Fleet Maull - Meditating as If Your Life Depended on It

Fleet Maull was never interested in pursuing a conventional life, but when he found himself confronted with the stark reality of thirty years without parole in a maximum security prison for drug smuggling charges, he had to come to grips with the consequences of his actions under circumstances more demeaning and more violent than he had ever imagined. Would he succumb to the horrors of his devastated life or make a decision to live, no matter what? With rare courage and unflinching commitment, Maull tackled his fate by diving into his Tibetan Buddhist meditation practice by night and teaching literacy classes and providing hospice care to inmates by day. During his time behind bars, he completed a strenuous Tibetan initiatory practice that entailed performing 100,000 prostrations in his tiny cell, took vows to become a novice monk, and managed to navigate the unspoken and often life-threatening maze of social codes that govern prison life. Maull talks with EnlightenNext’s founder Andrew Cohen and senior associate editor Ross Robertson about the crushing lows and blissful highs of his ordeal in this riveting account of the decision to become “absolutely radically committed to eradicating any kind of negativity or uselessness out of my life.”

BIO

Sensei Fleet Maull, M.A., Ph.D. candidate, is a meditation teacher, trainer, executive coach, consultant, university teacher and activist working for peace, prison reform and social transformation. He is a senior student of the late Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche and a meditation teacher in the Shambhala Buddhist tradition. He is also a senior student and Dharma successor of Zen master and social entrepreneur, Roshi Bernie Glassman, and a senior teacher and ordained priest in the Zen Peacemaker Community. Fleet currently studies with Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche and Roshi Bernie Glassman, as well as the Venerable Thrangu Rinpoche and Khenpo Tsultim Gyatso. He is also a holder of the Way of Council and a certified trainer with the Ojai Foundation’s Center for Council Training, HeartStream Education and New Line Consulting.

Fleet is the president of New Line Consulting Colorado and maintains a very active practice in management consulting, corporate training and executive coaching. He is the founder and director of Prison Dharma Network, National Prison Hospice Association and the Colorado Peacemaker Institute. Fleet helped start the first inside prison hospice program, initiating a prison hospice movement that now includes over 50 hospice programs in U.S. state and federal prisons. He is adjunct faculty at Naropa University where he teaches courses in engaged spirituality and contemplative and integral approaches to social action, peacemaking, and politics. He is also the founder and director of the Center for Contemplative End of Life Care Programs at Naropa University.

Fleet leads meditation retreats, activist trainings and street retreats throughout the United States and Europe, where he also visits prisons and jails doing transformational work with both prisoners and prison staff. He is a frequent presenter at conferences on prison work, end of life care, activism and engaged spirituality. His peacemaking activities range from the streets of U.S. cities, to former concentration camps in Poland, to Israel-Palestine, and the forgotten world inside our jails and prisons. Fleet is the author of numerous articles and book chapters and the recently released book, Dharma in Hell, the Prison Writings of Fleet Maull. He has been interviewed widely in the print, radio, and television media, including National Public Radio’s Fresh Air program and the nationally syndicated E-Town.