Insight Myanmar

This is the second episode in our series exploring Filipino meditators affected by the Dhamma of the Golden Land. Here, we tell the story of just one Filipino meditator: Raymond Riveria , or Mon for short. Mon was attracted to martial arts, but being raised Catholic, he was initially skeptical of Asian forms of religious practice. His first formal practice came in the form of Christian meditation,...

Myanmar is the dream destination for so many meditators and spiritual seekers, and this was certainly the case for Sebastien Le Normand . A published author and French yogi in the tradition of S.N. Goenka living in Canada, Sebastien long wished to visit sites related to this lineage of teachers, and he made his dream a reality by planning a personal pilgrimage in 2016. He was so moved by the exper...

The Buddha’s teachings of liberation were not meant only for prosperous and stable times, but also for when things are uncertain, or even perilous. Perhaps no moment in recent years has tested the mission of contemporary meditation centers and monasteries as much as this ongoing coronavirus pandemic, when just the basic act of gathering together poses a serious health risk. In this episode, we che...

If you reference the Philippines, vipassana meditation practice and Buddhist study are not the first things that come to mind! That is because this heavily Catholic island nation is pretty much the only region in all of Southeast Asia that has had hardly any connection to the Dhamma over the course of the last 2,500 years. So then, why would a podcast based on Buddhist practice, with a specific fo...

Alan Clements’ new book, Burma: Voices of Freedom, is a monumental achievement, a work more than three decades in the making. Alan interviewed hundreds of people in order to examine the intersecting lines between Burmese Buddhist practice and the turbulent history of the country, thus bringing together the worldly and the spiritual in profound ways.  He decided to sit for just one full-length...

“Having already witnessed first-hand the transformation of mindfulness from mysterious curiosity to commercialized buzzword, going back to read about a time when so much was still so unexplored generated a kind of nostalgia in me. Perhaps this is like when Americans pine for the ‘simplicity’ of the 1950s or the ‘freedom’ of the Old West—it says more about the psychology of the one doing the pining...

The second in a two-part interview, educator and amateur historian Zaw Win Htet continues his stories that weave together his own life, his local region, and some of the most revered Dhamma teachers of 20 th century Burma. In this segment, he covers the life and monastery of Mohnyin Sayadaw, the most important monastic disciple of Ledi Sayadaw. He also relays the ancient history of the monkey-run...

“My grandmother is the main character of this story,” Zaw Win Htet informs us as he begins the interview. An educator and amateur historian, Zaw shares how the bedtime stories she told him every night animated his life’s journey of discovery. Combining academic study with oral history, lived experience and a family lore steeped in deep Buddhist faith, Zaw weaves together his own life, his local re...

This is the third in our ongoing “Intersections of Dhamma and Race” podcast series. At this time of increased tensions, there is a sore need for personal reflection and introspection, deep and active listening of “the other”, and communication across all boundaries and communities. And when we do this based firmly on the bedrock of the Buddha’s timeliness teachings of liberation, the possibility o...

The story of Melissa Coats is a tale of finding balances. It relates to navigating her identity, being half-white and half-Korean, and her practice, going back and forth between being a lay practitioner and Buddhist nun, in both secular and religious communities. It speaks to her life, alternating between progressive enclaves in California and a more conservative Burmese Buddhist life in Myan...

The sixth episode in our “COVID-19 in Myanmar” series, this is the first show in this series in which all the voices are from a single place —in this case, Thabarwa Monastery in Than Lyin. This episode departs from previous ones in more ways than this, however. As some of the interviews were collected right as the world began to shut down because of COVID-19, we realized that while not that long a...

Sometimes a single moment can be so profound… or so complex… that it takes hours, or even days, following the encounter to get a handle on it. In the story that follows, that “moment” has been taking years to process. In this case, the actual moment in question is simple enough: Yonie, an African-American vipassana meditator in the tradition of S.N. Goenka, travels to Myanmar to pay homage to the...

This is a very different kind of show than any previous episode we’ve brought you on the Insight Myanmar Podcast . Regular listeners may remember that a few months ago, we interrupted our usual run of sit-down interviews to produce a special series on the coronavirus pandemic in Myanmar. In these episodes, we checked in with a number of monastics and practitioners, and inquired how they as meditat...

Welcome to the fifth episode in our ongoing “COVID-19 in Myanmar” series, called “Sheltering in Place.” While the previous show told the stories of four expats who left just before the world closed down, the current episode relates the tales of four more expats who were in Myanmar at the time that the pandemic hit, and made the decision to remain in the country and ride out the storm in the Golden...

How has the coronavirus pandemic impacted foreign meditators in Myanmar? This is precisely the question we set out to answer in this “Expats in Exile Edition” of our COVID-19 in Myanmar series. The guests include: ·      Jose Molina , an agricultural economist based in Yangon, who observed that life stayed pretty much as usual in the city, even as the rest of the world shu...

In 2017, Zach Hessler, then known as U Obhasa, was a forest monk in upper Myanmar. Following in the tradition of monks during the Buddha's time, one day he set out from his forest monastery on foot to wander among the mountains and villages in the vicinity. He did so with the intention of following a set of ascetic practices known as dhutaṅga. But he could not have imagined what would happen next....

How is the coronavirus pandemic impacting monastics in Myanmar? This is precisely the question we set out to answer in this very special “Monastic Edition” of our COVID-19 in Myanmar series. The guests include: ·      U Viveka , a Canadian monk studying under Sayadaw U Tejaniya, who is using the pandemic as an opportunity to examine his fear of death. ·   &n...

In the second installment of our ongoing COVID-19 in Myanmar series, we present the Women’s Edition . So often at times of crisis and at key moments in world events, it is the voices of men who make the news. This is certainly no less true in Myanmar, where speeches from revered Sayadaws and male meditation teachers dominate the Dhamma discourse. For this reason, this episode will highlight those...

In this inaugural episode of our ongoing "COVID-19 in Myanmar" series, we present the Burmese Edition , where we hear from the four local voices who present their perspectives on the ongoing coronavirus pandemic in Myanmar. They reflect on how their Buddhist faith and practice has played a role in helping to them to understand and respond to the crisis. The guests include: ·   &nbsp...

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...