Myanmar: A Practice Unbound
Insight Myanmar
“Well, I want to find the truth, or whatever that means,” explains Richard Evans, an architect and meditation practitioner shaped by the S.N. Goenka Vipassana tradition, speaking on the Insight Myanmar Podcast. He describes his life as an effort to understand reality through direct experience rather than belief, and how meditation has become the method through which he pursues that search.
His search began early, when he was a child attending Anglican church services and felt something did not add up. He did not accept what he was being told about God and expected some kind of consequence for that disbelief… yet nothing happened. That moment removed the sense that inherited belief could be trusted. If what he had been told did not hold, then something else had to account for experience, even if he could not yet name it. From that point forward, he began looking for something that could stand on its own. As he grew older, that question stayed with him and became more deliberate. At one point, walking down the street, he asked himself what he actually wanted from life and realized that the answer was not career or stability, but truth itself. That did not resolve the question, but it fixed his direction.
The search became more urgent through his feelings of anxiety. He describes this as not just something he suffers with, but a serious issue in his family, especially on his father’s side. For a long time, his experience of anxiety remained isolating; however, seeing similar patterns in others over time helped him recognize that what he was experiencing was not unique. That recognition, in turn, changed the direction of his search. The question was no longer only what is true, but how to relate to suffering without avoiding it. That process, he says “engages everything about who you are, and you really get down to the essence of yourself. And I find that part deeply satisfying, however difficult to do.”
That need led him to Vipassana meditation in the Goenka tradition. Vipassana was the first, clearly defined method in his search: a practice built around silence, a fixed schedule, and close observation of bodily sensations as they arose and passed. The first course was difficult and often felt unreal, and his general skepticism of organizational structures did not disappear. But his experience introduced something he had not had before—a way to check what he was being told against what he could actually observe.
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