Alan Clements

Alan Clements Live from Bali Communion with the Feminine Daily Spontaneous Personal Talks My Dharma on the Tender Edge of Life Talk # 1: November 1, 2026 (32 minutes)

They Bombed the Monastery: Will the World Awaken? After the bombing of Mahasi Sayadaw’s home monastery in Burma’s Sagaing region, the world’s Buddhist, mindfulness, and insight meditation communities must join forces for Burma's freedom Published by Mizzima Myanmar News READ HERE: eng.mizzima.com/2026/10/31/4… A personal reflection by Alan Clements

ALAN CLEMENTS Live from Bali The World Dharma Edge of My Life Finding Liberation Through Living Live spontaneous talks Daily, 8–8:30 a.m. Bali time Facebook Live • IG • YouTube • X I’m honored to invite you into a daily space of reflection—the world Dharma edge of my life, finding liberation through living. These will be spontaneous talks about what’s dear to my heart: the edges I’m living with, the fantasies, the joys, the sorrows, the grief, and the vision. Simply me, reflecting on the edges of me and sharing what I’m discovering along the way. It’s been a long time since I’ve stepped into public view this way. While I’m here in Bali, I want to be more visible and use my voice more actively—to speak from where I am, with the questions I’m living, the uncertainties I’m navigating, and the possibilities that keep calling me forward. If this speaks to you, I hope you’ll tune in. I’d be honored to have you join me.

Aung San Suu Kyi and the courage to lead beyond domination DVB: Democratic Voice of Burma October 26, 2026 Alan Clements english.dvb.no/aung-san-suu-…

Myanmar’s dictator -Min Aung Hlaing - threatens to “eliminate” journalists: Open Dialogue with the Myanmar Media and Journalists Is Far Preferable to Their “Elimination” An intimate appeal to conscience, to the Dhamma, and to the courage to end the war on your own people Dear friends, There’s been an alarming public announcement by the regime in Burma. The regime’s newspaper, Kyemon, has called for the “elimination of any destructive element inside or outside the country.” Alongside this threat, the regime is attempting to enlist Interpol in its pursuit of five independent media outlets—The Irrawaddy, Mizzima, DVB, Myanmar Now, and Khit Thit—and the journalists and contributing writers who supply their news, seeking their detention, the confiscation of their passports, and, if necessary, their deportation to Myanmar. As an author, journalist and contributing writer supplying these independent media outlets with essays, articles and commentary, I am among those directly affected by this malicious threat. The regime is seeking to turn international police cooperation into an instrument of political repression—to draw Interpol into complicity in its campaign against independent journalism. Its requests do not establish that Interpol has agreed to participate. The intimidation reaches beyond the organizations themselves to the people who sustain their journalism—the reporters, editors, and contributing writers supplying news, investigations, articles, and commentary, including those of us writing from exile or abroad. We are caring human beings exposing a dictatorship’s violence. The language of “elimination” casts a chilling shadow over our work and our lives. Min Aung Hlaing: Open Dialogue with the Myanmar Media and Journalists Is Far Preferable to Their “Elimination” Read my response here on my Substack alanclements.substack.com/p/…? Or Mizzima Myanmar News website and please share. eng.mizzima.com/2026/10/16/3…? The more widely we illuminate this urgent threat of “elimination” against independent media outlets and the journalists who supply their news, the greater our chance of prevailing. God bless this battle of conscience over domination, love over oppression, and dialogue over death. From my heart to yours. Thank you for caring and thank you for being in my life. Alan Clements Ubud, Bali READ ALAN'S PUBLISHED LETTER TO HIM ON HIS SUBSTACK alanclements.substack.com/p/…?

Min Aung Hlaing: Open Dialogue with the Myanmar Media and Journalists Is Far Preferable to Their “Elimination” by Alan Clements Read more : eng.mizzima.com/2026/10/16/3…

THE COURAGE TO BECOME FREE Patriarchy, Childhood Trauma, Psychedelic Healing, Forgiveness, and the Radical Transformation of a Human Life Alan Clements in Conversation with Treya Klassen Watch the video on YouTube youtu.be/xhfEztoEn8g?si=H9WT…

WATCH THE VIDEO BELOW THE FREEDOM OF THE HEART: Science, Wildness, Multi-Eyed Seeing, and the Courage to Belong Alan Clements in Conversation with Natalie Schmitt Every so often, I enter a conversation thinking I am going to interview someone, only to discover that something more mysterious has begun to happen. The questions loosen, biography recedes, accomplishment becomes secondary, and two people begin listening from somewhere beneath the prepared language. My conversation with Natalie Schmitt became that kind of encounter. Natalie is a conservation geneticist, scientist, inventor, adventurer, and lifelong student of the natural world. Her work has taken her from humpback whales and snow leopards to caribou in northern Canada, remote islands of Myanmar, the Southern Ocean near Antarctica, and collaborations with Indigenous and traditional communities. Yet what moved me most was not the extraordinary geography of her life, but what all those years of looking so closely at life have done to her heart. We found ourselves exploring the limits of science, Indigenous knowledge, conservation, violence, ecology, consciousness, trauma, intimacy, compassion, and what Natalie calls “multi-eyed seeing”—the humility of recognizing that no single way of knowing is sufficient to comprehend the astonishing complexity of being alive. Beneath it all was a question increasingly important to me: can we remain rigorous without becoming imprisoned by what we know, spiritually open without escaping reality, and vulnerable enough to love without surrendering our discernment or freedom? This unedited exchange is a small taste of our forthcoming book, Conversations with Visionary Women, a labor of love that Krystal Dyan and I have been creating together. Natalie’s is one of 26 long-form conversations already gathered, with another 15 remarkable women awaiting confirmation in the coming days. We are now moving toward completing, designing, and publishing the book sometime in November. I am deeply grateful to Natalie for her intelligence, vulnerability, curiosity, and generosity. I hope you will watch this glimpse into The Freedom of the Heart not in search of final answers, but with enough curiosity, tenderness, skepticism, and wonder to allow the questions themselves to open something unexpected. From my heart to yours, Alan Clements

Dear friends, I’ve just published a new essay on my Substack, based on an edited transcription of a World Dharma talk I gave here in Bali several years ago, titled The Pathology of Being Present: Mindful Intelligence, Moral Courage, Psychedelic Activism, and Why Awareness Without Conscience May Not Be Wisdom at All. At the heart of the essay is a question that has followed me through decades of meditation, activism, spiritual inquiry, and the bewildering education of being alive: Is being present necessarily wise? An assassin can be intensely present while looking through the scope of a rifle. Mindful intelligence asks the deeper questions: Who am I about to kill? Why do I believe this person is my enemy? Is what I believe true? And will this action actually serve the peace I claim to want? The essay explores the difference between awareness alone and awareness joined with conscience, discernment, moral imagination, and responsibility. It asks whether our practices merely help us become more comfortable with the world as it is, or awaken within us the intelligence and courage to question what we are participating in and what kind of world our choices are creating. The essay is offered freely. If it speaks to you, please share it with others and subscribe to my Substack. And if you feel inspired to offer a donation in support of my continuing work, it would be deeply appreciated and can be made directly on the Substack page. Please read the article on my Substack here: alanclements.substack.com/..…...? The Pathology of Being Present⁠ From my heart to yours, Alan Clements Bali, 2026

A Life of Inquiry in a Complex World Announcing A Video Guidebook to the Practice of World Dharma - Watch the 2 min Trailer worlddharma.com/items/taking… The Dharma Art of Mindful Intelligence · Finding Liberation Through Living Alan Clements Alan’s Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. alanclements.substack.com/p/…? To learn more about Awakening World Dharma: Liberation Through Living, visit the World Dharma PayHip page: payhip.com/worlddharma Dear friends, I wanted to share something with you that feels especially close to my heart. After nearly fifty years of living, questioning, practicing, traveling, teaching, creating, loving, losing, beginning again, and trying to understand what freedom might actually mean in the beautiful and often bewildering complexity of being alive, I’m very happy to finally offer this newly curated work. A Life of Inquiry in a Complex World, introduces A Video Guidebook to the Practice of World Dharma—a ten-hour, thirty-seven-chapter journey through many of the thoughts, stories, questions, feelings, and insights that have shaped my life and what I have come to call the Dharma art of mindful intelligence: finding liberation through living. I’ve also included a short video introduction of just a few minutes, which I hope you’ll enjoy. The complete Video Guidebook is now available through the links in the Substack article. You can read the essay, listen to the audio version on Substack, and enter the video book in whatever way feels natural to you. payhip.com/worlddharma None of this came into being alone. A deep bow of grace to the generous donor whose support made the original Video Guidebook possible, to her beloved daughter who undertook the editing, to Jeff Hellman for restoring and recently curating this body of work, and to Krystall Onee for helping bring the new trailer to life. So many hours of care have gone into this, and at this stage of my life it means a great deal to me to be able to share it with you. The work is gifted freely. If something here speaks to you, please consider sharing it with someone you love and subscribing to my Substack. And if you wish to support the continuation of this work, a donation of any amount can be made there as well. It genuinely helps keep the larger World Dharma vision alive and unfolding. This feels less like a culmination than a new beginning. From my heart to yours, thank you for being here, for receiving this, and perhaps for carrying it a little further into the world. Alan Clements Bali, 2026 To learn more about Awakening World Dharma: Liberation Through Living, visit the World Dharma PayHip page: payhip.com/worlddharma A Life of Inquiry in a Complex World Announcing A Video Guidebook to the Practice of World Dharma The Dharma Art of Mindful Intelligence · Finding Liberation Through Living By Alan Clements I have spent much of my life wondering what freedom actually means when it is removed from the sanctuary of abstraction and placed inside the beautiful, erotic, frightening, political, intimate, mortal actuality of being alive. What does mindfulness mean when the person sitting beside you is dying, when a country you love is being destroyed by dictatorship, when a relationship breaks apart, when your own body becomes uncertain, when war enters the village, when desire overturns your carefully constructed identity, or when you wake in the middle of the night astonished that consciousness exists at all? After nearly fifty years of living with these questions, I am releasing something unlike any book I have previously made: A Video Guidebook to the Practice of World Dharma, a ten-hour, thirty-seven-chapter journey into what I have come to understand as the Dharma art of mindful intelligence—the art and activism of finding liberation through living. This is not a course in Buddhism, although Buddhism is woven deeply through my life. It is not a program for self-improvement, and I have no interest in manufacturing a more spiritually decorated version of ourselves. Nor is it a collection of answers pretending that the immeasurable complexities of consciousness can be domesticated into reassuring formulas. The video book grew from a more intimate proposition: that perhaps the most consequential territory we will ever encounter is the living immediacy of our own mind, and that learning to know this mind—its tenderness and terror, conditioning and imagination, intelligence and confusion, its capacities for cruelty, self-deception, beauty and extraordinary love—may be among the most radical responsibilities of being human. I first encountered this understanding in Burma, now Myanmar, where I entered monastic life and spent years practicing meditation in silence among monks and nuns under some of the great Buddhist meditation masters of that era. My teachers repeatedly brought the inquiry back to something disarmingly simple. The essential matter was not becoming Buddhist. It was knowing the mind. Not possessing a philosophy about consciousness, but becoming intimate with consciousness as it actually moves through the body: sensation becoming feeling, feeling becoming thought, thought becoming identity, identity becoming action, and action becoming the world we collectively inhabit. Mindfulness, understood in this way, was never intended to become an escape from life. It was an invitation to become almost unbearably intimate with it. But what I eventually came to call World Dharma did not emerge fully formed inside a monastery. Its roots were certainly there, in the silence and rigor of Burma, but its actual form emerged through the collision between contemplative practice and the extremities of lived experience. It grew through my years in Burma and decades of traveling the world, and came into sharper focus during the war in the former Yugoslavia and later in Sarajevo, Bosnia, where the spiritual vocabulary I had inherited was forced into proximity with war, grief, displacement, ethnic hatred, courage, theatre, intimacy and the astonishing persistence of ordinary human tenderness. There, the distance between meditation and history became impossible for me to maintain. Dharma had to be capable of entering the burning building of the world. And it had to enter the burning building of one’s own life as well. Across the decades there was love and suffering, romance and rejection, belonging and exile, addiction and sobriety, solitude and relationship, health and illness, the ecstasy of creative expression and the devastation of watching what one cherishes disappear. These were not interruptions to some more authentic spiritual journey. Increasingly, I understood that they were the journey. The contradictions themselves became the practice ground, because liberation, if the word has any living meaning, cannot depend upon arranging existence so that only the experiences we prefer are permitted to enter consciousness. Something began emerging from these apparent opposites that I could no longer adequately describe simply as Buddhism. It was not a rejection of Buddhism; quite the contrary. My gratitude for the Buddha, Dharma, Sangha and the teachers who introduced me to the extraordinary discipline of mindful awareness remains immeasurable. But the inquiry had crossed boundaries. It had become a kind of trans-Buddhism, a trans-spirituality, not because it had transcended the need for ethics, discipline or contemplative depth, but because life itself had become too vast to be contained within a single religious identity. Psychology entered. Art entered. Eros entered. Politics entered. Theatre entered. Mortality entered. The body entered. Creativity and activism entered. Nothing essential could be left outside the door. I began calling this World Dharma: an inquiry spacious enough to draw from the contemplative genius of the East and the psychological, artistic, scientific and existential investigations of the West without being imprisoned by either. It is trans-spiritual without being anti-spiritual, and it enters political reality without requiring ideological obedience. It is the art and activism of finding liberation through living. For me, this means refusing the ancient temptation to divide reality into the spiritual and the profane, the sacred and the damaged, the awakened and the unworthy. If Dharma cannot illuminate consciousness in the unedited conditions of human existence, then what precisely are we awakening from, and what are we awakening into? This understanding changed the meaning of practice for me. Silence remained precious, but silence alone was insufficient. Meditation remained indispensable, but meditation could not become an alibi for disengagement. Compassion had to acquire hands and feet. Awareness had to become relationship, creativity, courage, discernment and, when necessary, resistance. The inward revolution and the outward world could no longer be separated so conveniently. The fear we refuse to investigate privately can become remarkably dangerous when organized collectively. Conversely, the tenderness discovered while sitting alone with our own vulnerability can influence how we love another person, raise a child, create art, confront injustice, accompany the dying, or refuse to dehumanize someone with whom we profoundly disagree. At the heart of World Dharma is also a fierce devotion to truth, and therefore to learning the difference between radical independent thinking and the strangely Kafkaesque condition of becoming unconsciously inhabited by propaganda, misinformation, conformity and collective suggestion. The danger is not merely that somebody else may deceive us. More intimate, and perhaps more difficult to recognize, is our extraordinary capacity to participate in our own deception—to protect identities and certainties through denial, projection, rationalization and selective perception. Mindfulness at its most uncompromising asks us to observe this machinery within ourselves before condemning it in others. To know one’s own mind is therefore an act of epistemic freedom: the willingness to distinguish reality from illusion, evidence from belief, what we know from what we merely want to be true, while remaining sufficiently humble to recognize how easily certainty itself can become another hiding place. There is something luminous in that intimacy with truth. Awakening, as I have come to understand it, is not omniscience, spiritual perfection or immunity from confusion. It may be something far more tender and demanding: an increasingly undefended relationship with actuality. We begin noticing the stories we manufacture, the wounds from which we interpret the world, the identities we defend, the information we accept because it confirms us, and the realities we resist because they threaten who we imagine ourselves to be. The luminosity is not somewhere beyond this human complexity. It appears within the very act of seeing clearly, of becoming less frightened of what is true, and discovering that intimate awareness can hold contradiction without immediately converting it into ideology. A Video Guidebook to the Practice of World Dharma is a distillation of this terrain. Its thirty-seven chapters range between approximately eight and twenty-five minutes, creating ten hours of teachings, reflections, stories and experiential inquiries. Accompanying them are sixty-one one-minute World Dharma practice reflections: brief invitations to interrupt the momentum of ordinary consciousness and return attention to what is actually happening. I wanted the form itself to remain human, something you can watch slowly, return to, question, disagree with, sit silently after, or carry into the circumstances of your own day. Perhaps that is what I most hope this video book becomes: not something you merely consume, but something you enter into relationship with. I hope you occasionally stop the video. I hope something I say unsettles a cherished assumption enough that you close the screen and walk outside. I hope you test every observation against your own experience rather than accepting it because I spent years in monasteries or decades writing, teaching and traveling through these worlds. Dharma worthy of the name should deepen our capacity for inquiry rather than increase our dependency upon authority. I am not interested in creating followers. I am interested in the possibility that we might become more profoundly trustworthy to ourselves without confusing self-trust with the certainty that we are always right. Announcing A Video Guidebook to the Practice of World Dharma payhip.com/worlddharma This feels especially urgent now. We inhabit a world in which artificial intelligence is transforming our relationship with knowledge and creativity, ecological disruption confronts us with consequences that transcend borders, and technologies engineered to capture attention increasingly mediate our experience of reality. Information travels through algorithms, corporations, governments, political movements, social tribes and increasingly sophisticated systems capable of generating convincing simulations. Under such conditions, the quality of our attention has become a civilizational question. If we cannot recognize when fear has captured thought, when desire is masquerading as truth, when belonging requires the surrender of conscience, or when an algorithm has quietly begun determining what deserves our attention, freedom can become a word we continue using while losing contact with the experience it describes. And still, through all of this, I remain astonished by the maddening miracle of being alive. Beneath our strategies and identities remains this mysterious capacity to become conscious of consciousness itself, to interrupt inherited patterns, to forgive, to apologize, to begin again, to make beauty beside devastation, to risk intimacy after heartbreak, and to discover tenderness precisely where certainty has failed us. I have witnessed these capacities in monasteries and war zones, in Burma and Sarajevo, among artists and dissidents, lovers and strangers, and in the strange laboratory of my own imperfect life. They are among the reasons I continue to believe that awakening is not withdrawal from the human predicament. It is an increasingly intimate participation in it. Perhaps this is ultimately what World Dharma means to me. It is not another belief system to defend, another identity to acquire, another spiritual tribe to join, or another ideology through which to divide the world into those who understand and those who do not. It is an invitation into intimacy with experience itself. It asks whether awareness can become sufficiently spacious to encounter the whole catastrophe without abandoning intelligence, tenderness or the instinct for freedom. It asks whether we can remain awake enough to see what is happening, intimate enough to feel it, independent enough to question it, and compassionate enough not to turn our awakening into another weapon against one another. So I offer A Video Guidebook to the Practice of World Dharma not as the culmination of an answer, but as the distillation of an inquiry. After fifty years, I know considerably less about the mystery of existence than I once imagined I might. But I care more deeply about the quality of consciousness we bring to that mystery, and whether our brief appearance here can become more lucid, courageous, compassionate, creative and free. I invite you into these thirty-seven encounters not so that you can follow my journey, but so that perhaps something within them will encourage you to enter your own life more completely, including the places you have been taught to avoid, and discover within the complexity of living an intelligence no doctrine could ever give you. Perhaps freedom was never waiting somewhere beyond the contradictions. Perhaps the invitation of Dharma has always been more intimate and more demanding: to awaken here, within the unfinished actuality of our lives, and through the immeasurable vulnerability of being human, learn the art of finding liberation through living. My heart to yours, Alan Clements Bali, 2026 To learn more about Awakening World Dharma: Liberation Through Living, visit the World Dharma PayHip page: payhip.com/worlddharma Alan’s Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Thanks for reading Alan’s Substack! This post is public so feel free to share it. alanclements.substack.com/p/…? Announcing A Video Guidebook to the Practice of World Dharma worlddharma.com/items/taking… About Alan Clements Alan Clements is an author, investigative journalist, performing artist, former Buddhist monk, and human-rights activist. One of the first Westerners to ordain as a Buddhist monk in Burma, now Myanmar, he trained in intensive vipassana meditation under the Venerable Mahāsi Sayadaw and the Venerable Sayadaw U Pandita. After being forced to leave Burma by the military dictatorship in 1984, his work expanded across contemplative practice, human rights, journalism, literature, theatre and spoken-word performance. For more than four decades, Clements has explored the relationship between inner freedom and the forces shaping our collective lives. His books include The Voice of Hope, based on his conversations with Nobel Peace laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, Burma’s Revolution of the Spirit, Instinct for Freedom, Burma’s Voices of Freedom, Conversation with a Dictator, Unsilenced, and Politics of the Heart. World Dharma is the evolving expression of his life’s inquiry into mindful intelligence, freedom of conscience, creativity, compassion, and the art of finding liberation through living.

Now Released Worldwide -- Watch the 2 min Intro below AWAKENING WORLD DHARMA LIBERATION THROUGH LIVING A Newly Curated 10-Hour, 37-Chapter Video Book with 61 Bonus Support Clips The Dharma Art of Mindful Intelligence By Alan Clements To learn more about Awakening World Dharma 10 hour video book, Finding Liberation Through Living, visit the World Dharma PayHip page below. payhip.com/worlddharma We are honored to share with you this newly curated World Dharma Video Book, Awakening World Dharma: Liberation Through Living. This ten-hour video book brings together 37 chapters and 61 bonus support clips, drawn from decades of inquiry, meditation, teaching, writing, dialogue, travel, activism, creative exploration, and the unpredictable education of being alive. Although the material ranges widely, one question moves quietly through it all: What does it mean to live freely and consciously in the world as it actually is?