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Insight Myanmar

Insight Myanmar Podcast

Insight Myanmar is a beacon for those seeking to understand the intricate dynamics of Myanmar. With a commitment to uncovering truth and fostering understanding, the podcast brings together activists, artists, leaders, monastics, and authors to share their first-hand experiences and insights. Each episode delves deep into the struggles, hopes, and resilience of the Burmese people, offering listeners a comprehensive, on-the-ground perspective of the nation's quest for democracy and freedom.

And yet, Insight Myanmar is not just a platform for political discourse; it's a sanctuary for spiritual exploration. Our discussions intertwine the struggles for democracy with the deep-rooted meditation traditions of Myanmar, offering a holistic understanding of the nation. We delve into the rich spiritual heritage of the country, tracing the origins of global meditation and mindfulness movements to their roots in Burmese culture.

Each episode is a journey through the vibrant landscape of Myanmar's quest for freedom, resilience, and spiritual riches. Join us on this enlightening journey as we amplify the voices that matter most in Myanmar's transformative era.

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#624
Today · 1 hr 1 min
Turning the Page
Episode #624: “Even before the coup, books gave me ideas, empathy, and hope,” says Zu May Lwin, a student activist and library organizer from Magway, She argues that education and access to books are essential not only for personal growth but also for rebuilding Myanmar after military repression. Before the 2021 coup, she explains, reading culture in Magway was limited by cost, scarcity, and exhaustion. Books were hard to obtain, many families were focused on survival, and schools did little to cultivate a meaningful relationship with literature beyond textbooks. She joined a mobile library initiative that brought books directly to parks and university campuses. It was very successful, showing her that interest in reading could grow when books became part of public life. The coup transformed that work into something more urgent. Believing students had a duty to defend freedom and the right to learn, she joined peaceful demonstrations in Magway as part of the Civil Disobedience Movement. At one protest, she was arrested, and spent over eight harsh months in prison. After her release, she could not safely return home and instead moved through displacement areas near the Thai border. There she saw young people continuing to study despite losing schools, textbooks, and stability, which deepened her conviction that education was a form of resistance. In response, she helped found Saffron Traveler, a project that builds small, mobile libraries in rural and conflict-affected areas. Supported by donations and local cooperation, these libraries serve displaced students while remaining movable enough to survive military pressure. As she puts it, “My dream is to create a strong library culture in Myanmar, where every young person—no matter where they live or what their background—can have access to books and learning spaces and the opportunity to grow.”
#623
Tuesday · 1 hr 44 min
No Retreat Is an Island
Episode #623: This is the third episode in a series of talks with Tempel Smith, who shares his deeper impressions of Burmese Buddhist culture, and how he became a bridge for other Americans to understand it better. Tempel starts by continuing his reflection into the polarities that defined his early life experiences, mainly in terms of social engagement versus quiet meditation. As a young monk in Burma, he tried to consciously negotiate those apparent tensions, and questioned whether they could be integrated into a single practice. However, when he attained deeper states of calm, he realized that they were not, in fact, contradictions. Another dissonance he reconciled for himself was cultural: being a Western practitioner in a Burmese Buddhist context. Westerners often want to do “a stripped-down Buddhist practice that doesn't have ritual and doesn't have community.” But in the end, he feels they lose out. While noting that the teachings of most Burmese monks encourage strict silence and an exclusive focus on meditation, Tempel found these guidelines produce very different results in Burmese yogis than those coming from abroad. As a teacher, he has seen Western students develop remarkable insights during courses, yet be unable to integrate them into daily life. The Burmese, however, see practice and their culture/society as intertwined. Tempel had previously led meditation retreats for youth, but with these insights, he wanted to expand their Dharma experience into social engagement and community building. His idea developed into a three-month trip to Thailand, India, and Burma, where Tempel exposed the group to various aspects of Buddhist life. The result was transformative. Rather than Westerners opening their hearts through intensive retreats with less integration, the hearts of these youth opened instead through engagement with Burmese Buddhist society, which was deeply inspiring. “You let your activism and your meditation harmonize, and you get a liberated mind!” he notes in closing. “That's what 30 years of practice has shown me and what I'm trying to help people get to their own integrative mind state. And then the suffering falls away of the mind and the beauty flourishes.”
#622
Monday · 1 hr 57 min
Reasonable Doubt
Episode #622: “We need to recognize that we really don't know as much as we think we do about what's going on,” Jason Eligh says. As senior expert on drugs and drug markets at the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime, Eligh argues that Myanmar’s methamphetamine economy has been misunderstood not only because it is hidden, but because governments and analysts have mistaken partial evidence for knowledge. Myanmar’s Shan State sits inside one of the world’s major drug-producing regions, supplying opium and heroin while also forming one of the three major global methamphetamine production zones, alongside Mexico and the Afghanistan-Pakistan-Iran nexus. But meth is harder to measure than opium. Poppy fields can be seen from above; synthetic drugs can be made indoors, through multiple chemical pathways, with legal dual-use substances that move through ordinary commercial channels. Even seizures, Eligh warns, cannot tell us the size of the market. They can reveal enforcement activity, but not total production. That caution reshapes how he reads the post-coup period. The 2021 coup intensified conflict and changed routes, but Eligh rejects the easy claim that it alone caused a sudden meth surge. Prices, seizures, chemical data, and trafficking flows all point in several directions at once. Conflict can disrupt business, but corruption, armed taxation, and state-linked protection can also keep illicit trade stable. Eligh’s analysis moves from drug production to drug policy. If the goal is “to save lives,” he argues, punishment alone drives users underground and weakens the ability to understand what harms are spreading. Opium farmers face a different trap: eradication without real alternatives can destroy the only income available in remote conflict zones. The Mekong meth trade is no longer a contained Golden Triangle story. It is a global synthetic drug platform, tied to chemicals, logistics, corruption, poverty, and demand across continents. “It's a global problem,” Eligh says. “We can't kid ourselves any longer.”
#621
Friday · 1 hr 24 min
An Unexploded Past
Episode #621: Please note that interview is intended solely as a record of Aki Ra’s personal experiences and historical demining work in Cambodia. His descriptions of past methods reflect what he personally did under very differentcircumstances and should not be understood as instructions, training, or advice for handling landmines, unexploded ordnance, or other explosives. Such devices are extremely dangerous and should only be approached, identified, or removed by properly trained and authorized professionals following current safety procedures. Aki Ra was about ten years old when the Khmer Rouge forced him into military life, where he learned to plant landmines and survive in Cambodia’s war. After later fighting alongside Vietnamese forces, he eventually turned the same technical knowledge toward removing the explosives left behind. “I wanted to change from bad to be good,” he says. Since 1990, he has spent decades clearing mines and unexploded ordnance from Cambodian farmland and villages. That experience gives his story particular relevance to Myanmar, where landmines are again shaping civilian life and will remain dangerous long after front lines move. The comparison becomes concrete around the small M14 anti-personnel mine, a weapon Aki Ra knows from his own clearance work. Touching upon the difficulty of detecting them in Myanmar, he emphasizes a distinction central to the work he does today: civilians should not search for, touch, or attempt to remove mines themselves. His education sessions instead teach people to recognize danger, mark or remember the location, and contact trained disposal teams. Aki Ra also contrasts the conditions in Myanmar with his own memories of Cambodia. He says soldiers in his units warned villages about mined areas and tried to avoid homes, schools and religious buildings. Yet Cambodia also demonstrates how little protection wartime intentions ultimately provide. Decades after the fighting ended, mines and unexploded ordnance still remain in fields, still injure civilians, and still require organized clearance. Aki Ra now works with trained teams, medics, metal detectors and formal safety procedures, while the Cambodia Landmine Museum near Siem Reap helps finance their work. The war that created Cambodia’s minefields is over; the labor of making the land safe is not. For Myanmar, that is perhaps the hardest part of the comparison: the mine crisis will not necessarily end when the fighting does.
#620
October 8 · 1 hr 48 min
All in the Family
Episode #620: “This was not just my family's mission, but it could also be mine through Jesus.” For Peter Eubank, that realization marks the shift that also defines the lives of his sisters, Sahale and Suuzanne: growing up inside the Free Burma Rangers bound together Burma, conflict, service, human rights, and Christian faith, but adulthood has required each of them to decide what part of that inheritance they will choose for themselves. Their earliest memories hold danger and belonging together. Sahale remembers walking through the jungle at night without a headlamp so the Burma Army would not see the group, while holding a Karen elder’s hand and looking at the stars. Suuzanne remembers being five and packing water, a light, a lighter, and a snack as a village evacuated under approaching mortar fire. Peter remembers riding a horse while an elder taught him Karen, before he was old enough to understand that displacement was not simply ordinary life for his friends back in the United States. After the 2021 coup, the siblings watched older divisions change as young Bamar people left universities and joined anti-coup resistance or the Free Burma Rangers. At the same time, Sahale and Suuzanne were studying in Texas, struggling with the distance as friends were killed and attacks intensified. They came to see education not as withdrawal from Burma but as preparation to return with skills: Sahale through emergency nursing and Suuzanne through veterinary medicine. Peter, who has worked in frontline medical logistics, is still deciding between missionary work, military service, or another path. Their memories also refuse to reduce Burma to war. They recall monkeys causing chaos, meals assembled whatever could be found, hunted, or picked at hand, and relatives whose generosity shaped their idea of love. They all still hopes for a free, democratic Burma where visiting friends no longer means calculating the danger of jets, mortars, or gunfire. While the siblings choose separate futures, the people who raised them remain inside those choices.
#619
October 6 · 1 hr 21 min
Ten Million Fireflies
Episode #619: “My motto is love is the most powerful magic,” says Elizabeth Yee, a Burmese medical doctor, writer, and activist who joined the Civil Disobedience Movement after the 2021 coup. Now living in Thailand, she works with the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners (AAPP) on mental-health and psychosocial support, while also branching into art. As a child, Elizabeth devoured Chinese martial-arts novels that inspired her belief in justice and self-discipline. The work of one Burmese author, a physician-novelist, persuaded her to enter medical school, where she had the thought to “become a doctor and then write a lot of books.” Supported by Chinese-Burmese parents who broke with tradition to favor their daughter— based largely on her father’s belief that she was the reincarnation of his father— she excelled and became an assistant surgeon. Yet she rebelled against Myanmar’s military-controlled, politically-entangled medical system. She refused to take its restrictive exam and instead studied for the UK’s MRCP (Membership of the Royal Colleges of Physicians) qualification. During the COVID pandemic, she began exploring digital education and saw the regime’s inefficiency firsthand. When the coup erupted, she resigned to join the protests. She was cited under Article 505A—effectively her arrest warrant. She fled her Yangon apartment and went underground while continuing to provide medical aid at demonstrations. Eventually, she fled to the countryside. After a year treating rural villagers, she crossed into Thailand, determined to stay there and not to abandon the revolution. At AAPP, she combines medicine, psychology, and activism, learning from political-prisoner survivors and discovering feminism, which she defines as “justice with love.” She is now a dedicated artist, using AI to help compose music, and creating paintings that express her feelings and passions around the themes of feminism, ecology, and resistance. Art, she says, is both healing and defiance. “We need to fight until we are done,” she says quietly, “because there are so many unjust things.”
#618
October 5 · 1 hr 42 min
An Experiment in Dhamma
Episode #618: U Jāgara’s journey into Burmese Buddhism provides valuable exploration of meditation traditions and their adaptation to modern contexts. In this fourth appearance on the platform, he begins by talking about Ledi Sayadaw, a Burmese monk who revitalized Theravada meditation in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, making it accessible to both monks and lay practitioners through his teaching and writings. U Jāgara emphasizes Ledi Sayadaw’s dynamic and personalized approach to teaching, contrasting it with the standardized method of S.N. Goenka, highlighting the flexibility of Burmese Buddhism in addressing varied, spiritual needs. U Jāgara also explores the tension between universal accessibility on the one hand, and preserving the nuanced richness of Burmese traditions on the other. He contrasts Goenka’s singular focus on sensation-based vipassana with Ledi Sayadaw’s multifaceted approach, which integrates textual study, personalized meditation, and understanding foundational Buddhist principles such as dependent origination and the analysis of the four elements. He believes that these distinctions underscore the need to find a balance between authenticity and modernization in Burmese Buddhism, as well as in the global mindfulness movement. He delves into Pa Auk Sayadaw’s teachings, which emphasize deep concentration (samathā) to achieve profound insight (vipassanā) into dependent origination and karmic causality. While controversial to some, Pa Auk’s methods resonate deeply within Burmese cultural and religious norms and enrich the ongoing dialogue among practitioners worldwide about the relationship between concentration and insight. U Jāgara reflects on the need to balance textual study with meditative practice, cautioning against overemphasizing either. He discusses the resilience of Burmese Buddhism even amid socio-political challenges. And he advocates for a deeper engagement with the ethical and philosophical dimensions of one’s practice as a transformative journey toward self-understanding and compassion, in contrast to the belief that reliance on a single meditation technique can have the same effect. U Jāgara’s narrative underscores Burmese Buddhism’s enduring relevance and adaptability.
#617
October 2 · 1 hr 45 min
Articles of Faith
Episode #617: This is the first episode in a seven part series, which examines how Buddhist law and institutions have shaped religious life, and how they interact with secular legal systems. The first guest, Rebecca Redwood French, begins with a lawyer’s question: “What [is] the morality behind legal systems?” It took her from public defense work to Tibetan exile communities in India, where she interviewed former judges and officials, translated law codes, and eventually wrote her acclaimed book, The Golden Yoke. Returning to North American academia, she found Buddhism treated mainly as meditation and private morality, while its legal traditions were dismissed as monastic discipline. French responded by helping to build a field. An initial meeting produced plans for books, conferences, a journal, and a scholarly network, eventually leading to Buddhism, Law and Society and four conferences by 2026. Her claim is that the Vinaya shaped far more than monastery life; it influenced punishment, exchange, political authority, and statecraft. Her Tibetan cases showed judges sometimes trying to transform offenders rather than isolate them. Her later work extended Buddhist law into donation, merit, intention, and joy. The difficulty remains making these legal worlds visible without reducing them to rules or stripping away the values that gave them force. The next guest, Sanjayan Rajasingham, is a Tamil Christian and law professor at the University of Jaffna, and he studies how Buddhism has shaped constitutions in Theravada-majority states. His concern is that religious power often enters law indirectly, through national stories that make majority control appear necessary for protecting the Dhamma. In Sri Lanka, the unitary state and executive presidency contain little explicitly Buddhist language. Yet both are understood through the Mahavamsa story that the Sinhala people were entrusted with preserving Buddhism. Centralized authority can then appear necessary, while minorities are cast as threats. Thailand follows a related pattern, with the monarch treated as a Buddhist guardian able to restrain elected institutions. Rajasingham argues that inherited narratives “have a power of their own,” and their consequences have included violence against non-Buddhists and repression of dissent. Yet he sees another possibility within the same tradition: “What better way to preserve the Dhamma than to live out the fact that ‘the other’ is truly welcome?” As for Myanmar, he feels that a future constitution must prevent religious protection from becoming another route back to exclusion.
#616
October 1 · 1 hr 13 min
Don't Have To Live Like a Refugee
Episode #616: Joseph, a community leader among Myanmar refugees in Malaysia, and Patrick, an advocacy specialist working on refugee and migrant issues there, speak about their work and the very challenging situation faced by Myanmar refugees. Refugees themselves, while they have adapted to daily life in Malaysia, that adaptation never became security. Even after many years, they still live with constraints imposed by their legal status. Because Malaysia was not a signatory to the 1951 Refugee Convention, those fleeing conflict are permitted to remain in the country but are not legally recognized as refugees and have no pathway to citizenship or permanent residency. There is also a large and growing group of stateless children born to refugee parents, who can neither obtain citizenship from Myanmar nor legal status in Malaysia. Joseph and Patrick connect the cumulative effects of violence in Myanmar, dangerous flight, detention risk, economic exploitation, and prolonged legal uncertainty to a widening mental health crisis. They hear from individuals experiencing severe psychological distress, including suicidal thoughts and paranoia. At the same time, mental health services for refugees have largely collapsed there. As a result, refugees with serious psychological conditions have nowhere else to turn. In response to all these challenges, Joseph and Patrick run community-based training programs that teach culture, language and survival skills. Many newcomers have never before lived outside Myanmar and so are unfamiliar with the exigencies of cross-cultural awareness and understanding. These programs also address the importance of dignity and restoring hope. Both men reflect on the psychological toll of their own long-term exile and community involvement. Unlike those resettled in Western countries, they continue to imagine their return at some unknown point in the future as the only true endpoint. This prolonged suspension—neither fully rebuilding a life elsewhere, nor fully relinquishing the hope to return home—shapes how Myanmar refugees in Malaysia endure displacement. Patrick and Joseph say the Burmese people are fighting not for leaders but for freedom and dignity, and he asks those who believe in freedom to stay with them. They end with this plea: “Please don’t forget about Myanmar!”
#615
September 29 · 1 hr 30 min
Without Fear or Favor
Episode #615: “My passion for journalism and for telling stories to others still remain,” says Min Mitchell, former executive editor at Radio Free Asia, a U.S.-funded news organization that provides independent reporting to countries with restricted media. Min is also the wife of former US Ambassador Derek Mitchell, who represented the American mission during the country's brief democratic opening. Drawing on a career spanning Taiwanese journalism, U.S.-funded international media and China reporting, Mitchell argues that independent journalism provides an essential public service by delivering trustworthy information to people living under censorship, while documenting repression, conflict, and humanitarian crises. She explains that RFA reports for audiences living in countries where independent information is unavailable or tightly controlled, requiring journalists to adapt constantly as governments restrict the flow of news. Following Myanmar’s 2021 military coup, RFA expanded shortwave broadcasting when internet shutdowns made digital communication unreliable. “Journalism,” she says, “is not just telling news. You also providing people useful information to deal with what is going on the ground.” Mitchell believes U.S.-funded international media demonstrate democratic values by providing independent reporting rather than serving commercial interests or political agendas. During her years at RFA, covering increasingly authoritarian environments strengthened her conviction that journalists must report facts accurately and without bias. Even as social media, artificial intelligence, and state-sponsored influence campaigns reshape the information landscape, she insists that trusted journalism remains indispensable. Although concerned by declining global press freedom, Mitchell remains hopeful that societies can reaffirm the importance of truthful reporting and shared democratic values. The quality she returns to most often is resilience. Remembering a Burmese colleague who reassured her after the coup with a simple smiling message, she concludes, “No matter what happens… people have that resilience to get through it, to endure it, and to eventually come out of it.” For Mitchell, that enduring resilience is Myanmar’s greatest lesson.
#614
September 28 · 1 hr 2 min
A Practice Unbound
Episode #614: Richard Evans, an architect who began practice in the S.N. Goenka Vipassana tradition, describes his life as a search for truth grounded in direct experience rather than belief. In this discussion, he presents that search as the thread connecting his early skepticism, his confrontation with anxiety, and his later commitment to meditation as a way of testing what was real. That search began in childhood, when he attended Anglican church services and felt that something did not add up. He did not accept what he was being told about God and expected some kind of consequence for that disbelief… yet nothing happened. That moment shook his trust in inherited belief and left him looking for something that could stand on its own. As he grew older, that question stayed with him. At one point, while walking down the street, he asked himself what he actually wanted from life; the answer that came was not career or stability, but the need to knowtruth itself. His own experience of anxiety gave the search greater urgency. He describes this as a serious issue within his family, yet his own experience of it still felt isolating. Over time, however, he recognized that what he was experiencing was not unique; it was a recognition changed his search from trying to understand the world, to finding a way to relate to suffering without avoiding it. That need led him to Vipassana meditation as taught by Goenka, which became the first clearly defined method in his search. The first course was difficult, but it gave him a way to test what he was being told against what he could observe. Later, as his experience deepened, the structure of the practice and the organizational constraints no longer felt sufficient on its own. Conversations with other practitioners helped him refine his understanding, and doubt became less an obstacle than a sign of the edge of what he understood. He describes his practice now as more self-directed, guided by observation, conversation, and continued inquiry, and no longer compelled to discover a “final answer.”
#613
September 25 · 2 hr 11 min
Cleared for Contact
Episode #613: Mike is a lifelong martial artist who came to Myanmar through martial arts training rather than faith, and yet found himself pulled into a Burmese esoteric world he had not been looking for. The line he returns to as both method and warning is simple: “See things as they are, not as they appear.” He began formal training in the late 1950s, moving through Japanese systems before encountering Burmese martial arts in the United States decades later. What held him was not spectacle but a demanding structure, built around principles, weapons work, conditioning, and long timelines for advancement. That discipline set the conditions for everything that followed. When he first traveled to Mogok in the mid-1990s, it was not as a spiritual seeker. He describes himself as not religious, and skeptical of claims that could not be tested. In Mogok, he watched demonstrations that crossed into trance and invulnerability, where practitioners endured blades, flame, and boiling water while in altered states. The moment that stayed with him was not the performance but the logic offered afterward: when trance breaks, the protection leaves. Soon he was questioned about his conduct and invited into initiation rites that tied martial discipline to mental training and vows. The five precepts were treated as a foundational requirement, with specific restrictions on alcohol, drugs, and even meat on the grounds that “wild minds,” when ingested, carried effects into samathā practice. Back in the United States, the initiation continued working on him, pushing him toward teachers across traditions and into a daily meditation routine he continues to this day, while also deepening a conviction—first raised by teachers in Mogok and later affirmed in other encounters—that he had been Ta’ang in a past life. That same insistence on unsentimental perception shapes his political reading of Myanmar’s war. Mike rejects neat models that ignore fragmentation and uneven power, and he argues that durable outcomes depend on leverage and enforcement, not slogans. In both arenas, he is arguing for the same discipline: train the mind to stop seeing what it wants to see, or it will keep repeating the same decisions.
#612
September 24 · 1 hr 25 min
Full-Service Autocracy
Episode #612: “You do create a dependency. You create a long-term relationship that also you can leverage into political influence as well.” Ian Storey, a principal fellow at the ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute in Singapore, sees that dependency as the thread connecting Russia’s military, energy, diplomatic and nuclear ties with Myanmar. The relationship is economically small, but it gives Moscow influence in precisely the sectors the military government has needed most since the 2021 coup. Myanmar began turning toward Russian weapons in the early 2000s after years of heavy dependence on China. Russian fighter aircraft, helicopters and training later became embedded in the military’s capabilities, creating continuing requirements for spare parts, maintenance, munitions and technical expertise. Since the coup, Russia has also supplied oil and refined products, including aviation fuel, while the two governments developed ruble-kyat payment arrangements and other ways to conduct trade under sanctions. The political exchange is equally transactional. Myanmar’s military government endorsed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, while Moscow has provided diplomatic recognition and continued military support. Yet Russia will not sacrifice its wider ASEAN interests for Myanmar, and Storey stresses that the country remains a relatively minor Russian market. Nuclear cooperation could make the relationship much harder to unwind. After more than two decades of discussions and training, Russia has agreed to provide Myanmar with a small modular reactor, although construction has not begun. If built, the plant would tie Myanmar to Russian financing, operation, fuel and technical services for decades. Storey doubts Moscow would commit major resources to rescue the military if it faced collapse. Russia remains a secondary power in Southeast Asia, pursuing narrow advantages in arms, energy and nuclear technology. For now, however, those narrow advantages align closely with the military regime’s needs, leaving Myanmar exposed to a partnership that can be deeply consequential without ever becoming deeply committed.
#611
September 22 · 2 hr 7 min
Freedom’s Just Another Word
Episode #611: “I always want to be free.” Lienchi Tran, a Vietnamese American meditation teacher, first learned what unfreedom meant in postwar Vietnam. After South Vietnam fell in 1975, her father was sent to a reeducation camp, the family was expelled from Saigon, and the children were scattered among relatives. At night, Tran tied a rubber band around her fingers to keep herself awake while reciting the Buddha’s name and praying for her father’s safety and eventual return. Raised in Mahāyāna Buddhism and shaped by the writings of Thích Nhất Hạnh, she began meditating seriously as a teenager. Yet an image of a Theravāda monk, seen just before her family emigrated in 1990, opened another direction. In California she found Bhante Khippañño, trained in Mahāsi practice, ordained as a nun, and traveled to Myanmar for an intensive forest retreat under Sayadaw U Paṇḍita. Myanmar felt like a second home, but the freedom she sought did not finally lie in austerity or ordination. Under Sayadaw U Tejaniya, Tran found a practice built around awareness and wisdom rather than a fixed formula. Eating, engaging in her householder task as an architect, feeling anger, and caring for family could all become part of the same investigation. The task was neither to suppress difficult states nor to make them disappear, but to know what was present and strengthen a different momentum from greed, aversion, and delusion. She applies the same approach to dāna, which she defines as a kind of letting go, and to sīla, which she notes is an examination of the mind before speech or action. Now a teacher herself, Tran no longer considers robes the measure of seriousness. She remains in the United States to care for her mother, while imagining a return to Myanmar and long practice near Sayadaw U Tejaniya when that responsibility ends. The monastery still attracts her, but not because a nun’s clothing can confer freedom. Practice must proceed through the mind and conditions she actually has, including the attachment she can admit without disguise: the bed at home is still more comfortable than the one at the center.
#610
September 21 · 1 hr 34 min
Critical Condition
Episode #610: “I can't leave anymore, because if I were to leave now, I would like never be able to live the same way, because of the comrades who have fallen and the comrades that are still with me… I would not be able to have that guilt with me.” Dr. Sunshine— a pseudonym that reflects both his warmth and resilience— is a Burmese physician whose life has become deeply intertwined with Myanmar’s modern struggle for freedom and survival. After the coup, he learned tactical combat medicine to help protesters under fire. Soon he was teaching others—first small groups, then resistance fighters and medics hiding in the jungle. “I’ll shoot him in the hand,” he tells trainees in role-playing sessions. “He will have three minutes until he bleeds out. What are you going to do?” After fleeing to Thailand, Dr. Sunshine continued traveling through border regions, training men and women from every ethnicity and faith. “We have Muslim soldiers,” he says. “Even during Ramadan, [the non-Muslim PDFs] respect the prayer times and fasting.” He beams when describing this unity: “It’s incredible how everyone comes together inside, even [towards] women and LGBT—they all treat them equally.” Dr. Sunshine also helps run secret jungle clinics that treat hundreds of displaced people and fighters. “All we’re doing is trying to extend the life of a patient that comes in until they get to a hospital or clinic that can help treat them,” he explains. Supplies are scarce—“I was at one PDF base,” he adds, “they have like four or five hundred soldiers there, and only two tourniquets!” He admits the toll is immense. “Every time I go in for a training, when I come back, I’ll cry like a baby in my room.” Yet his message remains simple and resolute: “Don’t give up on us. Even just words of support mean everything.”
#609
September 18 · 1 hr 46 min
Birth of an Icon
Episode #609: Jostein Kobbeltvedt, director of the Rafto Foundation for Human Rights in Bergen, Norway, reflects on how the 1990 Rafto Prize awarded to Aung San Suu Kyi helped bring Myanmar’s democracy struggle to international attention and how the global narrative surrounding her later collided with the realities of governing. The Rafto Foundation was created to recognize human rights defenders while their struggles are still unfolding. Early laureates were dissidents from Eastern Europe, and the committee’s decision to recognize Suu Kyi marked an expansion of the prize’s focus beyond that region. At the time of the award, Suu Kyi was under house arrest and largely unknown outside Myanmar. Her name came to the committee’s attention through a brief newspaper mention, yet the prize helped introduce her story to wider audiences. International recognition soon followed, including the Nobel Peace Prize. The Rafto Foundation maintained long-term contact with Suu Kyi and her family during her detention, and in 2013 she traveled to Bergen to formally receive the prize. But the narrative surrounding Suu Kyi shifted dramatically after she entered government following Myanmar’s 2015 elections. As State Counsellor, she confronted political constraints that differed from those she faced as an opposition leader. Violence against Rohingya communities beginning in 2016, and her response to the crisis shocked many international supporters who had viewed her as a democratic icon. The experience highlights the complexities of democratic transitions and the enduring influence of military power within Myanmar’s political system. It also illustrates how international advocacy, economic engagement, and diplomacy have shaped Norway’s evolving relationship with Myanmar. Despite continuing setbacks, Kobbeltvedt emphasizes that Myanmar’s citizens remain committed to pursuing democracy, and their struggle continues to draw international solidarity.
#608
September 17 · 1 hr 53 min
The Giving Tree
Episode #608: Dave Hopkins came to vipassana meditation not as a scholar, traveler, or spiritual seeker, but as a working-class tree worker carrying grief, anger, addiction, and exhaustion. Raised in Delaware after his father’s DuPont job brought the family north, he moved through school trouble, the Navy, drinking, restaurant work, and tree crews before landing at Dhamma Dharā, the Massachusetts meditation center in the tradition of S.N. Goenka. The pressure that brought him there was blunt: “Grief, yeah.” His younger brother Ed had taken a course at Dhamma Dharā in 1987 and returned radiant, but in March 1989 he died by suicide. Hopkins smoked more pot, tried to dull the wound, and found that nothing was working. His first ten-day course was brutal. He arrived as a pack-and-a-half-a-day smoker, left his cigarettes in the truck, endured craving, pain, drowsiness, and anger, then ran out on the tenth day, lit up, gagged, and never smoked again. The discipline gave him something he had repeatedly lost: a reason not to quit. Over the decades, practice, service, and tree work became linked. Washing pots for students taught him that ordinary labor could help others receive Dhamma. Tree work taught him preservation without sentimentality. He removes dangerous trees when necessary, but his business-card principle is simple: “Ff there's a tree that can be saved, let's have a conversation.” Yet Hopkins’ loyalty to the tradition does not erase his questions. He has seen Dhamma Dharā grow from rough accommodations into polished infrastructure, watched the community become younger and more professional, and felt the assistant teacher world become more distant. Since Goenka’s death, he senses “a little less heat” in the tradition’s momentum. He remains committed, but wonders about rigidity, taboo subjects, samādhi, jhāna, and older Burmese teachings that seem wider than what the contemporary organization now permits. Hopkins never made it to Burma, and given the current conditions of conflict now ranging there, he doubts he may ever reach the Golden Land. “A lot of trains that I missed, a lot of boats that I missed,” he muses. Still, the deeper truth he draws from the path is less romantic than exacting: “You had the framework, and you had the technique, and no matter what length of course you're taking, you're on your own.”
#607
September 15 · 1 hr 58 min
From Section A to 505 A
Episode #607: “I could not stay under a military rule that’s been killing thousands of people,” Maple says. “I cannot just sit and watch.” When Myanmar’s military seized power in February 2021, Maple was a scholarship student in South Korea studying Business Management and Entrepreneurship, already thinking about how she might one day redirect her education toward reforming the system she had grown up in. School, as she experienced it, had been shaped by hierarchy and competition rather than curiosity. Students were ranked into sections, with privileges reserved for the highest group. “The top students were in section A,” she recalls, describing how access to resources like the computer room followed those divisions. By fifth grade, monthly “talent” badges were awarded to the top ten students and publicly removed from anyone who fell behind. “It’s not about learning,” she says. “It’s all about memorizing everything and just taking the exams in the best way possible.” Maple’s political awareness formed early. At eight years old, during the 2007 monk-led protests, she marched with her family and later watched video footage of crackdowns at home. “I saw the bodies and everything,” she remembers. By the time the coup trapped her in Myanmar during a visit from her Korean university during the pandemic, she initially believed international pressure might reverse it, studying United Nations statements closely before realizing those words offered no protection. Maple began fundraising for the Committee Representing Pyidaungsu Hluttaw, offering scholarship consultations to students who could show donation receipts. The post spread; her bank account was frozen; soldiers arrived with a warrant under Section 505A. She spent eleven months in hiding while continuing her Korean coursework online, the isolation eroding her health and pushing her toward suicide until a drawing from her younger sister interrupted that spiral. After a failed attempt to cross into Thailand and a deportation, Maple eventually made it back across the border. In Mae Sot, she now works with displaced students navigating the legal and financial barriers that stand between them and formal education. Here she is continuing her life’s work that started many years ago, yet under very different conditions. Myanmar students, she insists, are “smart, outstanding, and hardworking,” and resilient beyond their years. What they lack is not determination but access. “If you just give them a chance,” she promises, “they would do whatever it takes.”
#606
September 14 · 36 min
No Neutral Neighbor
Episode #606: Anusorn Tamajai’s attempted intervention during Min Aung Hlaing’s visit to Thailand began with an undelivered letter. Prevented from placing his proposals directly before Myanmar’s military leader, the Thai member of parliament raised his voice instead. The act was spontaneous, but the reasoning behind it was not. “My intention was to demand for peace in Myanmar, and I would like to fight for humanity.” Anusorn favors a democratic federal future for Myanmar rooted in popular participation. Political activity and free expression must be restored, he argues, followed by a genuinely free election; if the military authorities cannot conduct one credibly, he believes an international body such as the United Nations should do so. His support for the Panglong tradition sits inside a wider principle: Myanmar’s political order should be determined by its people rather than imposed by an authoritarian government. That principle also governs his view of Thailand. Thai investment that benefits the junta should carry conditions supporting greater freedom and openness, and economic relations should serve ordinary people in both countries rather than privileged corporate or political interests. Thailand should engage political forces beyond the military regime, while people arriving from Myanmar should be treated according to humanitarian obligations. Anusorn wants ASEAN to exert similar pressure, but he recognizes how slowly such mechanisms work. He does not answer that frustration by embracing political shortcuts, but instead advisesthat movements must be built over time, even when success may lie beyond a single lifetime. “You need to build up the movement. It’s a long march.” His planned response is to keep organizing, including an ASEAN network supporting democracy, human rights, and peace in Myanmar. The urgency has not disappeared simply because the route is long: Myanmar’s people, as he repeatedly insists, have already suffered for too long.
#605
September 11 · 1 hr 8 min
Borrowed Intimacy
Episode #605: Note: this podcast episode, as well as the following text describing it, includes frank language about sexuality, male sex work, and self-harm. Reader and listener discretion is advised. The AAS Conference in Vancouver brought together thousands of scholars and practitioners working across Asia, creating a wide-ranging space for exchange, debate, and reflection. Within that broader setting, Burma emerged as one of several urgent areas of focus amid its ongoing crisis. Insight Myanmar Podcast was invited to record on site, setting up a small space to capture a series of short, real-time conversations with participants moving through the conference. These interviews were shaped by immediacy—thoughts shared in the moment, rather than after the fact—and are now being extended to a wider global audience. This episode is the final in a four-part series. Amnuaypond Kidpromma, a lecturer at Chiang Mai University’s Faculty of Humanities, studies a rarely discussed dimension of Myanmar’s post-coup displacement into Thailand — the rise of Myanmar male sex workers who enter the trade not as a planned profession but as an extension of migrant labor that no longer pays enough to survive. In her research, these men usually arrive from rural Myanmar as they flee conflict and conscription, and take whatever work they can find, often in construction or restaurants. When wages fail to cover daily life, visa costs, work permits, and remittances back home, sex work becomes another shift. What interests Kidpromma is not only the economic pressure but the language the men use to absorb it. “They just say, ‘I am a man who takes the job,’” she explains. The phrase turns sex work into temporary labor rather than a fixed identity, and links it to a masculine obligation to provide. That Burmese masculine frame shapes everything. Most of the men she interviewed entered the work still understanding themselves as straight, still calling themselves “real men,” and not speaking of the job in the same moral register that female sex workers often do. Where women in her earlier research described guilt, bad karma, religious striving, and the need to make merit, the men more often treated the work as harsh necessity. Many had once been ordained as novices or monks, and Kidpromma argues that they seem to feel they retain a kind of religious legitimacy even after entering the trade, while women work much harder to repair spiritual damage. The movement into sex work is often gradual. Friends introduce them. They begin by drinking with clients, then allowing touch, then accepting money that far exceeds anything available in ordinary migrant labor. One man told her that after being kissed and touched, he received 5,000 baht — “this is like the whole month I earned.” From there, the line moved quickly to sexual relations. Kidpromma does not present these men as symbols or moral lessons. She presents them as people cornered by a border economy that keeps widening after the coup. What she hears most often is not self-expression but sacrifice — the insistence that whatever is happening to them is being endured so that someone else might eat, study, or survive a little more safely.

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