Insight Myanmar

In this inaugural edition of the “Myanmar Dhamma Diaries,” Joah tells the story of an alcoholic Airbnb guest from Europe who disrupts his Yangon home. Learning that the guest had chosen to stay there as a cry for help in battling his addiction problems, Joah arranges for him to meet two foreign monks to begin to learn about Dhamma, and eventually helps him to stay for several weeks under the care...

Swe Win’s journey has taken him from a love of British literature to the pits of solitary confinement in Insein Prison in Yangon, where he escaped harsh conditions and toxic anger by taking up a meditation practice. Since being released, he has become a serious vipassana meditation student in the tradition of S.N. Goenka, and has continued his activism by becoming one of Myanmar’s leading investig...

The provincial upbringing that characterized Maria Alejandra Amaya V’s childhood in the Colombian countryside outside of Bogotá could scarcely have predicted her later interest in Vipassana meditation in the tradition of S.N. Goenka, nor her eventual life in robes of a Buddhist nun at Pa Auk Monastery. “Sometimes I think [my story] is like a very good romantic story in Theravada Buddhism,” notes S...

Ashin Sarana may be one of the most well-known foreign monks in Myanmar today. He conducts his own meditation courses and routinely gives Dhamma talks in fluent Burmese. But did you know that his earliest monastic influences was a kung-fu movie and a book on magic? In this talk, U Sarana traces his spiritual journey from his native town of Pilsen in the Czech Republic to the Buddhist and Pali Univ...

Daniel is senior vipassana teacher (Acharya) in the S.N. Goenka tradition, in addition to being a licensed acupuncturist. He was appointed a Center Teacher (CT) originally for Dhamma Santi in Brazil, and then a Coordinating Area Teacher (CAT) “to serve the Rest of Africa.” A native Argentinian, he described going into self-exile after Juan Perón’s return to power, which led him first to Paris and...

At a time when foreigners were only granted seven-day visas to Burma, then one of the most closed countries in the world, Alan Clements arrived in 1977 and managed to stay nearly five years, training directly under Mahasi Sayadaw and then Sayadaw U Pandita, despite enduring repeated forced disrobings, deportations and eventual blacklistings. Despite this, Alan has returned to the Golden Land whene...

We caught up with Sayalay Piyadassii in Yangon, between time in her native Lithuania and as a student at Shan State Buddhist University in Taunggyi. She shares how her initial enthusiasm taking silent vipassana retreats in the tradition of S.N. Goenka led to nunhood in Myanmar in 2013, and she has remained in robes ever since. A number of themes are brought up in her spiritual biography, such as f...

Thabarwa Sayadaw has had a meteoric rise in Myanmar. After weathering a series of crises that threatened the very existence of his monastery, the Burmese monastic’s mission is now expanding at an unprecedented rate across not only the country but the entire world. And then there is his monastery itself, which is redefining the role of monasticism and the shape of Burmese Buddhism in the 21 st cent...

We are proud to present the inaugural episode of the Insight Myanmar podcast! Our host, Joah McGee, will first give a brief introduction about the podcast’s mission and background, followed by short previews of each of the first six interviews we’ve conducted so far. The full-length podcasts will be aired once weekly and feature (in order of appearance on the trailer): Alan Clements, an American y...