Bonus Episode: Shake It Off

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.

Rangoon Calling

Episode #579: “I did not expect to be conversing in Urdu with someone in Yangon.” Bilal Hassan, a Pakistani creator and doctor, traveled to Burma after noticing how much of Karachi’s everyday culture carried unexplained Burmese traces: khao suey, family names, old songs about Rangoon, and stories no one could quite complete. His trip began as a search for those missing links, but Yangon gave him something more complicated than recognition. The city felt to him like the place where South Asia and Southeast Asia meet, with Urdu-speaking caretakers at Bahadur Shah Zafar’s shrine, Surti and Memon mosques tied to Karachi business families, Tamil and Chulia Muslim institutions, halal food, and Burmese Muslim cuisine shaped by migration. Yet those familiar traces existed inside a post-coup country marked by checkpoints, fuel shortages, surveillance, airport controls, and a visible gap between wealth and hunger. A roadside woman near Bago had only white rice to offer, while a hotel buffet back in Yangon complete with French champagne cost dozens of dollars. The deepest tension came through Muslim life itself. Downtown Yangon looked visibly Muslim in ways Bilal had not expected, but when the subject of Rohingya was broached, it changed the air in the room. Some Muslims distanced themselves; others admitted fear and sadness but refused to keep speaking. Bilal came to see Muslim communities as connected, careful, and guarded, maintaining names, food, language, and religious life while learning how not to stand out. He left resisting both tourist denial and headline simplification. Burma was not only a war zone, not only a beautiful country, and not only a forgotten extension of South Asian memory. It was all of those at once, and the connections he found could not be separated from the silences people used to survive.

Past the Commentaries

Episode #578: Aye Myat Thwe is a Burmese lay Buddhist practitioner raised inside the Mahasi Vipassana world, where devotion, meditation, and study were braided into ordinary family life. Watching her grandmother sit daily, she grew up assuming the classic Burmese hierarchy of authority was stable and complete, the commentaries as canon, Abhidhamma as the tradition’s intellectual summit. For years, she accepted that inheritance without friction. Then scholarship cracked it open. Learning that Abhidhamma may not be the Buddha’s original teaching shocked her, not because it erased its value, but because it revealed how much Burmese certainty is cultural as well as doctrinal. Once that door opened, she began questioning everything, and felt the social cost of doubt in a society where deference and inherited interpretation can outweigh inquiry. Her widening view extended to lineage identity. Early impressions, shaped by polemics against Pa Auk, taught her suspicion before she had direct experience. Later, encountering Mogok and Pa Auk more honestly, she came to see these traditions as parallel approaches rather than rivals, with conflict often generated by institutional competition and the anxieties of authority rather than by founding masters themselves. She also rethought the role of samathā and “powers,” recognizing both the risks of misuse and the legitimacy of deep concentration when ethically grounded. And she became attentive to how communities code-switch about cosmology, sometimes muting supernatural discourse to appear rational or modern, even while insiders quietly acknowledge it. The Rohingya crisis then forced an ethical reckoning. She saw how fear of protecting the Sāsana could override compassion, and admits she stayed quiet under communal pressure, turning blame inward. After the coup, the fractures deepened. She believes Burmese Buddhism’s future depends less on defending institutions than on recovering moral credibility and everyday application, a reform that keeps roots while refusing corruption.