Insight Myanmar

Ground Rules

Episode #583: “If you can maim them, you can get multiple people off of a battlefield, and it’s also a terror tactic as well.” Collin Mayfield, an American journalist and documentary filmmaker, spent months with the resistance group People’s Defense Force Zoland in western Myanmar’s Chin State in 2023 and 2025. During his second trip, he stepped on an M14 mine near a former resistance police checkpoint, losing part of his foot and nearly his left eye. The blast exposed a weapon whose damage extends far beyond the explosion, consuming evacuation teams, scarce medicine, repeated surgeries, rehabilitation, and years of care. Mayfield had already seen that toll when a PDF-Zoland soldier underwent an emergency amputation on a plastic tarp in the forest. Across Chin State, residents warned him away from mined ground, soldiers lived with missing limbs, and even retrieving a wandering animal could force a family to gamble its survival. The regime’s mines do not merely obstruct fighters; they punish villages sympathetic to the resistance and drain the clinics, schools, and local institutions resistance groups are trying to sustain. After Mayfield was wounded in late 2025, it took hours to reach a clinic where staff amputated part of his foot under an epidural. Limited antibiotics could not contain the infection, and the wound became black and necrotic. An exceptional intervention by American and Indian authorities allowed him to reach a hospital in Aizawl, where doctors removed more infected bone and told him another week in Myanmar likely would have killed him. Most Myanmar survivors have no comparable route out. Treatment and physical therapy in Poland have allowed Mayfield to walk, hike, and run again, although pain, imbalance, embedded shrapnel, and further surgery remain. A disabled friend now transports supplies with a prosthetic leg, but a replacement spring alone costs roughly $3,000. The mine did not end either man’s contribution; it left both dependent on care that remainsinaccessible to countless survivors while the military continues laying the weapons.

Open Source Awakening

Episode #582: “If you're having weird meditative experiences, I'll be happy to talk to you about those for free. I won't even take a donation.” Daniel Ingram, a physician, meditation teacher, author of Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha, and cofounder of the Dharma Overground, has spent nearly three decades creating language and support for contemplative experiences that can be mistaken for pathology, exaggerated into attainment, or silenced by Buddhist institutions. His concern began with lucid dreams, blissful states, energetic surges, and an out-of-body experience during childhood and adolescence. He hid them from his pediatrician father, who later admitted that he might have responded in a harmful way. Intensive retreat practice in the 1990s made the phenomena reproducible, but the decisive moment came at the Malaysian Buddhist Meditation Center, where an old recording of a Burmese monk described the sequence Ingram had just undergone. Burmese insight maps transformed private confusion into a path that others had already observed. Those maps also placed him in conflict with Western meditation communities that discouraged open discussion of stages and attainments. Ingram accepts that maps can produce scripting, competition, and inflated claims, but argues that silence leaves practitioners isolated and clinicians unprepared. His book and the Dharma Overground created public spaces for experiences that conventional settings often refused to name. After a 2003 retreat with the younger Sayadaw U Paṇḍita, he claimed arahantship as a permanent loss of belief in a separate subject, while acknowledging that fear, irritation, and desire still arise—a result that conflicts with strict readings of the Theravāda ten-fetter model. Ingram now supports research intended to bring physicians, psychologists, neuroscientists, and contemplative practitioners into the same inquiry. Rather than resolve doctrinal disputes through authority alone, he proposes testing advanced practitioners under controlled conditions to see whether classical claims about the eradication of fear, anger, and desire can be observed. The maps once helped him survive territory that seemed unintelligible; he now wants medicine and Buddhism to submit their competing explanations to the same unresolved experiment.

Bonus Episode: Shake It Off

In this bonus episode, we share a special online fundraiser for Better Burma led by Richmond Heath, a certified TRE (Tension and Trauma Releasing Exercises) provider and trainer based in Australia, whose full conversation on Episode 514 [https://insightmyanmar.org/complete-shows/2026/4/2/episode-514-tremors]explored the meeting point between meditation, trauma, spontaneous movement, and the body’s own intelligence. In this conversation, Richmond moves from theory into practice, guiding participants through an accessible introduction to the exercise. Richmond explains that stress and trauma do not live only in memory or thought; they also appear as patterns in the muscles, breath, and nervous system. He reframes shaking and trembling not as symptoms to suppress, but as instinctive recovery responses the body uses to come out of fight, flight, freeze, or shutdown. Drawing on TRE, polyvagal-informed language, and examples from other cultures, he invites participants to understand the body not simply as the place where trauma is stored, but also as the place where release and regulation can begin. The heart of this event is experiential. Richmond carefully leads attendees through a guided tremor session, continually emphasizing safety, choice, self-regulation, and the importance of stopping whenever the body needs rest. Participants are encouraged to listen deeply, move slowly, and allow the body’s natural intelligence to unfold without forcing anything. The episode closes with reflections on how TRE might support communities affected by Myanmar’s violence, and a hope that future funding could bring this training directly to local caregivers, educators, organizers, and border communities who need it most right now. Please consider making a donation [https://www.betterburma.org/donation] of any amount to support our continued programs!

Never Break the Chain

Episode #581: Tin Tin Htar Myint, a medical epidemiologist based in France who has worked in vaccines for more than two decades, describes Myanmar’s immunization collapse as a problem of governance as much as medicine. Before 2021, she argues, the national program had been expanding in concrete ways, adding vaccines that could reduce childhood pneumonia and diarrhea and protect girls from HPV. Then the coup shattered the human infrastructure that makes routine immunization possible. Health workers joined the Civil Disobedience Movement, hid, fled, or were arrested, and the country’s vaccine system became a set of reported numbers that no longer match the conditions on the ground. Tin Tin points to official coverage figures that appear to rebound after 2021, but says they cannot be reconciled with the reality of airstrikes, displacement, and villages trapped behind checkpoints. In surveys she describes from Sagaing, the most isolated areas show catastrophic “zero dose” rates for children born after the coup—no BCG, no DTP, no MMR—while villages near large cities can still manage partial coverage because access exists and parents take risks to reach it. Some organize ad hoc “vaccination trips,” moving groups of children through military checkpoints to get a shot and return home. For her, the downstream damage is already visible. She describes signs of vaccine-preventable outbreaks appearing again through social media reports, and she that tuberculosis is resurging rapidly in places with limited detection and no reliable drug supply. The collapse does not stop at vaccines. Tin Tin argues that immunization normally arrives with basic care packages, health education, and family planning, and that when the program breaks, those services break too, driving rising pregnancies, miscarriages, and the reemergence of sexually transmitted infections. The most painful detail she offers is also the simplest proof of what is missing. “They still carry the vaccine booklet of their children.”

The Missing Self

Episode #580: Professor P. L. Dhar, a longtime Vipassana teacher in the S.N. Goenka tradition, reflects on his life-long spiritual journey. A decade immersed in Vedanta and other Indian traditions, along with a meditative and devotional practice, helped him develop deep concentration. Yet he gradually became dissatisfied, wondering whether these practices investigated reality deeply enough. Then a series of crises transformed his spiritual search. Political violence in India, the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, the Bhopal disaster, and most importantly the death of his young son in 1985 pushed him into profound grief and self-doubt. These events moved him to enroll in one of Goenka’s ten-day Vipassana courses, where he discovered a form of practice that seemed to reach levels of suffering he had not previously been able to address. Over the next several years he devoted himself intensely to Vipassana, completing long retreats, becoming a teacher, and eventually helping introduce meditation programs into Delhi’s Tihar Jail, one of India’s largest and most notorious prisons. He regards the Tihar project as a remarkable demonstration of meditation’s transformative potential. Yet it was connected to an issue that concerned Professor Dhar. He had always been troubled by Goenka’s frequent criticisms of other spiritual traditions, and indeed, some Tihar inmates were very angry when they heard them. Goenka responded by removing the offending parts and adding in more positive messaging, which were very well received in Tihar. Yet for whatever reason, these revised Hindi versions were not used other than at the Tihar courses. Later, as Dhar gained more responsibilities within the organization, he also became concerned that institutional growth, hierarchy, and status were receiving more attention than deeper questions about liberation. His most significant concern was around anattā, the Buddhist doctrine of not-self. Professor Dhar explains that while years of practice gave him a deep experiential appreciation of impermanence, he eventually concluded that neither the Goenka technique nor the culture surrounding it sufficiently examined how the sense of self is constructed, nor was there much enthusiasm within the organization for doing so. While he remains forever grateful to Goenka, these concerns led to his departure from the organization in 2010. Since then, his investigationsinto non-self have led him to believe it is the key link between meditation practice and liberation.