Episode #520: “Ancestors are not dead. They’re not the living dead. Rather, they should be best thought of as ‘the always living.’” Dr Micah Morton, a cultural anthropologist and professor at Northern Illinois University, describes Akha life across the Upper Mekong borderlands as a struggle to keep that relationship intact while everything around it shifts—states hardening borders, religions competing for allegiance, and markets remaking livelihoods.

Morton traces an origin narrative tied to Jadae Mirkhanq, a remembered homeland city-state whose meanings have changed as Akha have become citizens of five countries. The past, he argues, is not a single inheritance but a set of stories shaped by migration, hierarchy, and dissent, including legends of Mongol pressure and internal conflict around a powerful king whose era is credited with laying down the “Akha way.”

At the center of Morton’s account is Akha customary law, rendered as ghanr, an encompassing system that governs life and death through obligations to ancestors and the maintenance of “vital life giving energy.” Genealogies, ritual offerings, and village gates are not symbolic leftovers but mechanisms that produce health, prosperity, and moral order. Yet modern schooling and language shift change how this knowledge is carried, pushing remembrance from oral mastery toward written records.

Morton follows these pressures into a cross-border effort to standardize an Akha writing system, one that was attempted to be designed “by and for Akha,” and into the fractures created when writing becomes a tool for competing missions—Christian evangelism on one side, and neo-traditionalist reform on the other. He frames Christian conversion not as a private belief swap but, in traditionalist terms, an “entirely new set of customary laws,” with the village gate becoming the emblem of rupture, exile, and later reconfiguration.

Coffee then arrives as both bridge and threat. In Lawcavq Pu (Doi Chang), wealth from global coffee markets has funded new forms of status and debt, while also underwriting intensified funerals and gatherings aimed at reforming ancestral practice so it can survive beyond the village gates.

In the end, Morton does not frame the Akha as trapped between tradition and modernity. He instead regards them as managing competing jurisdictions—ancestral law, church discipline, state regulation, market dependency—none of which can fully absorb the others, and none of which can simply be ignored. “It’s an ongoing cultural system of customary law that Akha have, over time, adapted to their particular circumstances.”

Episode #519: Friedgard Lottermoser, a German student of Sayagyi U Ba Khin, describes the unique character of meditation at the International Meditation Center (IMC) in Rangoon between 1959 and 1971. Unlike the large,standardized courses later developed by S. N. Goenka, U Ba Khin taught only one ten-day course a month to small groups. Each student received individualized instruction based on temperament and background. “He went by feeling,” Friedgard recalls, noting that he could sense a student’s meditative progress even from afar. She contrasts U Ba Khin’s flexibility and adaptability with Goenka’s standardized system of recorded discourses and fixed schedules centered on a single technique.

When political restrictions prevented U Ba Khin from traveling abroad after Ne Win’s 1962 coup, he could not realize his own dream of teaching dhamma outside Burma. So he trained several non-Burmese teachers to undertake this mission, as well as Goenka, who as an Indian businessman was able to obtain a passport. In particular, Goenka’s organizational talent and charisma transformed meditation into a vast global network. Yet Friedgard stresses that U Ba Khin never intended his teaching to be wholly standardized; he expected these teaching disciples to adapt the practice to their own cultures.

In explaining the technique, Friedgard cites a pamphlet, The Essentials of Buddha Dharma in Meditative Practice, written by U Ba Khin where he outlines ten stages of vipassanā insight. These range from theoretical understanding (samasana) to deep dissolution (bhaṅga) and ultimately to detachment and realization. Unlike Goenka, he placed less emphasis on equanimity and more on “continuity of awareness—anicca with feeling.”

Friedgard also goes into great detail about her friendship with Ruth Denison, an U Ba Khin disciple who adapted vipassanā for Western students through movement and mindful walking. Though Denison and her teaching approach was controversial in the conservative, Burmese Buddhist community at IMC, Friedgard believes U Ba Khin would have understood such adaptations. His genius, she says, lay not only in teaching meditation but in trusting that each culture must find its own expression of the Dhamma.

Episode #518: The story of the KMT irregulars in Burma is a historical anomaly tied to the Chinese Civil War, the Cold War, and Burma’s early independence. Following their defeat, remnants of the Nationalist Army under General Li Mi crossed into Burma’s Shan States. Claiming to continue the anti-communist struggle, they later turned to the opium trade as a means of survival. This trade, expanded under the KMT’s control, expanded exponentially, transforming the region into the Golden Triangle—an epicenter of the global drug trade.

The KMT’s activities also destabilized Burma and strained Prime Minister U Nu’s administration, leading to tensions with British and American stakeholders. Meanwhile, the CIA engaged in a covert mission tofund and arm the KMT, further complicating the geopolitical landscape. Meanwhile, the KMT’s exploitative practices alienated local ethnic groups, such as the Karen and Mon, deepening mistrust and fragmenting resistance.

By 1953, international pressure forced U Nu to address the KMT’s presence at the United Nations. This led to evacuations supported by the CIA, though the process was incomplete and fraught with challenges. Many KMT forces remained, leaving an enduring legacy. The Golden Triangle’s drug trade flourished, ultimately reaching American inner cities; while regional instability persisted and the Tatmadaw grew in power, setting the stage for military rule in Burma.

“By the mid to late 1950s, only about seven or eight thousand had gone [back to Taiwan], which was satisfactory for the government,” Baron says, noting the lasting footprint of the KMT’s presence in Burma, and highlighting the incomplete resolutions and ongoing legacies of this historical chapter. “But there was simply in the region, loads that just stayed, loads that never left, and you see their relatives or their descendants still there now.”

Episode #517: “They are using each other for their own benefit.” With this line, Wai Yan Phyo Naing frames a sober account of SinoMyanmar relations. A researcher and lecturer in international relations and modern history who studied in Moscow and later worked with migrants in Thailand, Wai Yan Phyo Naing brings both scholarship and field experience to the conversation.

For Wai Yan Phyo Naing, the relationship is transactional. “China is only interested in its national interests,” he says. “China is ready to communicate with whoever becomes powerful in Myanmar.” Myanmar engages because it must, yet, as Wai Yan Phyo Naing insists, “Myanmar is a sovereign, independent state—not a province of China.” Geography drives the rest: China seeks an outlet to the Indian Ocean, and Myanmar’s coast provides it. The pipelines from Kyaukphyu to Yunnan are operating; the rail vision remains contested—proof, Wai Yan Phyo Naing says, that consent and fair terms decide outcomes.

Security realities push cooperation, as Wai Yan Phyo Naing notes that China brokered talks with MNDAA, TNLA, and AA, even “opened the observer office in Lashio,” and, as the generals realized the limits of unilateral force, they came to “appreciate the Chinese intervention.” The darker side of crossborder interdependence is the scam economy, which Wai Yan Phyo Naing calls “like a cancer.”

Strategically, Wai Yan Phyo Naing recounts how Beijing once “wanted to create the tunnel… to the Ayeyarwady River and then to the sea.” That was rejected, but “the port project, gas and oil pipeline” are now real, and China is “ready to continue their highspeed railroad from Yunnan.” The moral is unchanged: both states pursue advantage, and Myanmar must bargain hard.

Wai Yan Phyo Naing cautions against extremes. “Whoever holds power in Myanmar cannot forget China’s presence,” he says. “Please don’t forget we are just beside China… we shouldn’t see China as a ‘bad guy’ all the time.”

Episode #516: “I want to be able to center women in their full right and to shine a spotlight on how I think they are very much the heroes of the revolution,” says Jenny Hedström, a researcher whose book, Reproducing Revolution, examines women’s labor in the Kachin struggle. Joined by Stella Naw, a Kachin activist and scholar, they argue that the conflict cannot be reduced to a simple story of aggressor and victim. Instead, it must be understood through the everyday labor that sustains communities across generations of war.

Jenny’s engagement with Kachin women began in the early 2000s while working with the Kachin Women’s Association Thailand. She found that English-language scholarship centered male fighters and formal politics, while the women she spoke with talked about displacement, rebuilding, and survival. When she began her PhD in 2015, she initially focused on female soldiers, assuming armed actors were the proper lens for studying war. But spending time in Kachin towns, army brigades, and displacement camps shifted her perspective: she realized that labor that was not militarily or publicly celebrated proved equally essential to revolutionary endurance.

Together, they argue that Kachin womens’ roles in farming, teaching, organizing, and caregiving within Kachin Independence Organization–controlled areas constitute real governance, and not merely domestic support. Stella reframes gender as relational, noting that rigid expectations of masculinity have harmed men as well. “When they can no longer perform the values that define them as Kachin men… they take their own life!”

They extend this critique to the international arena, contending that legitimacy is too narrowly defined through sovereignty and armed control. The sustaining labor that makes resistance governance possible remains politically undervalued, and Jenny and Stella want conflict analysis and policy engagement to more explicitly account for this foundational layer of local governance. They stress that the governance sustained by women is politically indispensable, so it should be studied, supported—and valued—accordingly

In the end, their commitment remains unequivocal: “We’d rather live and fight for freedom than to submit,” says Stella. “People are willing to die, so they will continue fighting. It's not going to end, but we can end it soon by supporting these resistance actors, who made up for pluralistic states, and support civil society groups who can hold EAOs and EROs accountable.”

Episode #515: Toru Kubota is a Japanese documentary filmmaker who believes storytelling can foster empathy beyond abstract argument. A political science student at Keio University who developed an interest in refugee issues, in 2014 he joined a student project interviewing Rohingya refugees in Japan. Using a camera for the first time, he helped produce a short documentary about their lives.

In 2016, Kubota traveled to Sittwe in Rakhine State and entered camps housing Rohingya displaced after the 2012 violence. Though officially designated as internally displaced persons camps, he saw them as places of confinement, where communities were segregated and deprived of adequate services. Filming an accidental fire inside one camp became a turning point; editing the footage later convinced him of film’s power to convey lived experience.

Following both the military’s 2017 campaign against the Rohingya and the 2021 coup, Kubota returned each time to Myanmar to document events unfolding there. While filming a protest in 2022,soldiers arrested him at gunpoint and used staged photographs as evidence of his participation. He was charged with incitement and immigration violations and sentenced to ten years in prison. Fortunately, diplomatic pressure was able to secure his release after 111 days in detention at the notorious Insein Prison, where he had endured solitary confinement and struggled with despair.

Since then, Kubota has supported exiled Myanmar journalists in a variety of different ways. His film “Borderline Resistors” follows exile media collectives along the Thai–Myanmar border. Reflecting on his imprisonment and the fragility of civil liberties, he recalls something an activist once told him: “Freedom is like air. You never appreciate it when you can breathe freely. But you finally realize how important is when you get drowned in water.”

Episode #514: Richmond Heath, an Australian physiotherapist, longtime vipassana meditator and senior trainer in tension and Trauma Releasing Exercises (TRE) discusses the involuntary movements that arise for some people in meditation. He argues they are not signs of dysfunction, but rather expressions of underlying bodily processes. It’s how a person relates to them that matters most.

In his late twenties, Heath developed chronic pain that resisted conventional treatment and forced him to abandon the physical activity that had once grounded him. Turning to vipassana meditation in the tradition of S.N. Goenka, he encountered intense discomfort but discovered that pain was partly a reaction layered onto sensation. By observing it rather than resisting it, its character changed, opening a new way of relating to the body.

As his practice deepened, spontaneous movements began to arise. These ranged from subtle shifts to complex, fluid postures that felt unexpectedly free rather than painful. Because he was not consciously producing them, he experienced them as something happening through the body rather than something he was doing. Yet neither medical nor meditative frameworks could account for it. His vipassana teachers discouraged the movements, and eventually he was asked to leave a retreat; medicine, in turn, tended to framed them as manifestations of pathology. Despite this, he trusted his experience and continued observing.

He later described these as “neurogenic movements” and came to understand them as part of a broader rhythm of activation and release. While initially interpreting them as trauma discharge, he expanded this view, noting similar patterns in early development, cultural practices, and states of heightened energy. This led him to conclude that no single framework fully explains the phenomenon.

Encounters with Aboriginal elder Jack Beatson and later TRE provided validation and context. TRE, which deliberately elicits similar movements, confirmed that such responses can be accessed intentionally, but also reinforced that they function best when not controlled.

Heath emphasizes discernment: the same process can regulate or destabilize depending on how it feels. His guiding question—“are you okay, and is it working for you?”—extends beyond meditation to everyday experiences, reframing reactions like panic as part of the body’s attempts to adjust. Even in extreme conditions, such as conflict zones, these processes may offer limited but meaningful relief. Ultimately, Heath maintains an openness to interpretation, grounded in a simple principle that the Aboriginal elder told him: “Enjoy the ride!”

Episode #513: Georgi Engelbrecht of the International Crisis Group links two stories that matter for Myanmar: the Mindanao peace process and Russia’s ties to authoritarian partners in Southeast Asia.

He begins in the Philippines with what he calls the conflict’s “master cleavage” — Muslim communities inside a state seeking self-determination against what they see as colonial intrusion. That grievance was reinforced by migration, exclusion, and underdevelopment until it hardened into decades of separatist war. But the macro narrative never explained everything. Alongside it ran “horizontal violence”: clan feuds, communal disputes, and local power struggles that don’t disappear just because a deal is signed.

For Engelbrecht, the 2012 and 2014 agreements with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front were a turning point, not an ending. The MILF largely abandoned fighting, the Bangsamoro autonomy project became real, and governing structures took shape after the autonomous region was established in 2019. Yet the region remains “in flux,” with delays, elite rivalries, contested legitimacy, and violence that has shifted rather than vanished.

From Mindanao he pivots to Myanmar and what major powers mean by “stability.” Russia’s push into Asia, he argues, accelerated with its rupture from the West, as Moscow sought partners and arenas beyond Western leverage. In Myanmar, that lens favors the junta: Russia tends to read rebellion as instability and the central state as the default counterweight. With pipelines for hardware, parts, training, and contact, “Myanmar, because of Russia's help, is not that isolated anymore,” and perceptions of durability become a force multiplier.

His wager is blunt: “Russia is banking on victory of the regime.” China, by contrast, cannot afford distance and hedges across actors because Myanmar’s disorder sits on its border. As Engelbrecht puts it, “Chechnya [for Russia] is probably what Myanmar is for China.” For Moscow, this becomes part of a broader pattern—how Russia shows it can keep partners standing, stay relevant beyond Western systems, and act as a patron for regimes the West is trying to isolate. For Myanmar, that means the relationship isn’t a blueprint for victory—but it can function as scaffolding: not determining the war’s shape, but bracing the regime’s ability to persist.