Podcast Appearance

Bruce Stewart on Insight Myanmar

Recently, I was interviewed by Joah McGee, creator and host of the Insight Myanmar podcast. Joah and I had an open, wide-ranging conversation, and spoke for so long that it will be split into two episodes. As an add-on to our usual Currents of Dhamma biweekly schedule, I’d like to share the first episode with you today. I’ll share the second when it comes out.

You can listen to the podcast here on the Insight Myanmar website, here on Apple Podcasts, or here on Spotify. It’s episode #554 if you prefer a different podcast platform.

Below is a detailed summary of the contents of the conversation. Enjoy!

---

Summary of Insight Myanmar Episode #554: Changing Course

“I would say that even as a child I was a wonderer,” begins Bruce Stewart, an early Western student and teacher in the S.N. Goenka Vipassana tradition, in the first of a two-part interview about his lifelong search for spiritual meaning. More than a search for answers, his story is a tale of curiosity itself. Running throughout his reflections is also a commitment to open, honest, and meaningful conversation—even when it involves difficult questions about teachers, organizations, history, or one’s own past assumptions.

Stewart grew up in relatively closed and isolated 1950s New Zealand. Though he struggled in school, he developed a strong sensitivity to nature, music and art. He describes being part of the typical “rugby and beer” crowd in his hometown, but the sudden death of his younger sister pushed him toward questions about the meaning of life that the culture around him did not seem able to answer. Looking back, he sees these experiences not as isolated events but as early expressions of a deeper tendency that would shape his entire life: a willingness to wonder, to question, and to remain open to possibilities that others often overlooked.

That sense of possibility and wonder eventually carried him away from New Zealand. His father, a conservative wool buyer, had unexpectedly introduced him to the wider world by bringing home hippie hitchhikers who had traveled through Europe and Asia to the island. Their stories awakened in Stewart a desire to leave the expected path of family business and explore life more widely. He worked his passage to Europe on a cargo ship, where physical labor, responsibility, and risk gave him an early taste of disciplined effort outside the world he had known.

He traveled and worked in Europe, and hitched across Africa. This life brought him to contact with countercultural communities, spiritual searching, and ways of living that felt freer than the conventional life he had left behind. Yet travel itself did not satisfy the deeper longing. Looking back, he recalls, “No matter how much adventure I packed into my life, there was always going to be something missing.” In Greece, the sight of a young man sitting silently on the beach in meditation one morning struck him deeply, even though at that time he had no idea what the man was doing. In Kenya, Stewart met another young man whose “different” demeanor also struck him, and through conversations with him, developed an interest in Indian spirituality.

Also in Kenya, on the island of Lamu, he experienced what he later understands as an important spiritual awakening. Spending long periods alone, he quietly observed nature, and the people around him—a beautiful lagoon filled with waterfowl, women weaving baskets, dhows gliding into port in the evening—and found himself naturally settling into a state of stillness and attentiveness. Without any formal training, he began discovering the value of simply observing experience rather than constantly seeking the next adventure. The realization gradually emerged that no amount of travel, excitement, or novelty could provide the deeper fulfillment he was looking for. Something more fundamental was calling him.

After returning to the West but still feeling unsettled, Stewart found his way to a Sivananda ashram in Canada, where meditation, asanas, chanting, and devotional practice gave form to impulses that had previously been intuitive and scattered. There he also met his future wife, Maureen. Together, they later returned to New Zealand and established one of the island’s first yoga centers. The center became a hub of teaching, communal living, vegetarian meals, retreats, natural healing, and alternative culture.

Those yoga years were sincere and formative, but Stewart again began to grow dissatisfied. Communal life exposed tensions, and gestalt-style work helped him and Maureen begin recognizing unresolved material beneath the idealism. Around that time, he read Chögyam Trungpa’s book, Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism, which made a strong impression on him and caused him to reevaluate his own approach to spirituality. Looking back on that period, he realizes, “I was sort of playing games with my spiritual life.” While he could talk about meditation and spiritual concepts, he felt that he was still bypassing deeper work.

At the same time, he gradually developed a view of spiritual development that would remain important throughout his life. Different teachings, communities, and practices could serve as valuable stages of growth, even if they were not permanent destinations. Looking back, he sees spiritual life not as finding one final system that answers every question forever, but as moving through successive stages, each providing something necessary before eventually giving way to the next phase of development.

That recognition prepared him for Vipassana. At first, Stewart and others at the yoga center resisted the idea that long hours of silent meditation could be more valuable than service, yoga, and the devotional practice. But when a resident returned from a ten-day course visibly changed, he could not dismiss what he saw and decided to take a course himself. Stewart’s first course was with John Coleman, a student of U Ba Khin, and the experience was decisive. “I knew so deeply that this is what I was looking for. I was really taken with it.”

Vipassana practice gave Stewart a method that felt practical, disciplined, and capable of producing real change. Leaving the yoga center was painful because he had invested so much identity, labor, and affection in it, but he knew he had to move on. One evening Coleman had played a tape of a dhamma discourse given by an Indian man, S. N. Goenka. This stayed in his mind, and after he and Maureen had dissolved their center, they traveled to India, to Dhamma Giri, where Goenka was building his first meditation center. They arrived during a rough, early stage in the center’s development. They sat courses, served, worked on the first pagoda, and lived in demanding conditions that required constant commitment and effort. The work was not separate from the practice; it was part of the atmosphere of dedication that surrounded those early years.

Stewart was deeply and personally moved by Goenka. He describes him as powerful and deeply inspiring, yet ordinary, accessible and with a great sense of humor. He felt Goenka passed the intuitive tests Stewart had developed for who was a worthy teacher. The teaching itself, combined with Goenka’s presence, gave him a confidence he had not found before. It seemed to him that the earlier stages of his life had led to this point, where he found a teacher and path to which he could dedicate his adult life.

While at Dhamma Giri, Mother Sayama came to visit. She had been a very advanced student of U Ba Khin, one reputed to have psychic abilities, and Stewart describes how the power of her presence was palpable. However, he saw differences between her Burmese Buddhist world and Goenka’s clearer, more practical presentation. For example, she and the clique that developed around her often spoke of devas and other realms. Mother Sayama and Goenka ended up splitting apart, and Stewart says Goenka calmly told everyone they had to choose who to follow; he and Maureen chose to remain with Goenka.

As the movement expanded, Stewart became part of the work of carrying the practice into new the US, where he helped form the first organization trust, serve courses and develop the first meditation center in this lineage in North America. He remembers this less as a grand historical project than as a daily pattern of doing what needed to be done. One course led to the next, one opportunity for service to another. Only later could he look back and recognize the scale of what had been built.

Yet Stewart reflects about a growing awareness of tensions that had been present from early on. His devotion to the practice and mission was real, but so was a quieter discomfort with certain behaviors, leadership styles, a focus on policies and procedures, and increasingly top-down organizational tendencies. The tradition’s “purity narrative” he found to be particularly challenging. At first, that narrative had been one of the things that inspired him. Like many practitioners, he believed he was participating in the preservation and transmission of something uniquely pure and valuable. Over time, however, the same narrative became more difficult to reconcile with historical complexity, institutional realities, and his own observations. At first, those concerns were difficult to articulate; over time, however, they became harder to ignore. A later painful incident gave him permission to question everything, including aspects of Goenka’s teaching and behavior that he had previously not allowed himself to examine so critically.

That questioning opened a wider field of study. Stewart began reading more about Buddhist history, learning about broader contexts beyond the tight container in which he had spiritually grown up, and going back to the early suttas. Historical inquiry complicated the inherited organizational narratives about lineage, purity, authority, and the development of Buddhist traditions. This did not make him reject the practice. Instead, it helped him understand that spiritual traditions are shaped by culture, history, power, interpretation, and human limitation as well as by genuine wisdom.

The process also reinforced a lesson he had first begun learning long before entering Vipassana. Every stage of spiritual life serves a purpose, but no stage is necessarily complete in itself. The yoga years, the period of devotion to Goenka, the building of centers, the study of Buddhist history, and the difficult questions that followed all became part of a larger process of growth rather than isolated chapters that canceled one another out.

Stewart’s mature view now holds these realities together. He remains grateful for the practice, the centers, the teachers, the service, and the many, many thousands of people helped by the tradition. But he also believes that success can have a shadow side, and that sincere spiritual communities need the courage to examine what has become rigid, defensive, or difficult to discuss. Looking back, he sees a path that was beautiful, demanding, imperfect, and deeply consequential, and also one which continues. “Not for a moment do I regret anything that I’ve done,” he concludes. “It’s been an incredibly rich journey for me, at times really difficult, but at times other times really, really fulfilling.”

---

Bruce Stewart shared the following additional information for the episode:

• The song featured in the episode, “Come To Say Goodbye,” performed by his brother, Neville Stewart, whose stage name is Art Smith.

• Bruce also shared his Currents of Dhamma Substack essays as an additional resource for listeners who would like to explore more of his reflections and writings.