An Umbrella Policy

An Umbrella Policy

Episode #585: “We can’t go back to the normal life, because our country is not even normal,” says Tone Tone, a former psychology student from Yangon, describing how Myanmar’s 2021 military coup shattered any hope of remaining apolitical. In this conversation she is joined by Liberia, a civil engineering graduate who became a strike organizer, and together they recount how violence transformed them from ordinary students into underground activists willing to risk prison and death. Before February 1, 2021, neither had political ambitions. Tone Tone was finishing university and helping with her family’s silk-screen printing business, and Liberia had completed an engineering degree and was pursuing further vocational training. When the military detained elected leader Aung San Suu Kyi and seized power, both joined peaceful street protests in Yangon, believing public resistance might restore democracy. That belief eroded as soldiers began shooting demonstrators. In December 2021, Tone Tone witnessed troops ram a vehicle into protesters, killing and injuring friends. Liberia shifted from humanitarian COVID relief work to organizing flash mobs through the Yangon People’s Strike, using small, cell-based groups to avoid detection. On August 8, 2022—the anniversary of the 8-8-88 uprising—they staged their most iconic act: four black umbrellas printed with the Burmese numeral eight, photographed near Sule Pagoda under heavy security. Days later, Liberia was arrested, interrogated, and sentenced to three years of hard labor in Insein Prison. Tone Tone narrowly avoided arrest but endured psychological torture when soldiers beat her parents in the background while they called her on a phone. Both eventually fled Myanmar. From exile, they continue supporting underground actions and fundraising through the umbrella symbol. Acknowledging fatigue but rejecting compromise with the military, they insist resistance continues. Their message remains urgent: “Please help to save Myanmar!”

Strong Determination

Episode #584: Lora Roy, a longtime Vipassana meditator in the S.N. Goenka tradition, reflects on a lifelong effort to live truthfully from direct experience rather than fear, social expectation, or rigid authority. She traces that orientation back to childhood, when her authoritarian father’s controlling approach pushed her inward. Isolated for long periods, she developed habits of reflection and self-observation while struggling with anger and emotional suppression. As an adolescent, she deliberately forced herself to become more socially engaged, and later, while studying architecture, a professor’s insistence that meaningful design required genuine self-knowledge deepened her determination to understand herself more fully. After university, she traveled through Europe seeking freedom from inherited identity and social conditioning. Although she had begun exploring spirituality through figures such as Ram Dass, Roy says she still lacked a practical way to work with emotional suffering, until she encountered Vipassana meditation through Joseph Goldstein and Sharon Salzberg. “Oh, my God, this is what I've been waiting for all my life!” she recalls thinking during her first retreat. Meditation gave her a method for observing experience without reacting impulsively, and she committed herself intensely to the practice. She later became deeply involved with S.N. Goenka’s tradition, admiring both his power and his humanity while also recognizing the emotional intensity and rigidity that emerged within the growing organization. Roy’s later training in whole systems design shaped how she interpreted those developments. Drawing on both meditation experience and systems thinking, she argues that institutions often begin with genuine insight but gradually become rule-bound and protective of identity. Reflecting on changes within the Goenka organization, she explains that authoritarian tendencies emergeincrementally because people feel protected by belonging to a shared worldview. Yet she continues to speak with gratitude about what the practice gave her. Now in her eighties she describes meditation less as a strict discipline than as an integrated way of living grounded in openness, self-knowledge, and compassion.

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!