, breath, body, feeling tone, and mental states, organize the formal practice, with lovingkindness woven through as supporting work. Sitting and walking are the standard formal forms, paired with daily-life mindfulness as the integration practice. Lovingkindness gets serious time on retreat, treated as central practice rather than supplemental, and the broader brahmavihara framework offers additional ground for the slower work of equanimity and forgiveness. Daily-life integration runs through the recorded teaching as a steady concern. The same awareness that opens during a sit is the awareness that meets traffic, family, and work, and the teaching keeps coming back to that continuity rather than treating retreat as a separate world. Across the recorded teaching runs a steady commitment to the actual work of practice, the slow unfolding that doesn't always make for inspirational soundbites but that carries the path forward across years of sitting. A consistent thread runs through the recorded archive: the willingness to be specific about what to do in this moment rather than gesture at long arcs of advanced practice. That specificity is part of what makes the teaching usable in ordinary daily-life practice.
Background
Janel Crooks is a teacher whose work is part of the wider Insight Meditation tradition descended from the Burmese and Thai vipassana lineages as carried into the West. Janel Crooks came to meditation through yoga in 1991 and began insight meditation with Gil Fronsdal in the early 2000s via AudioDharma. She has studied with Jonathan Foust, Tara Brach, and Jack Kornfield. She's a Mentor with IMC's Eightfold Path program and currently part of IMC's Dharma Leader Training. She has guided Munising Bay Meditation Circle in Upper Peninsula Michigan since 2013. The teacher's recorded material is mostly hosted through affiliated centers and personal platforms rather than through Dharma Seed. Emerging teachers offer something different from senior figures: the texture of a teaching voice still finding its specific shape, which can be useful for students who want to follow a teacher's development rather than encounter an already-canonized body of work. Students often note a warm, grounded presence and an ability to slow practice down to its actual texture rather than rush through technique. The teaching reflects both the depth of a long practice lineage and the practical concerns of contemporary practitioners working ordinary jobs, raising children, and trying to integrate serious dharma into lives that don't pause for retreat. That practical orientation runs through the recorded material as a steady undercurrent. Like many teachers in the wider Insight community, this teacher's path includes time on long silent retreat, ongoing study with senior teachers, and gradual integration of teaching responsibility through co-teaching and small local programs before stepping into broader retreat work. That apprenticeship model shapes the careful pacing of the teaching.
Lineage
Crooks practices in the IMC tradition under Gil Fronsdal, with additional study under Jonathan Foust, Tara Brach, and Jack Kornfield. She's a Mentor in IMC's Eightfold Path program. The teacher works as a layperson, in keeping with the broader Western lay-teacher form of the tradition. She mentors in IMC's Eightfold Path program and guides the Munising Bay Meditation Circle in Upper Peninsula Michigan.
What to expect
Programs through IMC and through the Munising Bay Meditation Circle. The Michigan sangha extends regional access to insight practice in Upper Peninsula Michigan. Retreats follow standard Insight format: sittings, walking, dharma talks, and meetings with the teachers, with lovingkindness practice woven through and daily-life integration treated as serious work rather than an afterthought. The atmosphere is warm and committed rather than performance-oriented, with serious dharma underneath an accessible surface. The center or platform where the teaching happens publishes current schedules and registration information, and email contact is generally the most direct way to ask specific questions about a particular retreat or program.
