Episode #628: “We started with emotions, not with the basic fundamental facts.” Nay Chi Min Htun was a university student and hotel receptionist in Yangon before the 2021 coup. Within months, she had left the home of her police-officer father, joined an underground resistance network, and begun transporting explosives. She later moved into Karen State, where she produced ammunition, trained as a drone operator, and participated in frontline operations against military positions.

The physical details stayed with her. Ammunition production repeatedly burned her fingertips, marks she wore with pride because other resistance workers had lost limbs or died in accidents. Her first bomb-carrying fixed-wing drone nose-dived back toward her own team and landed within feet of them without exploding. During another battle, her team lost contact with a loaded drone flying across villages and resistance positions until a commander improvised a repair using a motorcycle battery.

Over time, technical competence brought greater responsibility. Nay Chi trained new recruits and became head of a resistance column’s news and information department, where she raised funds and had to take on her most challenging duty yet, which was to publicly announce comrades’ deaths and oversee their funerals. By April 2026, after family trauma, the end of a long relationship, declining physical health, and growing doubts about whether she possessed the knowledge required to lead others, she left.

Her moral certainty has also become more complicated. Meeting a detained suspected soldier, his wife, and their infant forced her to confront the humanity she had tried not to see while fighting. She still believes the resistance is justified and may return to the armed resistance, but she no longer thinks courage alone is enough. The unresolved question is now what she must learn so that other people can safely depend on her decisions as a leader.

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.