Insight Myanmar

Insight Myanmar
  • 5,0 (1)
  • Nyhetskommentarer
  • Varje dag

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.

  1. −6 h

    The Back of the Cave

    Episode #556: “I just find it so interesting that the Buddha actually talked about discussion as being a really important part of our Dhamma journey,” says Bruce Stewart, a longtime practitioner, former assistant teacher, and one of the early builders of the Goenka Vipassana meditation tradition in North America. In this second appearance on this platform, he addresses the concerns that caused him to question key aspects of the organization, which culminated in his being barred from even visiting centers in the tradition. Drawing on decades of committed involvement, including being appointed a Senior Teacher (Achariya), Stewart reflects on the challenges that have emerged as the Goenka tradition became a large, global institution. He became particularly concerned with what he calls the tradition’s purity and prophecy narratives—beliefs about the unique authenticity and historical mission of the Goenka tradition that have become difficult to question now that they are embedded in organizational culture. Over time, he also observed that some teachers and students alike privately expressed a variety of concerns while hesitating to raise them publicly, leading him to wonder whether, ironically, a culture that encourages self-observation was itself uncomfortable with institutional self-examination. Those concerns deepened through a project in which Stewart and others gathered feedback from seventy experienced practitioners, and conducted extensive video interviews with a small group of them. After nearly a year of preparation, the findings were presented to Senior Teachers, but the response was largely negative. For Stewart, this raised a broader question about whether institutions can remain open to information that challenges established assumptions. He also began questioning whether the tradition’s success in spreading meditation had outpaced the development of teacher training, individualized guidance, and mechanisms for learning from criticism. At the same time, Stewart’s study of Early Buddhist Texts began to widen his understanding of Buddhism beyond the Goenka lineage, and raised some theoretical questions about the accuracy of some of Goenka’s interpretations concerning the technique itself. Although he remains grateful for the practice and the community he helped build, he ultimately stepped down from leadership and later found himself barred from centers in the tradition. Even so, he remains hopeful that future generations can preserve what is valuable while becoming more open to honest dialogue, historical inquiry, and critical reflection.

    3 tim 6 min

  2. −2 d

    The Body Politic

    Episode #555: Note: this podcast episode includes frank anatomical language and extended discussion of women’s bodies, including terms for female genitalia, in the context of human rights, state abuse, and activist movements. Reader and listener discretion is advised. “[They say that] Thailand is the only country that has never been colonized. But it's not true!” Kornkanok “Pup” Khumta, an activist from Isaan, argues that the myth of sovereignty hides a colonial order, where Bangkok defines language, history, development, and which bodies are allowed to exist. Isaan, she says, is Lao in language and culture, and the borders that separate people along the Mekong are still newer than the state admits. “People in Isaan, we have been brainwashed to be Thai people,” she says, adding that even the word “Thai” itself is a recent invention. Pup describes Siam’s consolidation as violent, then sustained through schooling that punishes local speech and replaces regional memory with a Siam-centered story. The same center–periphery structure shapes “development” as extraction: resources flow to Bangkok while poverty in the northeast is treated as normal. Generations migrate to the capital for education and wages, leaving Isaan hollowed out, a place many return to only for Songkran or New Year. At Thammasat University, Pup expected democratic critique but instead found classmates aiming for bureaucratic power. She pushed back, arguing provincial governors should be elected, not appointed from Bangkok. After the 2014 coup, she tested the regime’s limits with quiet protest and was arrested, learning that visibility alone can trigger punishment. Later, after refusing to sign a pledge to stop political activity, she was sent into prison, and processed through searches that turned discipline into bodily violation. That experience sharpened her feminism. She framed organizing around bodily autonomy, using taboo-breaking protest—speaking openly about female body parts and insisting democracy includes control over one’s body. Pup then moved to extend her politics beyond borders, rejecting ASEAN’s “non-interference” policy as a cover for authoritarian cooperation, including support for Myanmar’s military. For her, constitutional change in Thailand is the hinge between refuge and repression—and survival requires joy: “I believe in fun,” she says, because despair is also a weapon. “We are at the point that we don't have to belong to any state,” she says. “I mean, we can just treat each other as a humans and we can all come together against all forms of repression.”

    2 tim 2 min

  3. −3 d

    Changing Course

    Episode #554: Bruce Stewart, an early Western student and teacher in the S.N. Goenka Vipassana tradition, reflects on a lifelong search for spiritual meaning driven by curiosity, wonder, and a desire to understand life more deeply. The sudden death of his younger sister prompted early questions about life’s meaning, while stories from traveling hippies kindled a desire to explore the wider world. Leaving New Zealand, Stewart worked his passage to Europe on a cargo ship and spent several adventurous years traveling through Europe and Africa and immersing himself in the hippie counterculture. Eventually Stewart found his way to a Sivananda ashram in Canada, where his spiritual interests were given structure. There he met his future wife, Maureen. Together they returned to New Zealand and founded one of the country’s first yoga centers, creating a vibrant community centered on yoga, vegetarianism, retreats, and alternative culture. Later, Stewart took a vipassana course with John Coleman, a student of U Ba Khin; the experience was life-changing. Soon after, he and Maureen dissolved their yoga center and traveled to India to became involved with the fledgling Vipassana center at Dhamma Giri in Igatpuri, where they worked closely with S.N. Goenka. As the movement expanded, Stewart and Maureen were heavily involved in helping the tradition take root in the U.S. Yet over time, he became increasingly uneasy with organizational culture, leadership styles, and narratives of purity and authority. Historical study and deeper inquiry eventually led him to question long-held assumptions, and eventually his decision to broaden his practice and step down from his Senior Teacher responsibilities. Still, he remains grateful for the practice and its benefits, viewing his spiritual life as a series of valuable stages that collectively formed a rich, demanding, and deeply meaningful journey.

    2 tim 32 min

  4. −6 d

    When the War Comes Home

    Episode #553: Naw Moo Moo Paw grew up in a Karen village near Bago where conflict and landmines were part of everyday life. “I have seen a lot of people injured or die because of the war and intense conflict,” she says. “This is very normal for me.” Today, she is a PhD candidate in Global Studies at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, where her research focuses on what happens to people, their bodies, livelihoods, and place in their communities affected by political violence. She has interviewed civilians, injured soldiers, and active resistance fighters, gaining access to armed groups most outside researchers cannot reach. Resistance groups in ethnic Karen communities have used landmines primarily as a defensive tactic, but the warnings offered to civilians are frequently imprecise. For many, the warning changes little. “Civilians, they have to work on a daily basis, so that they can survive, for their economy, to take care of their family.” People are warned, but they have to go on with their lives. She finds that accountability is increasingly difficult to establish. Mines captured from military bases are reused by resistance groups, propaganda obscures who planted what, and records of mine locations can die with the soldier who laid them. “I think both sides are violating the law,” she says. Civilians, she finds, rarely assign blame. They understand the nature of war, fear the land’s growing unpredictability, and keep moving because they have no choice. Those injured in warned areas often face community ostracism, and too many take their own lives. As a Karen scholar, Naw Moo Moo Paw wants local knowledge, history, and experience placed at the center of any peace. “I want [Karen people’s] voices to be included in the future, too.”

    2 tim 19 min

  5. 11 juni

    Burden of Rule

    Episode #552: Mon Mon Myat, a journalist, filmmaker, and peace scholar, frames Myanmar’s political struggle as a long contest over power, moral discipline, and the possibility of change without domination. Her account begins with U Hpo Hlaing, the nineteenth-century thinker she calls “a kind of very early political theorist in Myanmar,” and moves toward Aung San Suu Kyi, whose politics she sees as part of the same search for accountable authority. For Mon Mon Myat, U Hpo Hlaing matters because he complicates the idea that democracy arrived in Myanmar only through Western influence. He studied Western parliamentary systems, but tried to translate them into Burmese moral and Buddhist terms, creating what she calls “Burma-native democracy.” His work was not a full modern system, but it offered a principle: rulers must be bound by ethical restraint, not merely by power. Aung San Suu Kyi, in Mon Mon Myat’s view, widened that principle. She did not speak only to rulers, but to citizens. Through speeches, radio broadcasts, and years of nonviolent resistance, she helped Mon Mon Myat understand politics as personal responsibility. “Politics had nothing to do with me,” she says of her younger self, before Aung San Suu Kyi’s example changed her sense of what citizenship required. That is why nonviolence remains central to Mon Mon Myat’s reading. She knows it is slow and costly, but argues that armed struggle leaves wounds across society, while nonviolence risks the masses less than others. The post-coup conflict has only deepened her fear of trauma that may last for generations. Her defense of Aung San Suu Kyi during the Rohingya crisis rests on a difficult distinction. Mon Mon Myat does not present her as flawless. She insists that Aung San Suu Kyi was a politician trying to hold together a fragile country, preserve civilian rule, and avoid further conflict under military pressure. Critics saw silence. Mon Mon Myat sees constraint, calculation, and a refusal to inflame communal violence. The hope she still holds is narrow but persistent: that Myanmar’s future depends not only on removing military rule, but on whether power can be morally restrained before it consumes everything around it.

    2 tim 26 min

  6. 9 juni

    Built From Scrap

    Episode #551: Fred Stockwell arrived in Mae Sot by accident more than twenty years ago while traveling through Thailand to photograph temples, a wrong bus dropping him off in what was, at the time, a bustling border town filled with NGOs and young volunteers. Someone told him to visit the garbage dump, and a man drove him there by a route that felt deliberately hard to retrace. “It was like it was a secret where it was,” he recalls. At the dump, Burmese migrant families survived by salvaging and selling recyclables, building shelters from whatever they could pull from waste. “They were living on top of the garbage!” he says. “Everything they built was what they found in the garbage.” Before Mae Sot, his life had already been shaped by self-taught risk and logistics—having introduced paragliding in the U.S. through early testing and instruction, and later becoming the first person to fly in and photograph the devastating effects of Hurricane Katrina, doing so from the air, when ground access had largely collapsed. And now back in the United States after that first Mae Sot visit, the contrast stayed with him: a comfortable life at home, and a border world where small failures—transport, housing, medical access—could turn fatal. His mind now made up,he returned to Mae Sot, and the first step he points to is concrete: “You’ve got to start somewhere. I started with one kid,” he says, describing a girl “as close to death as you’re ever going to get” and taking her to the hospital, then building outward through routines that held children in school, kept housing standing, and kept people connected to services they otherwise could not reach. The critique that follows stays procedural. People arrived wanting to help and then stalled, not from cruelty but because they lacked a method for what came next, and the same problem appeared in organizations that could arrive with structure and still fail to change the conditions at the dump, or elsewhere in the town. “I saw a lot of people here, no disrespect to them, that came in to help but didn’t have a clue what to do.” He ties effectiveness to the pairing of resources and competence, and reduces the mismatch to a single blunt line. “There’s a very large gap between the people that want to help and the people that need help. That gap is huge.”

    2 tim 19 min

  7. 8 juni

    Practice Outside the Lines

    Episode #550: “There was something inside of me that was calling me,” says Jerry Roy, a long-time Vipassana meditator and early student in the Goenka tradition. “Not a thought, but something pulling me.” He argues that liberation comes not from rigid adherence to technique or authority, but from direct understanding of the mind—especially craving and aversion. Raised in a Jewish household, Roy felt pressure to conform to a shared identity he experienced as restrictive. He rejected its religious element early, identifying instead as a “cultural Jew,” and developed a lasting determination not to live “in a box.” That impulse aligned with the 1960s counterculture, where he immersed himself in experimentation and activism. Psychedelics presented a spiritual potentiality, yet, as he later reflects, “It opened a door, but it didn't show me how to walk through the door.” Disillusionment with activism, along with the suicide of a housemate, pushed him toward a deeper inquiry into suffering. That search led him to India. He rejected both the hedonistic hippie scenes and guru-centered traditions he came across, but then discovered Vipassana meditation as taught by S.N. Goenka. “I realized that I had found what I was looking for,” he says. He became deeply involved in the tradition, valuing its discipline and accessibility. Over time, however, he began to see increasing rigidity within the organization, especially after his divorce led to a feeling of being excluded from the community. His practice also continued to evolve beyond the strict technique of the Goenka tradition, towards more continuous awareness. “The practice is not a technique,” he explains. “The practice is being present in the moment.” Today, Roy emphasizes direct experience over doctrine. “All you need to do is understand the root cause of suffering, which is craving and aversion.”

    2 tim 6 min

  8. 5 juni

    The Architecture Of Exclusion

    Episode #549: Mohammad Siraj, a Rohingya researcher, political analyst, educator, and aspiring legal scholar living in a refugee camp in Bangladesh, studies citizenship, constitutional reform, education, and human rights. Drawing on his work with the Rohingya Academic Research Institute and his experience teaching in refugee settings, he argues that the Rohingya crisis is not simply a humanitarian emergency but a political and institutional crisis rooted in discriminatory law, particularly Myanmar’s citizenship framework and constitutional structure. Siraj’s own life reflects the realities he studies. He once hoped to become a doctor, but military violence forced his family to flee Myanmar. In Bangladesh’s refugee camps, he continued studying through limited educational opportunities and later pursued research training. Statelessness created major barriers: even when he received university offers, he could not accept them because he lacked a passport or travel documents. He turned toward law because he believes legal systems have excluded Rohingya from citizenship, political participation, and protection. He repeatedly highlights statelessness as one of the greatest obstacles Rohingya face. Without citizenship, movement, higher education, and professional opportunities remain difficult to access. His own studies through the online University of the People illustrate both determination and the limits of such alternatives. Siraj’s research and teaching are rooted in these same conditions. At the Rohingya Academic Research Institute, a community-led organization in the camps, he helps Rohingya scholars document their history and rights. He also criticizes humanitarian education programs that prioritize administrative requirements over meaningful learning. In response, Rohingya teachers have created community schools using the Myanmar curriculum, though their certificates are rarely recognized by universities. For Siraj, the deeper cause of the crisis lies in Myanmar’s 1982 citizenship law, which stripped Rohingya of citizenship and legal protection. He argues that lasting reform must restore equal citizenship and dismantle constitutional structures that entrench military power, while dialogue across communities remains essential for building a democratic Myanmar where all ethnic groups share citizenship, representation, and dignity.

    1 tim 28 min
Visa alla (571)

Om

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.

Information

  • Kanal
    Insight Myanmar
  • Skapad av
    Insight Myanmar Podcast
  • Aktiva år
    2020 - 2026
  • Avsnitt
    571
  • Åldersgräns
    Vuxet innehåll
  • Copyright
    © Copyright 2026 Insight Myanmar Podcast
  • Programmets webbplats
    Insight Myanmar

Mer från Insight Myanmar

Du kanske också gillar