Insight Myanmar

Episode #588: Historian Douglas Ober began questioning the standard history of Indian Buddhism while traveling to Bodh Gaya, Sarnath, and other sacred sites in his twenties. The dates he found on buildings and inscriptions did not fit the familiar sequence in which Buddhism vanished, European scholars rediscovered it, Anagarika Dharmapala revived it, and B.R. Ambedkar restored it in 1956. His rese...

Episode #587: Su Thit, the founder of Spouses of People’s Soldiers, frames military defection in Myanmar less as a single brave act than as an extended struggle against survival math. Leaving the institution means losing salary, housing, rank, and the thin protection that comes with uniform. Staying can mean remaining inside a system that demands obedience to violence. She describes the decision t...

Episode #586: This is the sixth installment of our ongoing discussions with Friedgard Lottermoser. Drawing on decades of firsthand experience with Sayagyi U Ba Khin and other teachers, she offers a different account—one that sits alongside the established narrative and quietly complicates it, grounded in her own lived experience rather than directly opposing what came later. Friedgard begins with...

Episode #585: “We can’t go back to the normal life, because our country is not even normal,” says Tone Tone, a former psychology student from Yangon, describing how Myanmar’s 2021 military coup shattered any hope of remaining apolitical. In this conversation she is joined by Liberia, a civil engineering graduate who became a strike organizer, and together they recount how violence transformed them...

Episode #584: Lora Roy, a longtime Vipassana meditator in the S.N. Goenka tradition, reflects on a lifelong effort to live truthfully from direct experience rather than fear, social expectation, or rigid authority. She traces that orientation back to childhood, when her authoritarian father’s controlling approach pushed her inward. Isolated for long periods, she developed habits of reflection and...

Episode #583: “If you can maim them, you can get multiple people off of a battlefield, and it’s also a terror tactic as well.” Collin Mayfield, an American journalist and documentary filmmaker, spent months with the resistance group People’s Defense Force Zoland in western Myanmar’s Chin State in 2023 and 2025. During his second trip, he stepped on an M14 mine near a former resistance police check...

Episode #582: “If you're having weird meditative experiences, I'll be happy to talk to you about those for free. I won't even take a donation.” Daniel Ingram, a physician, meditation teacher, author of Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha, and cofounder of the Dharma Overground , has spent nearly three decades creating language and support for contemplative experiences that can be mistaken f...

In this bonus episode, we share a special online fundraiser for Better Burma led by Richmond Heath, a certified TRE (Tension and Trauma Releasing Exercises) provider and trainer based in Australia, whose full conversation on Episode 514 explored the meeting point between meditation, trauma, spontaneous movement, and the body’s own intelligence. In this conversation, Richmond moves from theory into...

Episode #581: Tin Tin Htar Myint, a medical epidemiologist based in France who has worked in vaccines for more than two decades, describes Myanmar’s immunization collapse as a problem of governance as much as medicine. Before 2021, she argues, the national program had been expanding in concrete ways, adding vaccines that could reduce childhood pneumonia and diarrhea and protect girls from HPV. The...

Episode #580: Professor P. L. Dhar, a longtime Vipassana teacher in the S.N. Goenka tradition, reflects on his life-long spiritual journey. A decade immersed in Vedanta and other Indian traditions, along with a meditative and devotional practice, helped him develop deep concentration. Yet he gradually became dissatisfied, wondering whether these practices investigated reality deeply enough. Then a...

Episode #579: “I did not expect to be conversing in Urdu with someone in Yangon.” Bilal Hassan, a Pakistani creator and doctor, traveled to Burma after noticing how much of Karachi’s everyday culture carried unexplained Burmese traces: khao suey, family names, old songs about Rangoon, and stories no one could quite complete. His trip began as a search for those missing links, but Yangon gave him s...

Episode #578: Aye Myat Thwe is a Burmese lay Buddhist practitioner raised inside the Mahasi Vipassana world, where devotion, meditation, and study were braided into ordinary family life. Watching her grandmother sit daily, she grew up assuming the classic Burmese hierarchy of authority was stable and complete, the commentaries as canon, Abhidhamma as the tradition’s intellectual summit. For years,...

Episode #577: Thomas Shapwon, a Naga elder and former politician, recounts the long struggle of the Naga people for sovereignty and survival between India and Myanmar. He describes the Naga as an ancient, independent nation with distinct language, culture, and traditions. From the formation of the Naga Club in 1918 to the declaration of Naga independence in 1947— one day before India’s own— the co...

Episode #576: “I have been attempted [at assassinations] twice when they shot me, but I escaped. My family, my brother, they are targeted, and armed groups are always behind us. They kill in a second.” Peter Saiful, a pastor with the Rohingya Christian Fellowship and a human rights defender, describes what it means to live as a Rohingya Christian refugee in Bangladesh after his family fled Myanmar...

Episode #575: Lindsey Kennedy, an investigative journalist and documentary filmmaker focused on organized crime, corruption, and conflict, argues that the scam-compound economy across Cambodia, Myanmar, and Laos can no longer be treated as a marginal criminal problem. It has become a governing force in parts of the region, shaping infrastructure, labor flows, border management, and even the logic...

Episode #574: Diego Prieto, a Chilean filmmaker, embarked on a journey to explore the Buddha's legacy and its modern relevance. His documentary started as an effort to explain the core teachings of Buddhism but evolved into a personal and transformative journey. Together with co-producer Camila Arias, he traveled to key sites in Buddhist history, including India and Sri Lanka, to trace the histori...

Episode #573: “I brought you here to the United States not so you could forget our homeland,” Salih Hudayar remembers his father telling him, “but so you could become educated and one day return to liberate our people and our country from the Chinese occupation.” Hudayar, now Foreign Minister of the East Turkistan Government in Exile, traces his political life to that instruction. Born in 1993 nea...

Episode #572: “The government will survive for as long as it can feed the people,” says Christopher Lamb, former Australian Ambassador to Myanmar, distilling what he believes defines the country’s political fate more than any ideology. He reflects on a relationship with Burma that began in the early 1970s, when the generals were drafting a Socialist Constitution and creating a surveillance state,...

Episode #571: “For students living through uncertainty, I think online learning and online education becomes a lifeline rather than simply an alternative.” Eaint Thet Hmu, a Philosophy, Politics, and Economics (PPE) student at Parami University, came to education through disruption rather than continuity. COVID-19 interrupted the expected path after matriculation; the 2021 coup closed off the univ...

Episode #570: The AAS Conference in Vancouver brought together thousands of scholars and practitioners from around the world, creating a dense, fast-moving environment of panels, conversations, and informal exchange across the full breadth of Asian studies. Within that wider landscape, Burma surfaced as one of several pressing areas of focus, shaped by the realities of its ongoing crisis. Insight...

Episode #569: When Hla Hla Win was sentenced to twenty-seven years in prison at age twenty-three, she did not focus on the number. “I decided that in politics, the way things change, I will be released.” She narrowed her horizon to the day in front of her — reading, teaching other inmates’ children, and sleeping without the constant fear of arrest that had defined her underground reporting. A form...

Episode #568: “I think a world where people partner and support each other is the world I want my kids to grow up in,” says Greg Tyrosvoutis, co-founder and director of the Inclusive Education Foundation (InED) on the Thailand–Myanmar border. For fifteen years he has worked with refugee camps, migrant learning centers, and ethnic-run schools serving communities displaced by conflict. His guiding b...

Episode #567: Stella Naw, a Kachin academic activist focused on indigenous and decolonial peacebuilding, is joined by Dustin Barter, a senior research fellow at the Humanitarian Policy Group at ODI, and together they argue that in the turmoil since the 2021 coup, ethnic resistance organizations (EROs) and their civil society partners are reshaping governance and legitimacy from the ground up, even...

Episode #566: Daniel M. Stuart, an Associate Professor of Religious Studies at the University of South Carolina and a visiting scholar in Hamburg, examines the elusive historical figure Maung Po Thet—also known as Saya Thet Gyi—whose place in the lineage associated with S. N. Goenka reveals how modern Vipassana narratives often simplify a far more complicated past. Stuart explains that there is ve...

Episode #565: In Anyar , or the central Dry Zone, community protection is by necessity locally led and informed by facts on the ground. In a huge area comprising swathes of Sagaing, Magway, and Mandalay regions, often referred to as the country’s “political heartland”, communities have faced intensified violence since the coup and persistent barriers to access, information, and livelihoods. Kant K...