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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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#609
Friday · 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
Thursday · 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
Tuesday · 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
Monday · 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.
#604
September 10 · 2 hr 34 min
Straight Outta Yangon
Episode #604: “I chose hip hop.” Born in Yangon in 1979 to parents who were nationally known singers, Anegga grew up in a household where art was both celebrated and watched. His father had helped introduce rock music to Myanmar during an earlier era of military control, and supporting opposition politics carried real risk. He remembers military visits to the family home at night and his mother having to hide because of her involvement with the NLD. Music, in other words, was never insulated from power. Hip hop entered his life through scarcity. Myanmar at the time was largely cut off from international media, English-language books, and commercial music distribution. He encountered rap through English-language radio broadcasts, especially VOA, and was drawn first to sound rather than meaning. He did not initially understand most of the lyrics he heard from artists like LL Cool J, Nas, or Biggie, but he studied cadence, breath control, rhyme structure, and delivery. Hip hop became a way of accessing a vocabulary of frustration that felt familiar even if the geography was different. He often explains that while Myanmar did not have American-style ghettos, it lived under a different form of systemic deprivation, one that shaped the whole country rather than particular neighborhoods. In 2000, he co-founded ACID and released what is considered to be Myanmar’s first hip hop album. The impact was immediate among young people; at the same time, every release required navigating censorship committees, submitting written lyrics in advance, altering phrasing to avoid rejection, and sometimes facing arbitrary refusals from broadcast authorities even after formal approval. The system did not operate transparently; it operated through unpredictability. Although he has consistently argued that ACID did not begin as an explicitly political group, interpretation often exceeded intention. Songs meant as expressions of loyalty or social observation were read by audiences as indirect political commentary. That ambiguity narrowed after 2007, when the Saffron Revolution led to arrests of band members, including Zayar Thaw. Over time, Anegga moved from coded expression to open political engagement, releasing explicitly political songs, supporting the NLD, and distributing banned political literature discreetly among students. His political involvement was also shaped by family history and long-standing loyalty to Aung San Suu Kyi. After the 2021 coup, the separation between music and politics disappeared entirely. Zayar Thaw, who had moved from hip hop into parliament, joined the resistance and was executed by the military in 2022, an act that underscored how thoroughly the country had reversed course. Anegga left Myanmar soon after and now lives in Thailand as an urban refugee, separated from his family and uncertain about permanent resettlement.
#603
September 8 · 59 min
The Sum of Small Cuts
Episode #603: Saw Poe Wah assists the Karen Refugee Committee (KRC) and speaks from a life shaped by the Thai–Myanmar border camps where he studied, lived, and later worked with community-based organizations. He describes the KRC as a Karen-led body that helps coordinate care for refugees across nine camps in Thailand’s Tak and Mae Hong Son provinces, a system he places at roughly fifty years of continuous operation. Its responsibilities are basic and ongoing: keeping people fed, connecting them to health services, and sustaining a community that has been treated as temporary for decades. Saw Poe Wah’s central argument is about strain, not ideology. Since the coup, more people have arrived from ever before to seek out safety, while the funding base that supports rations and healthcare has become more uncertain. He describes reorganizing limited support by vulnerability and pushing what self-reliance is possible through work access outside the camps, a route that depends on Thai permissions and never covers everyone. “We’ve seen so many people from inside Burma coming, seeking temporary shelter and care,” he says, and the problem is that short-term arrangements quickly harden into long-term displacement. Saw Poe Wah also speaks about the conditions inside Myanmar that keep driving movement: landmines that shape where teams can travel, and airstrikes that make fixed clinics and schools dangerous to operate. In areas where shelter itself can attract attack, he describes care delivered in the open. “We have to treat the patients under the trees.” The camps can ration, reorganize, and coordinate with larger agencies, but they cannot control the forces that keep producing displacement or the political decisions that determine how long support can be sustained.
#602
September 7 · 2 hr 9 min
Bearing Down on Practice
Episode #602: “The things that I was devoted to for liberation became the weapons that were used to harm me. The community that was a refuge became the thing that exiled me.” Amma Thanasanti, a meditation teacher, former Theravāda nun, and founder and spiritual director of Awakening Truth, spent more than two decades in the Ajahn Chah lineage before a conflict over women’s authority led to her expulsion. Her path had begun at UC Santa Cruz in 1979, where Jack Engler’s teaching convinced her that spiritual life would become the center of her life. Retreat practice, encounters with teachers including Dipa Ma, and survival of a Himalayan black bear attack deepened her conviction that meditation opened genuine freedom. That conviction did not prepare her for the limits of practice inside an unequal institution. At Amaravati, monks held authority while nuns lived under a separate sīladharā structure without equal access to bhikkhunī ordination. When Amma Thanasanti and three other nuns drafted a statement seeking a path out of their double bind, the response was shouting, a secret plan to reduce the nuns’ rights, and a ceremony she could not join without violating her integrity. Her talks were erased, former colleagues were told to avoid her, and the community she had treated as refuge became a source of exile. Recovery took fifteen years. Trauma work and attachment repair showed her that liberating insight does not automatically resolve wounds formed through fear, attachment, or coercive control. Her teaching now integrates the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta with trauma-informed understanding, while challenging communities that rely on self-report and protect a teacher’s identity more readily than those reporting harm. For practitioners, the difficulty is that belonging itself can narrow perception. Amma Thanasanti urges people to keep trusted relationships outside spiritual institutions and to notice changes in sleep, health, confidence, shame, anxiety, and the ability to speak honestly. Meditation may remain liberating even when a community becomes harmful; that split does not make the harm unreal. Her counsel is directed first toward the person whose own signals have become difficult to trust: “When the balance is such that you feel that the harm that’s happening is not something that you’re able to metabolize… Listen to that.”
#601
September 4 · 1 hr 27 min
An Unfound Door and All the Forgotten Faces
Episode #601: Chalida Tajaroensuk, chairperson and founder of the Thailand-based People Empowerment Foundation, argues that responses to Myanmar’s post-coup crisis must be grounded in the experiences of refugees, migrant workers, and border communities rather than shaped primarily through elite diplomacy and state-centered policymaking. Her organization conducts fact-finding missions, works with refugee communities and ethnic organizations, and brings information from camps and border regions into discussions with Thai authorities because she believes policymakers often lack direct understanding of conditions on the ground. She describes Thailand’s Myanmar policy as shaped by competing political, security, humanitarian and economic pressures. Different governments therefore shift between diplomatic caution, economic engagement, and security-focused approaches. Although many critics see Thailand’s continued dialogue with Myanmar’s military regime as indirect support for the junta, Chalida argues that maintaining communication preserves channels through which humanitarian concerns and border realities can still be raised. She also believes the weakness of ASEAN and divisions among Myanmar’s opposition groups encourage regional governments to rely on cautious diplomacy rather than more direct intervention. Much of her organization’s work focuses on refugee camps along the Thai-Myanmar border. She supports Thailand’s recent decision to allow some refugees to work outside the camps, butargues that the policy remains unevenly implemented. Her organization found that many refugees were excluded from official registration lists, preventing them from accessing work opportunities. Many camp residents also lack language skills, job training, and familiarity with the outside economy after decades of confinement. At the same time, humanitarian aid continues to decline while resettlement opportunities abroad have narrowed sharply. Chalida argues that Thailand must move beyond emergency management and create long-term systems that allow refugees to work and support themselves economically. Despite political obstacles and regional instability, she maintains that gradual policy change, long-term cooperation, and grassroots advocacy can eventually help displaced Myanmar communities rebuild their lives with dignity.
#600
September 3 · 2 hr 12 min
The People’s Credentials
Episode #600: “I won’t be disappointing the people.” Before Kyaw Moe Tun took the UN General Assembly floor on February 26, 2021, that was as much as he had disclosed about the position he intended to take. Myanmar’s permanent representative—its ambassador to the UN—and a diplomat since 1993, he had received the junta’s instructions after the coup but secretly prepared a statement siding with the public and the ousted elected government. Almost no one knew his words in advance. Once delivered, they placed both his position and his safety at risk. The junta tried to remove him from the UN and later an assassination plot against him brought FBI intervention and a month of round-the-clock Secret Service protection. Kyaw Moe Tun nevertheless retained the seat after the UN Credentials Committee deferred competing claims in 2021. That arrangement has continued, but at a price: he has withdrawn from the General Debate speakers list each year and kept a lower profile to protect the consensus that excludes the junta’s nominee. The next decision is formed through a process he cannot directly address. China, Russia, and the United States are expected to sit on the nine-country committee, while the other six members may emerge only when the new General Assembly session begins. Informal discussions can settle the language before a November meeting, and the full General Assembly may approve the report within seconds. The mission defending Myanmar’s democratic claim has meanwhile shrunk from fourteen people to five, surviving on funds held before the coup. Losing the seat would remove the channel through which Kyaw Moe Tun conveys the people’s aspirations and seeks international action. It would also strip him of the office from which he has resisted the junta while deepening his exile. He says the military has sentenced him for treason and that he must protect his wife and two children. The institution will decide who represents Myanmar; its current representative cannot safely return there.
#599
September 1 · 1 hr 34 min
The Cure Within
Episode #599: “I've been blessed to be on a spiritual journey for well over the last 50 years,” says psychiatrist Raman Khosla, reflecting on the lifelong search that eventually led him to S.N. Goenka’s Vipassana tradition. In this, the first in a series of ongoing conversation with Insight Myanmar, he traces the influences that shaped his quest to understand suffering and the mind. Khosla credits his parents with creating a deeply spiritual home grounded in the Bhagavad Gita’s teachings on devotion, selfless action, ethics, and compassion. His fascination with the causes of suffering and inner transformation began in childhood. He recalls asking why a classmate was sad, noticing that physical pain changed while sitting quietly during family yoga sessions, and questioning why religious chants described moral transformation without explaining how it could be achieved. As a teenager, an underlying dissatisfaction persisted despite an outwardly fortunate life. Reading about the Buddha, Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha, and encountering dedicated religious figures strengthened his conviction that genuine inner freedom must be possible. He explored numerous traditions, learning from Osho Rajneesh, the Ramakrishna Mission, the Bihar School of Yoga, and especially Jiddu Krishnamurti. While each offered valuable insights, none fully answered his central question: how can profound psychological transformation actually be realized? Believing the mind to be the most important subject of study, Khosla pursued medicine and psychiatry, hoping science and spirituality would illuminate the same mystery. During postgraduate training, however, he concluded that while Western psychiatry effectively treated mental illness, it offered far less guidance for cultivating humanity’s highest mental potential. Ajahn Sumedho’s Chitta Viveka further convinced him that the Buddha’s teachings described a lived reality rather than an abstract philosophy. Everything changed in 1987 when Khosla attended his first ten-day Goenka Vipassana course. He describes it as “the biggest single life-changing event of my life,” transforming the study of the mind from an intellectual pursuit into direct experience. Although he immediately wanted to dedicate himself fully to the practice, Goenka advised him first to complete his psychiatric training and allow the transition to unfold naturally, setting the stage for the next chapter of his journey.
#598
August 31 · 1 hr 35 min
Price of Raw Power
Episode #598: Rare earth mining has drawn Kachin State into a global struggle over minerals essential to electronics, green technologies, automobiles, and defense, while communities near the mines bear the environmental and social costs of extraction. Produced by Insight Myanmar for the International Development Research Centre’s Knowledge for Democracy Myanmar Initiative (K4DM), this episode brings three Kachin researchers into conversation with themes from their August 13 Dialogue on Sustainable Development, including transboundary pollution, community vulnerability, environmental governance, and regional cooperation across the Mekong. First, Brang (a pseudonym being used for safety) sees rare-earth mining as both a local disaster and a geopolitical asset. Heavy rare earths from Kachin feed defense, electronics, automobiles, and green technology, while mining clears forests, contaminates water, destroys crops, and damages health; around the Chipwi River, he points to vanished fish and cattle dying after drinking polluted water. China, he argues, has pushed toxic extraction across its borders while retaining control over processing technology. Western access therefore depends on more than securing ore; in Brang’s view it also depends on political change in Myanmar rather than a commercial accommodation with the military. Tu Nan (a pseudonym being used for safety) approaches the industry through environmental and transitional justice, asking not only who carries the damage now but who will be responsible for repair after conflict. His focus stays with communities whose livelihoods, forests, water, and cultural practices are being depleted. Yet he also documents their activity: villagers create protected community forests and defend watersheds against mining pressure. “They have that kind of agency to respond to a threat of oppression.” For Tu Nan, the Kachin Independence Organization’s claims to future statehood will be tested by whether resource governance includes public participation and protects community welfare even while extraction finances conflict. Seng Li studies the gap between KIO mining regulations and conditions on the ground. He sees greater institutionalization since 2025, but environmental restoration, labor, and gender protections remain weak. Women seeking mine work can face sexual coercion from Chinese operators, while polluted water and lost agricultural markets reshape village life. Conflict has expanded extraction by increasing desperation and armed groups’ need for revenue. Seng Li’s final concern reaches the international system: resource-governance frameworks often ignore non-state authorities, even though those actors control mines and communities. Accountability, for him, requires bringing them within the standards applied to state governments. Together, these accounts frame Myanmar’s rare-earth industry as a regional concern requiring credible monitoring, community participation, accountable state and non-state governance, supply-chain responsibility, and cooperation that gives affected communities a voice and a fair share of the benefits.
#597
August 28 · 1 hr 39 min
No Direction Home
Episode #597: Victor Chan’s life began not with a spiritual calling but with motion. Born in Hong Kong and trained in physics, he left without a fixed destination and spent the early 1970s moving across Europe and Asia along the hippie trail. “I was into sex, rock and roll and hedonism,” he says. Yet through a chance encounter in Kabul, he was introduced within a single year to three figures who would stay with him: the Dalai Lama in India, Mahasi Sayadaw in Rangoon, and Chögyam Trungpa in Colorado. Of the three, Mahasi Sayadaw left the deepest mark. Chan found formal meditation nearly unbearable, but Mahasi’s presence stayed with him for decades. The Dalai Lama made a very different first impression: when Chan arrived in Dharamsala in 1972, road-worn, unwashed, and dressed like a wandering hippie, the future Nobel laureate could barely suppress his laughter. Later, Tibet itself became Chan’s great field of movement. Entering during a brief window of looser restrictions in the early 1980s, he walked far beyond the usual routes, reaching monasteries, pilgrimage circuits, and remote artistic sites that had survived the Cultural Revolution. What drove him was not money or institutional backing, but compulsion, curiosity, and a nomadic instinct he still cannot fully explain. That work led to the Tibet Handbook, a vast guide documenting places, histories, and routes that were almost unknown to outsiders. It also brought him into the orbit of scholars like Michael Aris and, through those circles, into early contact with Aung San Suu Kyi, long before her political emergence. In later years, Chan’s attention shifted toward another kind of movement: conversation. Through public events and intimate dinners, he came to value not instruction or mastery, but the exchange itself—an active, searching encounter between people, ideas, and worlds, forged in travel, risk, attention, and lifelong restlessness.
#596
August 27 · 1 hr 59 min
Return to Sender
Episode #596: “I needed to find another way... through research, writing, education, mentoring, community work,” says CS Kyaw, a Myanmar-born doctor turned development researcher now based in Australia. She argues that Myanmar’s future depends not only on financial support from abroad but also on social remittances, the transfer of knowledge, skills, values, and relationships across borders that allow displaced Myanmar people to continue contributing even when returning home is unsafe. Originally trained in medicine and public health, Kyaw worked in Myanmar’s nonprofit sector before receiving an Australia Awards scholarship to study development at the University of Melbourne. Her work convinced her that health could not be understood through medicine alone. While serving as an outreach doctor, she saw neighboring villages with strikingly different access to education and healthcare because of unequal resources and opportunities. The experience led her to see well-being as inseparable from broader social and political conditions. The 2021 military coup became another turning point. It overturned her plans and forced her to ask how she could continue serving Myanmar when she could no longer do so safely inside the country. That question led her toward research, education, mentoring, community work, transnationalism, and social remittances. Now living in Australia as an asylum seeker, she identifies as a “transmigrant,” someone whose identity and responsibilities continue across borders. Kyaw puts these ideas into practice by volunteering with refugee and migrant women through the River Nile Learning Centre, co-founding Mohinga Hub for Myanmar diaspora communities, and teaching through Spring University Myanmar, while acknowledging the funding, security, and volunteer challenges these initiatives face. She also reflects on tensions between Myanmar communities inside and outside the country, the decolonization of language and knowledge, and the importance of local voices in education, research, and advocacy. Throughout the interview, she returns to the values that unite her work—dignity, equality, knowledge, community, and freedom. Asked to describe Myanmar’s future in one word, she says, “hope.”
#595
August 25 · 1 hr 7 min
At The Checkpoint
Episode #595: Salai Vanni Bawi, a Chin researcher focused on migration, refugees, and transnational repression, speaks about how the country’s crisis extends beyond its borders into a system that continues to shape the lives of displaced people even after they have fled the country. For example, in Thailand, individuals passing through Bangkok airport may be detained and interrogated, sometimes finding that authorities already possess detailed information about them. The presence of Myanmar embassy officials during questioning suggests further coordination. However, outcomes vary: in Bangkok, visibility and legal support may prevent deportation, while in border areas such as Mae Sot, enforcement is harsher and more unpredictable. Charges like illegal entry or human trafficking can be used to justify detention or pressure detainees, sometimes reframing political cases as criminal ones. Corruption further shapes outcomes, as bribes may determine whether someone is deported—an outcome that can lead to imprisonment, forced conscription, or death. At the same time, local relationships and informal arrangements can allow limited movement, showing that authority is negotiated as much as enforced. Vanni Bawi situates these regional dynamics within a broader structural problem: the way international engagement with Myanmar is still overwhelmingly organized around state-to-state relations. In practice, this means external actors continue to prioritize engagement with the military regime—treating it as the primary interlocutor—while the resistance and ethnic groups remain largely excluded. He argues this is not simply a political choice but a built-in limitation of conventional foreign policy frameworks, which are not designed to engage meaningfully with non-state actors. What is missing, he argues, is sustained and direct engagement with the actors actually shaping events inside Myanmar. Without incorporating these perspectives into regional and international dialogue, any attempt at resolution will remain fundamentally incomplete.
#594
August 24 · 1 hr 19 min
A Course in Progress
Episode #594: “We fumble through life a little bit, and we end up doing different kind of things.” Arthur Nichols uses this modest explanation for a life that has now been shaped by Vipassana for fifty years. At eighty-three, he has spent four decades conducting courses in the tradition of S. N. Goenka and helped establish the practice across Latin America. Yet he refuses to describe his path as heroic, carefully planned, or inherently wiser than the lives other people build. Nichols was teaching at a university in Atlanta when he took leave in 1975 and traveled overland to India. A book by Jiddu Krishnamurti opened his interest in living differently, and travelers later directed him toward a vipassana meditation course in the tradition of S.N. Goenka. He soon joined the first students at the newly opened Dhamma Giri center in Igatpuri, visited U Ba Khin’s International Meditation Centre in Rangoon, sat long courses, and was appointed one of the very first assistant teachers in 1986. Although he repeatedly considered returning to academic work, conducting courses and maintaining twice-daily practice gradually became his full-time life. Beginning in Venezuela in 1994, Nichols worked across Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Peru, and much of Latin America, often conducting retreats in temporary rented sites before permanent centers existed. He learned Spanish and Portuguese for the courses and watched small local groups develop into a regional network that has held thousands of retreats. He credits neither persuasion nor personal leadership for that growth, but the pāramīs (or spiritual potential) that he believes draw people toward practice when their time ripens. Nichols also resists presenting total dedication to meditation as a prescription. A monk, a parent, a professional, and a course server may each follow a different path. And in Burma, where war and displacement are now making sustained practice all but impossible, he offers no easy spiritual answer to abject physical suffering. At eighty-three, he continues to meditate, answer questions, and travel where courses need him. The work has expanded across continents, but his own measure remains deliberately small: practicing sīla, following right speech, and staying dedicated to this path.
#593
August 21 · 1 hr 30 min
Most Favored Regime
Episode #593: “Why are values included in international trade?” Arianna Bondi’s research begins with that question, but Myanmar turns it into a problem of limits. A PhD candidate at McGill University studying international political economy, Bondi examined how the European Union tried to promote human rights through trade policy, focusing on Myanmar’s place in the EU’s Generalized System of Preferences. Her study, completed in 2020 at Johns Hopkins SAIS in Bologna, looks at the period before the 2021 coup. That timing matters; Myanmar had been brought back into the EU’s Everything ButArms trade scheme in 2013 after preferences were withdrawn in 1997 over forced labor concerns. The policy was supposed to support development while encouraging respect for international standards. Bondi found that this created two different tools: positive conditionality, through engagement and market access, and negative conditionality, through the threat or use of withdrawal. Her interviewees saw little evidence that withdrawal had produced human rights change. Negative conditionality could send a signal, but it risked punishing workers while failing to reach the military structures responsible for the gravest abuses. Positive conditionality seemed more promising, especially in the garment sector, where EU-linked trade could improve wages, standards, and opportunities for largely female workers. But that success remained narrow. It could touch factory floors more easily than constitutional power, military violence, or the Rohingya crisis. Bondi’s account keeps returning to mechanism. Human rights cannot be treated as one broad category that trade either improves or fails to improve. The question has to be which right, which sector, which actor, and which channel. EU policy also carried other motives: business access, regional influence, concern over China, and member-state interests. That makes the application of values uneven. Myanmar leaves the trade instrument under pressure. A tariff preference may help workers, a withdrawal may make a statement, and neither may reach the institution doing the most harm.
#592
August 20 · 1 hr 49 min
Meditating beyond the Benevolent Dictator
Episode #592: In this, the 7th installment of a series of discussions with Jonathan Crowley, a former longtime practitioner and assistant teacher in the Goenka Vipassana tradition, he reflects on his decades-long relationship with the Goenka Vipassana tradition. For many years he believed the technique was complete, consistent, and capable of carrying a diligent student all the way to liberation. The emotional rewards of early practice reinforced that certainty, and the culture’s strong discouragement of outside study made alternatives seem unnecessary. Only later did he realize how those conditions prevented him from seeing the limits built into the system itself. A turning point came when he started reading the suttas. He saw that key concepts—in particular, vedanā, saṅkhāra, jhāna—were taught in ways far narrower than their Canonical meanings. Vedanā was treated almost exclusively as physical sensation, rather than the full affective tone of experience. Saṅkhāra became a simple “reaction” rather than the broad field of conditioned formations. And jhāna, central to the Buddha’s description of the path, was omitted entirely. These gaps shaped the expectations of long-course students, who were told that deep meditation would unfold through patient observation of bodily sensations alone. Without strong samādhi, however, the clarity needed for deeper insight never develops. He links these doctrinal limitations to cultural ones: a spectrum of fundamentalist tendencies, discouragement of inquiry, fear of “confusion,” and a social environment where silence and equanimity become tools of conformity. Yet he also speaks with affection for what the practice gave him and hopes his reflections give others permission not to abandon the tradition, but to think more freely within and beyond it.
#591
August 18 · 1 hr 59 min
Ground Control
Episode #591: “The war may end, but for years and years, landmines indiscriminately will kill and maim people, quite often children, as well as farm animals, long after the act of fighting has ended.” Ken Maclean, a cultural anthropologist and human-rights fact-finder, traces Myanmar’s landmine crisis from early-2000s interviews with prisoners forced to walk ahead of soldiers through suspected minefields to the political obstacles that still prevent systematic clearance. His central concern is not only what mines do when planted, but what they continue to control after troops leave. During research in 2013–14, possible refugee return from Thailand exposed the lack of safe routes, reliable maps, or an agreed authority for mine action. Military units, ethnic armed groups, and villagers used different mines for battle lines, camp perimeters, resource sites, roads, and community protection. Lightweight devices shifted in rain and soil, old mines remained live, and armed groups sometimes dug up and reused them, leaving no side with a dependable record of contamination. Removing a device can cost hundreds of dollars or more, even when it cost only a few dollars to make. A low-cost tractor fitted with a spiked hedgehog roller cleared some flat farmland in Karen State, but formal standards, ceasefire fears, and rivalries prevented the experiment from expanding. Mine-risk education faced its own contradiction: material that taught civilians to recognize booby traps could also teach fighters how to build them. Maclean still argues that multilingual risk education should be broadcast nationwide as immediate harm reduction. Peace would not settle who controls clearance or owns the land made usable. A national mine-action center could centralize authority in ways ethnic organizations reject, while clearing profitable roads and towns first could favor elites over refugees and displaced families. With conflict now dispersed and contamination no longer confined to the borderlands, Maclean sees no logical place to begin. Even if fighting stopped, the mines would continue to shape movement, livelihood, and return for decades.
#590
August 17 · 2 hr 27 min
The Feminine Mystique
Episode #590: Chie Ikeya’s work on colonial Burma began almost by accident. Trained as a historian and originally planning to study the Japanese occupation, she found herself in Yangon waiting for archival access that never came. In the meantime, she read Burmese newspapers and periodicals from the early twentieth century, where the notion of the “modern woman” appeared again and again as a source of fascination, fear, hope, and moral panic. Her later work, Refiguring Women, Colonialism, and Modernity in Burma, follows that figure through education, print culture, nationalism, consumer desire, sexuality, Buddhism, and race. In colonial Burma, women’s education expanded sharply, especially through missionary schools, and opened paths into medicine, law, teaching, journalism, and public life. Yet those openings also made women symbolic terrain. Their clothing, schooling, work, marriages, sexuality, and public presence became ways for others to debate whether Burma was becoming modern, losing itself, resisting colonialism, or protecting the nation. Ikeya complicates the familiar claim that Burmese women traditionally enjoyed high status. Certain legal rights around property and marriage were real, but rights on paper did not erase domestic violence, social control, class inequality, or the difficulty of forcing law into practice. The claim that Burmese women needed no feminism also carried political force: it could defend Burma against colonial arguments for “uplift,” while feeding a wider ideology of Burmese Buddhist exceptionalism. That ideology later shaped debates over intermarriage, religious belonging, anti-Muslim politics, and the boundaries of the nation. Ikeya does not treat exclusion as only state propaganda. It is diffuse, historical, and embedded in ordinary assumptions about who belongs, who does not, and whose presence must be regulated. Yet she also refuses to make violence the whole record. “Burma has not always been like this,” she says. Alongside histories of estrangement, she asks historians to recover the quieter histories of affection, belonging, and difficult intimacy that rarely survive in the archive.

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