Spiritual Journeys: Tourists Flock to Myanmar

This week let’s look at an interesting place for meditation and Buddhist practice, Myanmar, formerly Burma. As another one of the featured spiritual journeys: tourists travel to Myanmar. It seems safer now that the military government has relaxed the restrictions somewhat as to where tourists can go and what they can do. Here is an article by Paula Hancocks in the Cable New Network (CNN.com, “Religion” section) about these new tourists who are venturing off the usual tourist trails to experience a strongly non-western situation.

Spiritual Journeys: Tourists Flock to Myanmar

One recent visitor is a 23-year-old American Christian named Kym Cole. She said that doing up to 10 hours of meditation every day was difficult but it yielded unique rewards: “It feels like a different world but in a good way.”
Cole is among the thousands who are taking the opportunity to experience what was once one of the most isolated countries in the world as the nation institutes reforms and opens up to outsiders.
Myanmar does not keep statistics on spiritual tourists, but tourism to the country generally has doubled in the past four years. And more meditation centers here are catering to foreigners, capitalizing on their swelling numbers.
Myanmar, also known as Burma, is overwhelmingly Buddhist and much of society revolves around its hundreds of thousands of monks. Temples and pagodas define the landscape.
It is believed that well over 10,000 temples have been built in the ancient city of Bagan alone. More 2,000 survive today. Some Burmese boys learn to read and write at their local monastery, and many go for Buddhist education at some point in their childhood.
High-profile opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi, who assumed her new seat in Myanmar’s parliament earlier this month, had long cautioned that tourism would provide support to the regime that kept her under house arrest for much of the past two decades.
But a new civilian government was sworn in last year. Although it is still heavily influenced by the military, Suu Kyi is free has stopped discouraging tourism.
To read the original post for this passage click here.

Now please watch this short video so that you can see more clearly what Kim Cole and other tourists seeking spiritual experiences will find in Myanmar.

It’s a promising situation that so many temples still survive after years of the brutal military rule and that they are open to westerners seeking peace, mental health, increased awareness and all the other benefits to meditation and a spiritual path. I wonder if the tourist dollars are still going mainly to this repressive military government, but as more brave tourists venture into Myanmar the benefit to the common people in the form of much-needed cash will increase. This is yet another one of the spiritual journeys as tourists flock to Myanmar.