Insight Myanmar
by Insight Myanmar Podcast
Latest episode
One Step Back
One Step Back
About this podcast
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.
Episodes
The newest 50 of 656 episodes
- One Step Back · 1 h 47 min · Episode 641Episode #641: “You cannot aim a landmine because you put it in the ground and you wait for whoever to come upon it to step upon it.” Tamar Gabelnick, director of the…
- Born This Way · 1 h 53 min · Episode 640Episode #640: Eugene Sein’s life has repeatedly been shaped by categories imposed from outside: Karen people cast as dangerous through Myanmar’s Burmanized education system…
- The Revolution Must Learn · 1 h 42 min · Episode 639Episode #639: “I don't want this kind of accident to be happening in our new generation.” Htoo Chit Chit, founder and executive director of the Foundation for Education and…
- Stranger Things · 3 h 20 min · Episode 638Episode #638: Leslie Hover has inherited an extensive archive documenting the life of her father, Robert Hover, an American aerospace engineer who became an early Western teacher…
- What Remains Untreated · 2 h 7 min · Episode 637Episode 637: Anthropologist Céline Coderey's research in Rakhine State examines why people combine biomedical treatment with astrology, Buddhist rituals, traditional medicine…
- A Matter of Trust · 1 h 3 min · Episode 636Episode #636: The second episode in this seven-part series explores how Buddhist law and institutions have shaped religious life and continue to intersect with secular legal…
- In Other News · 1 h 35 min · Episode 635Episode #635: “The thing that works the best is always to humanize the numbers,” says Australian journalist Libby Hogan. That principle has emerged from more than a decade of…
- Beyond the Now · 2 h 12 min · Episode 634Episode #634: Christopher Titmuss has spent more than fifty years teaching Buddhist insight meditation, yet he warns that the very practices intended to bring liberation can…
- Stringer, Soldier, Spymaker · 2 h 9 min · Episode 633Episode #633: “We’re in the dreams-come-true business.” Barry Broman uses that line to explain the human side of espionage, but it also captures the path that took him from…
- Burning through Norwegian Wood · 1 h 59 min · Episode 632Episode #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 how dictatorship…
- Defined Elsewhere · 1 h 56 min · Episode 631Episode #631: “Community for me is an other-making category.” Judith Beyer, a legal and political anthropologist and the author of Rethinking Community in Myanmar, uses an…
- No Fixing Saṃsāra · 2 h 2 min · Episode 630Episode #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 faith in progress…
- Moving Parts · 1 h 25 min · Episode 629Episode #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 cross-border work…
- Fight and Flight · 1 h 52 min · Episode 628Episode #628: “We started with emotions, not with the basic fundamental facts.” Nay Chi Min Htun was a university student and hotel receptionist in Yangon before the 2021 coup…
- A Mind of Its Own · 2 h 25 min · Episode 627Episode #627: Joseph Goldstein’s introduction to meditation came almost accidentally. Sent to Thailand with the Peace Corps in the 1960s, he discovered Buddhist practice through…
- Holding Space · 1 h 23 min · Episode 626Episode #626: This is the first episode of a seven-part series reflecting voices of people who attended the Fifth International Conference on Burma/Myanmar Studies in Chiang Mai…
- Cut To Action · 1 h 21 min · Episode 625Episode #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, and founder of Zaw…
- Turning the Page · 1 h 1 min · Episode 624Episode #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 argues that education…
- No Retreat Is an Island · 1 h 44 min · Episode 623Episode #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 became a bridge for…
- Reasonable Doubt · 1 h 57 min · Episode 622Episode #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 drug markets at…
- An Unexploded Past · 1 h 24 min · Episode 621Episode #621: Please note that interview is intended solely as a record of Aki Ra’s personal experiences and historical demining work in Cambodia. His descriptions of past…
- All in the Family · 1 h 48 min · Episode 620Episode #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 defines the lives of…
- Ten Million Fireflies · 1 h 21 min · Episode 619Episode #619: “My motto is love is the most powerful magic,” says Elizabeth Yee, a Burmese medical doctor, writer, and activist who joined the Civil Disobedience Movement after…
- An Experiment in Dhamma · 1 h 42 min · Episode 618Episode #618: U Jāgara’s journey into Burmese Buddhism provides valuable exploration of meditation traditions and their adaptation to modern contexts. In this fourth appearance…
- Articles of Faith · 1 h 45 min · Episode 617Episode #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 interact with secular…
- Don't Have To Live Like a Refugee · 1 h 13 min · Episode 616Episode #616: Joseph, a community leader among Myanmar refugees in Malaysia, and Patrick, an advocacy specialist working on refugee and migrant issues there, speak about their…
- Without Fear or Favor · 1 h 30 min · Episode 615Episode #615: “My passion for journalism and for telling stories to others still remain,” says Min Mitchell, former executive editor at Radio Free Asia, a U.S.-funded news…
- A Practice Unbound · 1 h 2 min · Episode 614Episode #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 direct experience rather…
- Cleared for Contact · 2 h 11 min · Episode 613Episode #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 Burmese esoteric world he…
- Full-Service Autocracy · 1 h 25 min · Episode 612Episode #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 principal fellow at the…
- Freedom’s Just Another Word · 2 h 7 min · Episode 611Episode #611: “I always want to be free.” Lienchi Tran, a Vietnamese American meditation teacher, first learned what unfreedom meant in postwar Vietnam. After South Vietnam fell…
- Critical Condition · 1 h 34 min · Episode 610Episode #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 and the comrades…
- Birth of an Icon · 1 h 46 min · Episode 609Episode #609: Jostein Kobbeltvedt, director of the Rafto Foundation for Human Rights in Bergen, Norway, reflects on how the 1990 Rafto Prize awarded to Aung San Suu Kyi helped…
- The Giving Tree · 1 h 53 min · Episode 608Episode #608: Dave Hopkins came to vipassana meditation not as a scholar, traveler, or spiritual seeker, but as a working-class tree worker carrying grief, anger, addiction, and…
- From Section A to 505 A · 1 h 58 min · Episode 607Episode #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 military seized power in…
- No Neutral Neighbor · 37 min · Episode 606Episode #606: Anusorn Tamajai’s attempted intervention during Min Aung Hlaing’s visit to Thailand began with an undelivered letter. Prevented from placing his proposals directly…
- Borrowed Intimacy · 1 h 8 min · Episode 605Episode #605: Note: this podcast episode, as well as the following text describing it, includes frank language about sexuality, male sex work, and self-harm. Reader and listener…
- Straight Outta Yangon · 2 h 34 min · Episode 604Episode #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 celebrated and watched. His…
- The Sum of Small Cuts · 59 min · Episode 603Episode #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 later worked with…
- Bearing Down on Practice · 2 h 9 min · Episode 602Episode #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 that exiled me.”…
- An Unfound Door and All the Forgotten Faces · 1 h 27 min · Episode 601Episode #601: Chalida Tajaroensuk, chairperson and founder of the Thailand-based People Empowerment Foundation, argues that responses to Myanmar’s post-coup crisis must be…
- The People’s Credentials · 2 h 12 min · Episode 600Episode #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 disclosed about the…
- The Cure Within · 1 h 34 min · Episode 599Episode #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 search that eventually…
- Price of Raw Power · 1 h 35 min · Episode 598Episode #598: Rare earth mining has drawn Kachin State into a global struggle over minerals essential to electronics, green technologies, automobiles, and defense, while…
- No Direction Home · 1 h 39 min · Episode 597Episode #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 destination and spent the…
- Return to Sender · 1 h 59 min · Episode 596Episode #596: “I needed to find another way... through research, writing, education, mentoring, community work,” says CS Kyaw, a Myanmar-born doctor turned development researcher…
- At The Checkpoint · 1 h 7 min · Episode 595Episode #595: Salai Vanni Bawi, a Chin researcher focused on migration, refugees, and transnational repression, speaks about how the country’s crisis extends beyond its borders…
- A Course in Progress · 1 h 19 min · Episode 594Episode #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 has now been shaped…
- Most Favored Regime · 1 h 30 min · Episode 593Episode #593: “Why are values included in international trade?” Arianna Bondi’s research begins with that question, but Myanmar turns it into a problem of limits. A PhD candidate…
- Meditating beyond the Benevolent Dictator · 1 h 49 min · Episode 592Episode #592: In this, the 7th installment of a series of discussions with Jonathan Crowley, a former longtime practitioner and assistant teacher in the Goenka Vipassana…
