Fleet Maull: The Story of the Drug Smuggler Who Became a Buddhist Dharma Teacher

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The Sydcast is all about intimate and informative conversations with fascinating people you may not know. Until now. Because everyone has a story.

Listen in as Syd talks to entrepreneurs, community leaders, professional athletes, politicians, academics, authors, musicians, and many more about who they are and how they got there.

Sydney Finkelstein is an award winning professor at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College, and a best-selling author of Superbosses and 25 other books. He’s written for the Harvard Business Review, the BBC, Fortune, Forbes, the Wall Street Journal, and more academic journals than you’d care to know about. He spends his time asking questions, and sometimes, even answering them.

Episode Summary

In a search to live freely, Fleet Maull made regrettable choices that caused his life to take a dramatic turn, but also provided the impetus for a spiritual awakening. That transformative journey led him to spearhead prison reform programs and mindfulness training programs for public-safety sectors that are changing and saving lives. Syd talks with the Prison Monk about how the choices we make lead us to the person we become, in this episode of The Sydcast.

Syd Finkelstein

Syd Finkelstein is the Steven Roth Professor of Management at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College. He holds a Master’s degree from the London School of Economics and a Ph.D. from Columbia University. Professor Finkelstein has published 25 books and 90 articles, including the bestsellers Why Smart Executives Fail and Superbosses: How Exceptional Leaders Master the Flow of Talent, which LinkedIn Chairman Reid Hoffman calls the “leadership guide for the Networked Age.” He is also a Fellow of the Academy of Management, a consultant and speaker to leading companies around the world, and a top 25 on the Global Thinkers 50 list of top management gurus. Professor Finkelstein’s research and consulting work often relies on in-depth and personal interviews with hundreds of people, an experience that led him to create and host his own podcast, The Sydcast, to uncover and share the stories of all sorts of fascinating people in business, sports, entertainment, politics, academia, and everyday life.

Fleet Maull

Fleet Maull, PhD, CMT-P is an author, meditation teacher, consultant, coach, seminar leader, motivational speaker, social entrepreneur, and peacemaker. He is the founder of Prison Mindfulness Institute, National Prison Hospice Association, Windhorse Seminars & Consulting, the Center for Contemplative End of Life Care at Naropa University and co-founder of the Engaged Mindfulness Institute, Center for Mindfulness in Public Safety and the Upaya Zen Center's Buddhist Chaplaincy Training Program. He is a senior teacher in two venerable Buddhist traditions as an Acharya (senior Dharma teacher) in the Tibetan Buddhist Shambhala lineage and a Roshi (Zen master) in the Zen Peacemaker Order and Soto Zen lineage.

Dr. Maull taught socially engaged Buddhism, Buddhist psychology, and contemplative approaches to peacemaking and social action at Naropa University from 1999 - 2009 and is a frequent guest lecturer and conference presenter at other universities like Harvard, Brown, Emory and the University of Colorado. He is also a frequent keynote speaker at national conferences on mindfulness, criminal justice, end of life care, and trauma-informed care.

He is the author of Radical Responsibility: How to Move Beyond Blame, Fearlessly Live Your Highest Purpose, and Become an Unstoppable Force for Good and Dharma in Hell: The Prison Writings of Fleet Maull along with numerous book chapters and articles in peer reviewed professional journals.

Acharya Maull travels world-wide offering mindfulness retreats, transformational seminars, prison training, first responder training, and bearing witness retreats. He has trained correctional officers, law enforcement, and other public safety professionals in California, Colorado, Connecticut, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Oregon, Rhode Island, and Ontario, Canada.

Insights from this episode:

Details on how a drug addiction and a counter-culture mentality led Fleet to being in prison for drug smuggling.
Benefits federal prison afforded Fleet beyond improved facilities over county jail; perspective, compassion, and a focus on serving others.
Difficulties Fleet has faced outside of prison including the loss of his parents, his wife, and, very recently, his son and the comfort his faith provides.
How to find joy and positivity even in the worst circumstances by caring for others.
Details on Fleet’s mission to reform the prison system from punitive to rehabilitative and provide mindfulness training that extends beyond the prison walls.
How to get started in practicing mindfulness and receive tangible benefits.
Differences between Fleet’s mindfulness training and other available programs.

Quotes from the show:

On why Fleet got into selling drugs: “I was doing it just to keep living outside the system and I justified it with this us versus them thinking … I was so self-deluded that I actually felt it was a noble calling.” – Fleet Maull
“All my artifices of justification finally completely fell away and I had to face the fact that I had been involved in something extremely harmful.” – Fleet Maull
On how Fleet dealt going to prison: “I was practicing meditation and that was my salvation, to work with my mind in that way.” – Fleet Maull
On finding purpose: “[Prison] is a hellish place and I’m here for a reason.” – Fleet Maull
“In my tradition, the transition from one life to the next, we believe there is further life and that transition is very important.” – Fleet Maull
“We felt it very important to get mindfulness into mainstream rehabilitation programming and drug-treatment programming, and post-release programming, and so forth, to do that it had to be secular and it had to be evidence-based.” – Fleet Maull
“I think this idea of mindfulness training and other work of the type that you’ve been involved with has got to be helpful for people that have high-stress jobs.” – Syd Finkelstein
On why people struggle with practicing mindfulness: “They might get a few moments [of peace] but it’s not tangible enough to outweigh all the distractions, the boringness of it, and the difficulty in doing it.” – Fleet Maull
“The only place we have any power, that’s with ourselves.” – Fleet Maull