Episode #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 monks at a Bangkok temple before traveling to Bodh Gayā, where he trained under Munindraji in the Burmese Mahāsī tradition. What followed was a lifetime spent exploring how teachings rooted in Asian Buddhist cultures could be carried into Western society without losing their essential purpose.

His years in India brought him into contact with S. N. Goenka, Dipa Ma, and other influential practitioners whose approaches differed considerably. After returning to America in 1974, Goldstein helped establish the Western Vipassanā movement alongside Jack Kornfield and Sharon Salzberg, eventually co-founding the Insight Meditation Society. Yet the growing movement also confronted differences over methodology, lineage, and whether practitioners should remain within one tradition or learn from several.

Goldstein's understanding of transmission evolved beyond questions of meditation technique. Initially confident that universal Buddhist teachings required little adaptation, he gradually recognized how social exclusion, racism, and trauma could prevent people from accessing or integrating those teachings. His involvement in expanding diversity at IMS challenged assumptions he had carried for decades. “The teachings are universal, but for people to hear them and learn from them, they have to come.”

His reflections also return to Myanmar, where he practiced intensively under Sayadaw U Paṇḍita and witnessed the extraordinary generosity of communities supporting monastic life, often despite having very little themselves. As warfare and military repression have devastated the country, Goldstein acknowledges the responsibility felt by those who have benefited from its Buddhist traditions to support the people who preserved and transmitted these teachings. Rather than prescribing a single form of engagement, he emphasizes that practitioners can respond in different ways according to their circumstances, while sharing a common sense of gratitude, compassion, and responsibility toward the country and its people.

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 Studies in Chiang Mai, which explored how people are responding to the crisis while working toward a different future. Through shorter conversations with scholars, activists, educators, and community organizers, we connect regional politics with the everyday work of sustaining care, learning, livelihoods, and solidarity.

The first guest, Fuadi Pitsuwan, a Thammasat University lecturer and former foreign policy adviser to Thailand’s Move Forward Party, questions why Thailand invests so heavily in Myanmar’s military as a source of stability when its actions keep the country fragmented.

Thailand once supported ethnic armed groups as a buffer, then pursued trade and investment in the hope of political opening. Gas dependence, business interests and competition with China now constrain its choices, but Fuadi disputes whether those pressures justify the legitimacy granted to the junta.

Alongside official diplomacy, Thailand allows space for ethnic leaders and civil society. He wants civilian agencies to develop those relationships deliberately, supporting education, administration and health services that benefit both countries. Yet even proposals to let displaced Myanmar medical workers treat their compatriots have stalled despite broad agreement. His difficulty lies in converting acceptance into action: “I don’t know which lever to pull.”

“We have to do something more,” says our second guest, Agnes, a counseling who developed the suicide-prevention app Shin Tan after years of training and support failed to stop reports of deaths from reaching her. After Myanmar’s 2021 military coup, displacement, lost work, and interrupted education placed further strain on families already affected by COVID. Agnes also identifies beliefs that make suicide seem predetermined, complicating efforts to recognize distress and seek help.

A workshop in 2022 drew more than 200 participants, but many could not take the training back to their communities. Alongside supervised group and individual support, Shin Tan offers mental-health information, self-care tools, and questions directing users toward guidance. It works offline after downloading, addressing the unreliable connections that can keep help distant. However, the people she hopes to reach may have neither reliable internet nor someone they feel able to call.

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, and founder of Zaw Studios, has turned that refusal to wait into both a business method and a response to cultural absence. His family left Myanmar after the 1988 uprising, when his father’s political involvement made remaining unsafe. His parents had worked as rural doctors, but in the United States their credentials disappeared; they took cafeteria and laboratory jobs while Zaw learned English by imitating television.

Acting gave him a route through adolescence, but Hollywood offered almost no Burmese-American models or roles. He learned producing, photography, editing, and studio management so that he could create work rather than depend on someone else to recognize him. In 2012, he opened a small production space whose rent forced him to work quickly. Speed became a philosophy: deliver what a client needs, revise it immediately, and refuse to hide delay behind artistic perfectionism.

Zaw now passes that discipline to young Burmese-American interns, matching practical training to whatever skills they bring. He tells them to replace “I can’t” with “How can I?” and identify the personal advantage that might open the next door. Yet his method also carries a distance: the access he can provide in Orange County does not automatically reach people inside Myanmar, and after the 2021 coup he has been unable to return.

His larger answer is cultural production. Through Myanmar American TV, he wants Burmese performers to tell sitcoms, dramas, and thrillers shaped by their own humor and family experience. Mainstream roles have often reduced Burmese characters to antagonists; his sketches use fortune telling, in-laws, and generational pressure to make Burmese-American life visible from within. The proof of concept exists, and the studio continues training people through it, but the platform still needs money, collaborators, and an audience willing to act with the urgency he demands. “Opportunity is knocking, and nobody’s answering the door because they’re not being responsive quick enough.”

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 argues that education and access to books are essential not only for personal growth but also for rebuilding Myanmar after military repression.

Before the 2021 coup, she explains, reading culture in Magway was limited by cost, scarcity, and exhaustion. Books were hard to obtain, many families were focused on survival, and schools did little to cultivate a meaningful relationship with literature beyond textbooks. She joined a mobile library initiative that brought books directly to parks and university campuses. It was very successful, showing her that interest in reading could grow when books became part of public life.

The coup transformed that work into something more urgent. Believing students had a duty to defend freedom and the right to learn, she joined peaceful demonstrations in Magway as part of the Civil Disobedience Movement. At one protest, she was arrested, and spent over eight harsh months in prison. After her release, she could not safely return home and instead moved through displacement areas near the Thai border. There she saw young people continuing to study despite losing schools, textbooks, and stability, which deepened her conviction that education was a form of resistance.

In response, she helped found Saffron Traveler, a project that builds small, mobile libraries in rural and conflict-affected areas. Supported by donations and local cooperation, these libraries serve displaced students while remaining movable enough to survive military pressure. As she puts it, “My dream is to create a strong library culture in Myanmar, where every young person—no matter where they live or what their background—can have access to books and learning spaces and the opportunity to grow.”

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 became a bridge for other Americans to understand it better.

Tempel starts by continuing his reflection into the polarities that defined his early life experiences, mainly in terms of social engagement versus quiet meditation. As a young monk in Burma, he tried to consciously negotiate those apparent tensions, and questioned whether they could be integrated into a single practice. However, when he attained deeper states of calm, he realized that they were not, in fact, contradictions.

Another dissonance he reconciled for himself was cultural: being a Western practitioner in a Burmese Buddhist context. Westerners often want to do “a stripped-down Buddhist practice that doesn't have ritual and doesn't have community.” But in the end, he feels they lose out. While noting that the teachings of most Burmese monks encourage strict silence and an exclusive focus on meditation, Tempel found these guidelines produce very different results in Burmese yogis than those coming from abroad. As a teacher, he has seen Western students develop remarkable insights during courses, yet be unable to integrate them into daily life. The Burmese, however, see practice and their culture/society as intertwined.

Tempel had previously led meditation retreats for youth, but with these insights, he wanted to expand their Dharma experience into social engagement and community building. His idea developed into a three-month trip to Thailand, India, and Burma, where Tempel exposed the group to various aspects of Buddhist life. The result was transformative. Rather than Westerners opening their hearts through intensive retreats with less integration, the hearts of these youth opened instead through engagement with Burmese Buddhist society, which was deeply inspiring.

“You let your activism and your meditation harmonize, and you get a liberated mind!” he notes in closing. “That's what 30 years of practice has shown me and what I'm trying to help people get to their own integrative mind state. And then the suffering falls away of the mind and the beauty flourishes.”

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 drug markets at the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime, Eligh argues that Myanmar’s methamphetamine economy has been misunderstood not only because it is hidden, but because governments and analysts have mistaken partial evidence for knowledge.

Myanmar’s Shan State sits inside one of the world’s major drug-producing regions, supplying opium and heroin while also forming one of the three major global methamphetamine production zones, alongside Mexico and the Afghanistan-Pakistan-Iran nexus. But meth is harder to measure than opium. Poppy fields can be seen from above; synthetic drugs can be made indoors, through multiple chemical pathways, with legal dual-use substances that move through ordinary commercial channels. Even seizures, Eligh warns, cannot tell us the size of the market. They can reveal enforcement activity, but not total production.

That caution reshapes how he reads the post-coup period. The 2021 coup intensified conflict and changed routes, but Eligh rejects the easy claim that it alone caused a sudden meth surge. Prices, seizures, chemical data, and trafficking flows all point in several directions at once. Conflict can disrupt business, but corruption, armed taxation, and state-linked protection can also keep illicit trade stable.

Eligh’s analysis moves from drug production to drug policy. If the goal is “to save lives,” he argues, punishment alone drives users underground and weakens the ability to understand what harms are spreading. Opium farmers face a different trap: eradication without real alternatives can destroy the only income available in remote conflict zones.

The Mekong meth trade is no longer a contained Golden Triangle story. It is a global synthetic drug platform, tied to chemicals, logistics, corruption, poverty, and demand across continents. “It's a global problem,” Eligh says. “We can't kid ourselves any longer.”

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 descriptions of past methods reflect what he personally did under very differentcircumstances and should not be understood as instructions, training, or advice for handling landmines, unexploded ordnance, or other explosives. Such devices are extremely dangerous and should only be approached, identified, or removed by properly trained and authorized professionals following current safety procedures.

Aki Ra was about ten years old when the Khmer Rouge forced him into military life, where he learned to plant landmines and survive in Cambodia’s war. After later fighting alongside Vietnamese forces, he eventually turned the same technical knowledge toward removing the explosives left behind. “I wanted to change from bad to be good,” he says. Since 1990, he has spent decades clearing mines and unexploded ordnance from Cambodian farmland and villages.

That experience gives his story particular relevance to Myanmar, where landmines are again shaping civilian life and will remain dangerous long after front lines move. The comparison becomes concrete around the small M14 anti-personnel mine, a weapon Aki Ra knows from his own clearance work. Touching upon the difficulty of detecting them in Myanmar, he emphasizes a distinction central to the work he does today: civilians should not search for, touch, or attempt to remove mines themselves. His education sessions instead teach people to recognize danger, mark or remember the location, and contact trained disposal teams.

Aki Ra also contrasts the conditions in Myanmar with his own memories of Cambodia. He says soldiers in his units warned villages about mined areas and tried to avoid homes, schools and religious buildings. Yet Cambodia also demonstrates how little protection wartime intentions ultimately provide. Decades after the fighting ended, mines and unexploded ordnance still remain in fields, still injure civilians, and still require organized clearance.

Aki Ra now works with trained teams, medics, metal detectors and formal safety procedures, while the Cambodia Landmine Museum near Siem Reap helps finance their work. The war that created Cambodia’s minefields is over; the labor of making the land safe is not. For Myanmar, that is perhaps the hardest part of the comparison: the mine crisis will not necessarily end when the fighting does.

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 defines the lives of his sisters, Sahale and Suuzanne: growing up inside the Free Burma Rangers bound together Burma, conflict, service, human rights, and Christian faith, but adulthood has required each of them to decide what part of that inheritance they will choose for themselves.

Their earliest memories hold danger and belonging together. Sahale remembers walking through the jungle at night without a headlamp so the Burma Army would not see the group, while holding a Karen elder’s hand and looking at the stars. Suuzanne remembers being five and packing water, a light, a lighter, and a snack as a village evacuated under approaching mortar fire. Peter remembers riding a horse while an elder taught him Karen, before he was old enough to understand that displacement was not simply ordinary life for his friends back in the United States.

After the 2021 coup, the siblings watched older divisions change as young Bamar people left universities and joined anti-coup resistance or the Free Burma Rangers. At the same time, Sahale and Suuzanne were studying in Texas, struggling with the distance as friends were killed and attacks intensified. They came to see education not as withdrawal from Burma but as preparation to return with skills: Sahale through emergency nursing and Suuzanne through veterinary medicine. Peter, who has worked in frontline medical logistics, is still deciding between missionary work, military service, or another path.

Their memories also refuse to reduce Burma to war. They recall monkeys causing chaos, meals assembled whatever could be found, hunted, or picked at hand, and relatives whose generosity shaped their idea of love. They all still hopes for a free, democratic Burma where visiting friends no longer means calculating the danger of jets, mortars, or gunfire. While the siblings choose separate futures, the people who raised them remain inside those choices.