Episode #627: Joseph Goldstein’s introduction to meditation came almost accidentally. Sent to Thailand with the Peace Corps in the 1960s, he discovered Buddhist practice through monks at a Bangkok temple before traveling to Bodh Gayā, where he trained under Munindraji in the Burmese Mahāsī tradition. What followed was a lifetime spent exploring how teachings rooted in Asian Buddhist cultures could be carried into Western society without losing their essential purpose.

His years in India brought him into contact with S. N. Goenka, Dipa Ma, and other influential practitioners whose approaches differed considerably. After returning to America in 1974, Goldstein helped establish the Western Vipassanā movement alongside Jack Kornfield and Sharon Salzberg, eventually co-founding the Insight Meditation Society. Yet the growing movement also confronted differences over methodology, lineage, and whether practitioners should remain within one tradition or learn from several.

Goldstein's understanding of transmission evolved beyond questions of meditation technique. Initially confident that universal Buddhist teachings required little adaptation, he gradually recognized how social exclusion, racism, and trauma could prevent people from accessing or integrating those teachings. His involvement in expanding diversity at IMS challenged assumptions he had carried for decades. “The teachings are universal, but for people to hear them and learn from them, they have to come.”

His reflections also return to Myanmar, where he practiced intensively under Sayadaw U Paṇḍita and witnessed the extraordinary generosity of communities supporting monastic life, often despite having very little themselves. As warfare and military repression have devastated the country, Goldstein acknowledges the responsibility felt by those who have benefited from its Buddhist traditions to support the people who preserved and transmitted these teachings. Rather than prescribing a single form of engagement, he emphasizes that practitioners can respond in different ways according to their circumstances, while sharing a common sense of gratitude, compassion, and responsibility toward the country and its people.

Episode #626: This is the first episode of a seven-part series reflecting voices of people who attended the Fifth International Conference on Burma/Myanmar Studies in Chiang Mai, which explored how people are responding to the crisis while working toward a different future. Through shorter conversations with scholars, activists, educators, and community organizers, we connect regional politics with the everyday work of sustaining care, learning, livelihoods, and solidarity.

The first guest, Fuadi Pitsuwan, a Thammasat University lecturer and former foreign policy adviser to Thailand’s Move Forward Party, questions why Thailand invests so heavily in Myanmar’s military as a source of stability when its actions keep the country fragmented.

Thailand once supported ethnic armed groups as a buffer, then pursued trade and investment in the hope of political opening. Gas dependence, business interests and competition with China now constrain its choices, but Fuadi disputes whether those pressures justify the legitimacy granted to the junta.

Alongside official diplomacy, Thailand allows space for ethnic leaders and civil society. He wants civilian agencies to develop those relationships deliberately, supporting education, administration and health services that benefit both countries. Yet even proposals to let displaced Myanmar medical workers treat their compatriots have stalled despite broad agreement. His difficulty lies in converting acceptance into action: “I don’t know which lever to pull.”

“We have to do something more,” says our second guest, Agnes, a counseling who developed the suicide-prevention app Shin Tan after years of training and support failed to stop reports of deaths from reaching her. After Myanmar’s 2021 military coup, displacement, lost work, and interrupted education placed further strain on families already affected by COVID. Agnes also identifies beliefs that make suicide seem predetermined, complicating efforts to recognize distress and seek help.

A workshop in 2022 drew more than 200 participants, but many could not take the training back to their communities. Alongside supervised group and individual support, Shin Tan offers mental-health information, self-care tools, and questions directing users toward guidance. It works offline after downloading, addressing the unreliable connections that can keep help distant. However, the people she hopes to reach may have neither reliable internet nor someone they feel able to call.

Episode #625: “When nobody helps you, what you have to do is go. You know what? I’m just gonna do it myself.” Adrian Zaw, a Burmese-American actor, producer, and founder of Zaw Studios, has turned that refusal to wait into both a business method and a response to cultural absence. His family left Myanmar after the 1988 uprising, when his father’s political involvement made remaining unsafe. His parents had worked as rural doctors, but in the United States their credentials disappeared; they took cafeteria and laboratory jobs while Zaw learned English by imitating television.

Acting gave him a route through adolescence, but Hollywood offered almost no Burmese-American models or roles. He learned producing, photography, editing, and studio management so that he could create work rather than depend on someone else to recognize him. In 2012, he opened a small production space whose rent forced him to work quickly. Speed became a philosophy: deliver what a client needs, revise it immediately, and refuse to hide delay behind artistic perfectionism.

Zaw now passes that discipline to young Burmese-American interns, matching practical training to whatever skills they bring. He tells them to replace “I can’t” with “How can I?” and identify the personal advantage that might open the next door. Yet his method also carries a distance: the access he can provide in Orange County does not automatically reach people inside Myanmar, and after the 2021 coup he has been unable to return.

His larger answer is cultural production. Through Myanmar American TV, he wants Burmese performers to tell sitcoms, dramas, and thrillers shaped by their own humor and family experience. Mainstream roles have often reduced Burmese characters to antagonists; his sketches use fortune telling, in-laws, and generational pressure to make Burmese-American life visible from within. The proof of concept exists, and the studio continues training people through it, but the platform still needs money, collaborators, and an audience willing to act with the urgency he demands. “Opportunity is knocking, and nobody’s answering the door because they’re not being responsive quick enough.”