Insight Myanmar

Episode #127: “I basically started meditating about eight years ago, and it's it changed my life completely,” Claire Thorp tells us.

For years, Claire had been intrigued observing how her partner kept…

Episode #126: When Rose Metro sat down to write Have Fun In Burma, a novel set during the Rohingya crisis, she was already well aware that the country has long been viewed through an exotified, Orien…

Episode #125: Given the deteriorating and destabilizing situation in Myanmar, one might assume that experts in the fields of Burma Studies, along with Burmese language teachers, would be more importa…

Episode #124: Today’s guest, Guillaume de Langre, worked for several years in Naypyidaw as an adviser to the Myanmar Ministry of Electricity and Energy (MOEE), and explains the history of electrifica…

Episode #123: Lucine has been the liaison officer between France and Myanmar for decades. With this rich experience, she offers an insightful perspective on the workings and machinations of the hidde…

Episode #122: Gil Fronsdal’s single visit to Myanmar came over three decades ago, but the impact of the trip on his spiritual life stays with him still.

Initially practicing Zen, he went to Japan to d…

Episode #121: While perhaps a strange choice for some, Steve Jarand and Kati Schweitzer elected to spend part of their honeymoon meditating in Myanmar. Both being practitioners in the vipassana tradi…

Episode #120: On Thursday, August 25th, 2022, the accomplished artist and longtime activist, Htein Lin, was arrested along with his wife, Vicki Bowman. We had only just recently interviewed him, so h…

Episode #119: Erin Murphy has been involved in Asia issues since 2001, and Myanmar, in particular, since 2008. She relates all this in her recently released book, Burmese Haze.

She contrasts the some…

Episode #118: Kyar Phyu returns to the Insight Myanmar Podcast to update listeners on how eventful the past number of months have been, in particular regarding her association with the CDM.

Her activi…

Episode #117: “The army believed democratic fighters were hiding in my center, so they moved very aggressively. They entered my meditation center! They shouted, ‘Hey, I will kill you. I will kill you…

Episode #116: On July 7th, the official account of the European Union in Myanmar posted a two-minute video urging factories in conflict-torn Myanmar to re-open, charging that the factory shutdowns ha…

Episode #115: Matthew Wells is a member of Amnesty International’s Crisis Response team specializing in human rights violations, and has spent years investigating the ongoing atrocities by the Tatmad…

Episode #114: Growing up in the Bay Area, raised by parents who followed the Vietnamese meditation master Thich Nhat Hanh, Derek Pyle was no stranger to Buddhist theory and practice. While some Weste…

Episode #113: “I often asked myself how people can really have the presence of mind to sit down and write amidst such extraordinarily difficult circumstances, to be able to reflect on the kinds of tr…

Episode #112: Simon traces the arc of his Chin homeland’s history and politics from the mists of history to the present-day conflict.

Chin State is the poorest part of Myanmar, which suffers from an l…

Episode #111: Emerging from under decades of harsh censorship, local journalism and investigative reporting made great strides in Myanmar during the democratic transition in the 2010s. But all that w…

Episode #110: Ariya Baumann’s spiritual journey began far away from the tropical surroundings of the Golden Land. She grew in a small town in Switzerland, among the snowy Alps. Raised in a Christian …

Stephen Campbell has spent the last twelve years studying labor movements in Myanmar and other Southeast Asian countries. Going back and forth across the history of the country’s labor movement, he d…

“You can you hear from how I speak that these days, I am very distracted and distressed by the development of the entire thing,” Han Htoo Khant Paing admits during this urgent and emotional interview…