Shows / Insight Myanmar
Insight Myanmar
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…
Episodes
- Insight Myanmar
Burning through Norwegian Wood
Episode #632: “I was not political at all until 1988,” says Dr. Maung Maung Myint, the National Unity Government’s (NUG) representative to Norway. He describes…
- Insight Myanmar
Defined Elsewhere
Episode #631: “Community for me is an other-making category.” Judith Beyer, a legal and political anthropologist and the author of Rethinking Community in…
- Insight Myanmar
No Fixing Saṃsāra
Episode #630: “There's no fixing saṃsāra.” Khemarato Bhikkhu heard that line from a bhikkhuni in Berkeley after the 2016 U.S. election, at the moment when his…
- Insight Myanmar
Moving Parts
Episode #629: “They don’t sleep with their leg on.” Jason Bender, a certified prosthetist who lived and worked in Myanmar from 2014 to 2021 before supporting…
- Insight Myanmar
Fight and Flight
Episode #628: “We started with emotions, not with the basic fundamental facts.” Nay Chi Min Htun was a university student and hotel receptionist in Yangon…
- Insight Myanmar
A Mind of Its Own
Episode #627: Joseph Goldstein’s introduction to meditation came almost accidentally. Sent to Thailand with the Peace Corps in the 1960s, he discovered…
- Insight Myanmar
Holding Space
Episode #626: This is the first episode of a seven-part series reflecting voices of people who attended the Fifth International Conference on Burma/Myanmar…
- Insight Myanmar
Cut To Action
Episode #625: “When nobody helps you, what you have to do is go. You know what? I’m just gonna do it myself.” Adrian Zaw, a Burmese-American actor, producer…
- Insight Myanmar
Turning the Page
Episode #624: “Even before the coup, books gave me ideas, empathy, and hope,” says Zu May Lwin, a student activist and library organizer from Magway, She…
- Insight Myanmar
No Retreat Is an Island
Episode #623: This is the third episode in a series of talks with Tempel Smith, who shares his deeper impressions of Burmese Buddhist culture, and how he…
- Insight Myanmar
Reasonable Doubt
Episode #622: “We need to recognize that we really don't know as much as we think we do about what's going on,” Jason Eligh says. As senior expert on drugs and…
- Insight Myanmar
An Unexploded Past
Episode #621: Please note that interview is intended solely as a record of Aki Ra’s personal experiences and historical demining work in Cambodia. His…
- Insight Myanmar
All in the Family
Episode #620: “This was not just my family's mission, but it could also be mine through Jesus.” For Peter Eubank, that realization marks the shift that also…
- Insight Myanmar
Ten Million Fireflies
Episode #619: “My motto is love is the most powerful magic,” says Elizabeth Yee, a Burmese medical doctor, writer, and activist who joined the Civil…
- Insight Myanmar
An Experiment in Dhamma
Episode #618: U Jāgara’s journey into Burmese Buddhism provides valuable exploration of meditation traditions and their adaptation to modern contexts. In this…
- Insight Myanmar
Articles of Faith
Episode #617: This is the first episode in a seven part series, which examines how Buddhist law and institutions have shaped religious life, and how they…
- Insight Myanmar
Don't Have To Live Like a Refugee
Episode #616: Joseph, a community leader among Myanmar refugees in Malaysia, and Patrick, an advocacy specialist working on refugee and migrant issues there…
- Insight Myanmar
Without Fear or Favor
Episode #615: “My passion for journalism and for telling stories to others still remain,” says Min Mitchell, former executive editor at Radio Free Asia, a…
- Insight Myanmar
A Practice Unbound
Episode #614: Richard Evans, an architect who began practice in the S.N. Goenka Vipassana tradition, describes his life as a search for truth grounded in…
- Insight Myanmar
Cleared for Contact
Episode #613: Mike is a lifelong martial artist who came to Myanmar through martial arts training rather than faith, and yet found himself pulled into a…
- Insight Myanmar
Full-Service Autocracy
Episode #612: “You do create a dependency. You create a long-term relationship that also you can leverage into political influence as well.” Ian Storey, a…
- Insight Myanmar
Freedom’s Just Another Word
Episode #611: “I always want to be free.” Lienchi Tran, a Vietnamese American meditation teacher, first learned what unfreedom meant in postwar Vietnam. After…
- Insight Myanmar
Critical Condition
Episode #610: “I can't leave anymore, because if I were to leave now, I would like never be able to live the same way, because of the comrades who have fallen…
- Insight Myanmar
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…
- Insight Myanmar
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…
- Insight Myanmar
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…
- Insight Myanmar
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…
- Insight Myanmar
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…
- Insight Myanmar
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…
- Insight Myanmar
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…
- Insight Myanmar
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…
- Insight Myanmar
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…
- Insight Myanmar
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…
- Insight Myanmar
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…
- Insight Myanmar
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…
- Insight Myanmar
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…
- Insight Myanmar
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…
- Insight Myanmar
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…
- Insight Myanmar
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…
- Insight Myanmar
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…
- Insight Myanmar
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…
- Insight Myanmar
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…
- Insight Myanmar
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…
- Insight Myanmar
Port of No Return
Episode #589: The AAS Conference in Vancouver brought together thousands of scholars and practitioners focused on Asia, with Burma emerging as a key topic amid…
- Insight Myanmar
Missing, Presumed Extinct
Episode #588: Historian Douglas Ober began questioning the standard history of Indian Buddhism while traveling to Bodh Gaya, Sarnath, and other sacred sites in…
- Insight Myanmar
Abandoning the Barracks
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…
- Insight Myanmar
Tales of the Tape
Episode #586: This is the sixth installment of our ongoing discussions with Friedgard Lottermoser. Drawing on decades of firsthand experience with Sayagyi U Ba…
- Insight Myanmar
An Umbrella Policy
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…
- Insight Myanmar
Strong Determination
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…
- Insight Myanmar
Ground Rules
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…
- Insight Myanmar
Open Source Awakening
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…
- Insight Myanmar
Bonus Episode: Shake It Off
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)…
- Insight Myanmar
Never Break the Chain
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…
- Insight Myanmar
The Missing Self
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…
- Insight Myanmar
Rangoon Calling
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…
- Insight Myanmar
Past the Commentaries
Episode #578: Aye Myat Thwe is a Burmese lay Buddhist practitioner raised inside the Mahasi Vipassana world, where devotion, meditation, and study were braided…
- Insight Myanmar
A Border Runs Through It
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…
- Insight Myanmar
The Hidden Flock
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…
- Insight Myanmar
Terms of Extraction
Episode #575: Lindsey Kennedy, an investigative journalist and documentary filmmaker focused on organized crime, corruption, and conflict, argues that the…
- Insight Myanmar
Unscripted Awakening
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…