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 direct experience rather than belief. In this discussion, he presents that search as the thread connecting his early skepticism, his confrontation with anxiety, and his later commitment to meditation as a way of testing what was real.

That search began in childhood, when he attended Anglican church services and felt that something did not add up. He did not accept what he was being told about God and expected some kind of consequence for that disbelief… yet nothing happened. That moment shook his trust in inherited belief and left him looking for something that could stand on its own. As he grew older, that question stayed with him. At one point, while walking down the street, he asked himself what he actually wanted from life; the answer that came was not career or stability, but the need to knowtruth itself.

His own experience of anxiety gave the search greater urgency. He describes this as a serious issue within his family, yet his own experience of it still felt isolating. Over time, however, he recognized that what he was experiencing was not unique; it was a recognition changed his search from trying to understand the world, to finding a way to relate to suffering without avoiding it.

That need led him to Vipassana meditation as taught by Goenka, which became the first clearly defined method in his search. The first course was difficult, but it gave him a way to test what he was being told against what he could observe. Later, as his experience deepened, the structure of the practice and the organizational constraints no longer felt sufficient on its own. Conversations with other practitioners helped him refine his understanding, and doubt became less an obstacle than a sign of the edge of what he understood.

He describes his practice now as more self-directed, guided by observation, conversation, and continued inquiry, and no longer compelled to discover a “final answer.”

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 Burmese esoteric world he had not been looking for. The line he returns to as both method and warning is simple: “See things as they are, not as they appear.”

He began formal training in the late 1950s, moving through Japanese systems before encountering Burmese martial arts in the United States decades later. What held him was not spectacle but a demanding structure, built around principles, weapons work, conditioning, and long timelines for advancement. That discipline set the conditions for everything that followed. When he first traveled to Mogok in the mid-1990s, it was not as a spiritual seeker. He describes himself as not religious, and skeptical of claims that could not be tested.

In Mogok, he watched demonstrations that crossed into trance and invulnerability, where practitioners endured blades, flame, and boiling water while in altered states. The moment that stayed with him was not the performance but the logic offered afterward: when trance breaks, the protection leaves. Soon he was questioned about his conduct and invited into initiation rites that tied martial discipline to mental training and vows. The five precepts were treated as a foundational requirement, with specific restrictions on alcohol, drugs, and even meat on the grounds that “wild minds,” when ingested, carried effects into samathā practice.

Back in the United States, the initiation continued working on him, pushing him toward teachers across traditions and into a daily meditation routine he continues to this day, while also deepening a conviction—first raised by teachers in Mogok and later affirmed in other encounters—that he had been Ta’ang in a past life.

That same insistence on unsentimental perception shapes his political reading of Myanmar’s war. Mike rejects neat models that ignore fragmentation and uneven power, and he argues that durable outcomes depend on leverage and enforcement, not slogans. In both arenas, he is arguing for the same discipline: train the mind to stop seeing what it wants to see, or it will keep repeating the same decisions.

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 principal fellow at the ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute in Singapore, sees that dependency as the thread connecting Russia’s military, energy, diplomatic and nuclear ties with Myanmar. The relationship is economically small, but it gives Moscow influence in precisely the sectors the military government has needed most since the 2021 coup.

Myanmar began turning toward Russian weapons in the early 2000s after years of heavy dependence on China. Russian fighter aircraft, helicopters and training later became embedded in the military’s capabilities, creating continuing requirements for spare parts, maintenance, munitions and technical expertise. Since the coup, Russia has also supplied oil and refined products, including aviation fuel, while the two governments developed ruble-kyat payment arrangements and other ways to conduct trade under sanctions.

The political exchange is equally transactional. Myanmar’s military government endorsed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, while Moscow has provided diplomatic recognition and continued military support. Yet Russia will not sacrifice its wider ASEAN interests for Myanmar, and Storey stresses that the country remains a relatively minor Russian market.

Nuclear cooperation could make the relationship much harder to unwind. After more than two decades of discussions and training, Russia has agreed to provide Myanmar with a small modular reactor, although construction has not begun. If built, the plant would tie Myanmar to Russian financing, operation, fuel and technical services for decades.

Storey doubts Moscow would commit major resources to rescue the military if it faced collapse. Russia remains a secondary power in Southeast Asia, pursuing narrow advantages in arms, energy and nuclear technology. For now, however, those narrow advantages align closely with the military regime’s needs, leaving Myanmar exposed to a partnership that can be deeply consequential without ever becoming deeply committed.

Episode #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 in 1975, her father was sent to a reeducation camp, the family was expelled from Saigon, and the children were scattered among relatives. At night, Tran tied a rubber band around her fingers to keep herself awake while reciting the Buddha’s name and praying for her father’s safety and eventual return.

Raised in Mahāyāna Buddhism and shaped by the writings of Thích Nhất Hạnh, she began meditating seriously as a teenager. Yet an image of a Theravāda monk, seen just before her family emigrated in 1990, opened another direction. In California she found Bhante Khippañño, trained in Mahāsi practice, ordained as a nun, and traveled to Myanmar for an intensive forest retreat under Sayadaw U Paṇḍita. Myanmar felt like a second home, but the freedom she sought did not finally lie in austerity or ordination.

Under Sayadaw U Tejaniya, Tran found a practice built around awareness and wisdom rather than a fixed formula. Eating, engaging in her householder task as an architect, feeling anger, and caring for family could all become part of the same investigation. The task was neither to suppress difficult states nor to make them disappear, but to know what was present and strengthen a different momentum from greed, aversion, and delusion. She applies the same approach to dāna, which she defines as a kind of letting go, and to sīla, which she notes is an examination of the mind before speech or action.

Now a teacher herself, Tran no longer considers robes the measure of seriousness. She remains in the United States to care for her mother, while imagining a return to Myanmar and long practice near Sayadaw U Tejaniya when that responsibility ends. The monastery still attracts her, but not because a nun’s clothing can confer freedom. Practice must proceed through the mind and conditions she actually has, including the attachment she can admit without disguise: the bed at home is still more comfortable than the one at the center.

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 and the comrades that are still with me… I would not be able to have that guilt with me.”

Dr. Sunshine— a pseudonym that reflects both his warmth and resilience— is a Burmese physician whose life has become deeply intertwined with Myanmar’s modern struggle for freedom and survival.

After the coup, he learned tactical combat medicine to help protesters under fire. Soon he was teaching others—first small groups, then resistance fighters and medics hiding in the jungle. “I’ll shoot him in the hand,” he tells trainees in role-playing sessions. “He will have three minutes until he bleeds out. What are you going to do?”

After fleeing to Thailand, Dr. Sunshine continued traveling through border regions, training men and women from every ethnicity and faith. “We have Muslim soldiers,” he says. “Even during Ramadan, [the non-Muslim PDFs] respect the prayer times and fasting.” He beams when describing this unity: “It’s incredible how everyone comes together inside, even [towards] women and LGBT—they all treat them equally.”

Dr. Sunshine also helps run secret jungle clinics that treat hundreds of displaced people and fighters. “All we’re doing is trying to extend the life of a patient that comes in until they get to a hospital or clinic that can help treat them,” he explains. Supplies are scarce—“I was at one PDF base,” he adds, “they have like four or five hundred soldiers there, and only two tourniquets!”

He admits the toll is immense. “Every time I go in for a training, when I come back, I’ll cry like a baby in my room.” Yet his message remains simple and resolute: “Don’t give up on us. Even just words of support mean everything.”

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 San Suu Kyi helped bring Myanmar’s democracy struggle to international attention and how the global narrative surrounding her later collided with the realities of governing. The Rafto Foundation was created to recognize human rights defenders while their struggles are still unfolding. Early laureates were dissidents from Eastern Europe, and the committee’s decision to recognize Suu Kyi marked an expansion of the prize’s focus beyond that region.

At the time of the award, Suu Kyi was under house arrest and largely unknown outside Myanmar. Her name came to the committee’s attention through a brief newspaper mention, yet the prize helped introduce her story to wider audiences. International recognition soon followed, including the Nobel Peace Prize. The Rafto Foundation maintained long-term contact with Suu Kyi and her family during her detention, and in 2013 she traveled to Bergen to formally receive the prize.

But the narrative surrounding Suu Kyi shifted dramatically after she entered government following Myanmar’s 2015 elections. As State Counsellor, she confronted political constraints that differed from those she faced as an opposition leader. Violence against Rohingya communities beginning in 2016, and her response to the crisis shocked many international supporters who had viewed her as a democratic icon.

The experience highlights the complexities of democratic transitions and the enduring influence of military power within Myanmar’s political system. It also illustrates how international advocacy, economic engagement, and diplomacy have shaped Norway’s evolving relationship with Myanmar. Despite continuing setbacks, Kobbeltvedt emphasizes that Myanmar’s citizens remain committed to pursuing democracy, and their struggle continues to draw international solidarity.

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, anger, addiction, and exhaustion. Raised in Delaware after his father’s DuPont job brought the family north, he moved through school trouble, the Navy, drinking, restaurant work, and tree crews before landing at Dhamma Dharā, the Massachusetts meditation center in the tradition of S.N. Goenka. The pressure that brought him there was blunt: “Grief, yeah.”

His younger brother Ed had taken a course at Dhamma Dharā in 1987 and returned radiant, but in March 1989 he died by suicide. Hopkins smoked more pot, tried to dull the wound, and found that nothing was working. His first ten-day course was brutal. He arrived as a pack-and-a-half-a-day smoker, left his cigarettes in the truck, endured craving, pain, drowsiness, and anger, then ran out on the tenth day, lit up, gagged, and never smoked again. The discipline gave him something he had repeatedly lost: a reason not to quit.

Over the decades, practice, service, and tree work became linked. Washing pots for students taught him that ordinary labor could help others receive Dhamma. Tree work taught him preservation without sentimentality. He removes dangerous trees when necessary, but his business-card principle is simple: “Ff there's a tree that can be saved, let's have a conversation.”

Yet Hopkins’ loyalty to the tradition does not erase his questions. He has seen Dhamma Dharā grow from rough accommodations into polished infrastructure, watched the community become younger and more professional, and felt the assistant teacher world become more distant. Since Goenka’s death, he senses “a little less heat” in the tradition’s momentum. He remains committed, but wonders about rigidity, taboo subjects, samādhi, jhāna, and older Burmese teachings that seem wider than what the contemporary organization now permits.

Hopkins never made it to Burma, and given the current conditions of conflict now ranging there, he doubts he may ever reach the Golden Land. “A lot of trains that I missed, a lot of boats that I missed,” he muses. Still, the deeper truth he draws from the path is less romantic than exacting: “You had the framework, and you had the technique, and no matter what length of course you're taking, you're on your own.”

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 military seized power in February 2021, Maple was a scholarship student in South Korea studying Business Management and Entrepreneurship, already thinking about how she might one day redirect her education toward reforming the system she had grown up in. School, as she experienced it, had been shaped by hierarchy and competition rather than curiosity. Students were ranked into sections, with privileges reserved for the highest group. “The top students were in section A,” she recalls, describing how access to resources like the computer room followed those divisions. By fifth grade, monthly “talent” badges were awarded to the top ten students and publicly removed from anyone who fell behind. “It’s not about learning,” she says. “It’s all about memorizing everything and just taking the exams in the best way possible.”

Maple’s political awareness formed early. At eight years old, during the 2007 monk-led protests, she marched with her family and later watched video footage of crackdowns at home. “I saw the bodies and everything,” she remembers. By the time the coup trapped her in Myanmar during a visit from her Korean university during the pandemic, she initially believed international pressure might reverse it, studying United Nations statements closely before realizing those words offered no protection.

Maple began fundraising for the Committee Representing Pyidaungsu Hluttaw, offering scholarship consultations to students who could show donation receipts. The post spread; her bank account was frozen; soldiers arrived with a warrant under Section 505A. She spent eleven months in hiding while continuing her Korean coursework online, the isolation eroding her health and pushing her toward suicide until a drawing from her younger sister interrupted that spiral. After a failed attempt to cross into Thailand and a deportation, Maple eventually made it back across the border.

In Mae Sot, she now works with displaced students navigating the legal and financial barriers that stand between them and formal education. Here she is continuing her life’s work that started many years ago, yet under very different conditions. Myanmar students, she insists, are “smart, outstanding, and hardworking,” and resilient beyond their years. What they lack is not determination but access. “If you just give them a chance,” she promises, “they would do whatever it takes.”