Tami Simon: You’re listening to Insights at the Edge. Today, my guest is Fleet Maull. Fleet is a longtime student of Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche and is an acharya—or senior mindfulness meditation teacher—in the Shambhala International Meditation Community. Fleet founded the Prison Dharma Network—now called The Prison Mindfulness Institute—in 1989 while he was in the midst of serving a 30-year sentence with no parole for drug smuggling at a maximum security federal prison medical facility. In addition, in 1991, Fleet founded the National Prison Hospice Association, launching the movement that now includes hospice programs in over 75 state and federal prisons.
Fleet Maull is the author of the book Dharma in Hell: The Prison Writings of Fleet Maull and leads prison programs, meditation retreats, chaplaincy and hospice trainings, activist trainings, bearing-witness retreats, and street retreats throughout the world. He’s also the founder and executive director of the Peacemaker Institute, and he’s cofounder of the Uppaya Chaplaincy Program.
In this episode if Insights at the Edge, Fleet Maull and I spoke about how the only way out is through, and how this teaching helped Fleet deal with regret and fueled his focus to create as much good as possible while he was in prison. We also talked about the teaching of basic goodness, and how Fleet tested this view of basic goodness while he was in prison—[as well as] how it informs his work today with the Prison Mindfulness Institute. We also talked about service and how devoting ourselves to caring for others keeps us from being small and only focused on our own suffering. Finally, we talked about a vision for transformation of the criminal justice system, and what it might mean to work for the creation of an enlightened society. Here’s my conversation with the very truth-telling and inspiring Fleet Maull:
Now, you are a very unusual person and have lived such an unusual life. It’s true. That you’ve spent approximately 15 years on the inside of the prison system as an inmate-dharma practitioner, if you will, and now you’ve spent something like 15 years on the outside—but bringing dharma and meditation into prisons. To begin our conversation, I’d love it if you could help dispel what I think are misconceptions—and I imagine there are many—that people might have about meditating in prison, and what that’s actually like.
Fleet Maull: OK, I’ll do my best. It was actually 14 years that I spent inside, then some time under supervision when I got out. Interestingly enough, I also spent 10 years as a practitioner before I went to prison, which begs the question of why I ended up in prison. Suffice it to say, I was kind of thickheaded and one of those folks back in the ‘60s and ‘70s that got very into the whole counterculture movement and everything that was involved in it.
Prisons are extremely chaotic and noisy places, for the most part. So, they’re not what most people would think of as the ideal setting for meditation or developing a meditation practice.
You also had very little or any privacy. I spent the first seven months in an extremely chaotic, noisy county jail. Then, when I did arrive in federal prison, where I did my time, I spent about the first two and a half years living in a number of large dormitories. The first one—I think—had 28 men living in it, and then I went down to a 20-man and a 14 and an 8 or something like that. I eventually worked my way into one of the few single cells on the living unit where I lived, and managed to hang on to that by staying out of trouble (for the most part) for the rest of my time.
And that was a real gift—having that single cell—because it really allowed me to focus even more on my dharma practice, my study, and gave me that space. It was still extremely chaotic just on the other side of my door. In fact, in the evenings—from when you come back from dinner all the way through to lights-out at around 10:30, and then sometimes beyond depending on whether the guard enforces lights-out—it’s just chaotic in the halls. Just groups yelling and screaming and shucking and jiving, and all kinds of craziness going on.
But, that was always just right outside the door. Still, it was a real gift having that single cell.
So, it’s a challenging place to practice meditation. Actually, during the early years, when I lived in those big dorms, I would either try to stay on the top bunk. Most people—you know, seniority-wise—you start off on the top bunk and then you move to a bottom bunk, and then you move to a smaller room and so forth. I preferred the top bunk because, first of all, I had head clearance to be able to sit and meditate on the top bunk, where you didn’t on the bottom bunk. Secondly, I could sit up there at night and nobody paid that much attention to me.
But, later, I also began clearing out the trash closets that they at the entryway to these big dorms. I’d take a folding chair and go in there. I’d put some of the brooms and stuff outside of the closet so people could get at it. I’d go in there and sit and practice, sometimes for hours at a time on weekends. I had a little window in the door so people could look in. In fact, they’d open the door to go in there and get something, and they’d see me and be kind of startled.
In the summer months, it was just like a sauna. I would just sit in there and pour sweat. But, it did give me the opportunity to do my practice.
Getting locked up was a huge wake-up call for me, obviously—and the kind of split life I’d been leading of being a dharma practitioner on the one hand and this kind of crazy, cocaine outlaw on the other hand. That all came to an abrupt halt and I really focused on transforming my life. So, I was hell-bent on practicing any way I could, any time I could in prison.
But, sometimes people reference prisons as monasteries. There are some similarities in that you get three hots and a cot, right? You’re provided with meals and a bed. Everybody wears more or less the same clothes, and you don’t have a lot of responsibilities in the outside world.
But that’s about where the parallel ends because monasteries are designed as environments to be contemplative and to support mindfulness and wakefulness—whether they may be Catholic or Buddhist or other types of monasteries—or Hindu ashrams. But, they’re set up to support the practice and prisons are not that way at all. In fact, generally it’s a mixture of chaos and people just wanting to numb out and kind of go to sleep, and sleep their time away.
So, people do get these ideas. But, having said that, for me—because the great gift was that I came in with a strong practice and a strong practice background, and with the wake-up of coming to prison—and the devastation of what I had done to my son, who was nine years old when I got locked up—my dedication to practice allowed me to really make that environment my monastery, even though it wasn’t what one would normally think of as such.
TS: That’s interesting. So, you hear that phrase—“Turning a prison into a monastery”—[and] you don’t feel like, “Oh my God. Could you please not say that kind of thing? It’s so fantastical and unlike the violence and chaos that’s in a prison. Please don’t say that.” It sounds like you actually found a way to turn—as you said—your prison experience into a practice environment—monastic environment, if you will.
FM: Yes, I did. And I actually took monastic vows for the time that I was in prison.
You know, I’m kind of ambivalent about it because I’ve also—I was interviewed for quite a number of articles and some radio interviews while I was in prison. Sometimes interviewers would say, “Well, prison seems to have really worked for you. It really has brought about transformation and you’re doing a lot of really great things with your life.” I would say, “Yes,” but I’d always have to also reflect that, for the vast majority of people who go to prison, it’s actually very damaging and they come out worse than they went in.
So, in general, prisons are—in my view—mostly pretty damaging and inhumane environments. But, with the strength of practice, I was able to do that.
Now, I’m not the only one. I certainly am one of the progenitors of this kind of work—[along with] Bo and Sita Lozoff. We unfortunately lost Bo Lozoff to a motorcycle accident a couple years back, but his wife Sita continues the work. But, they founded the Prison Ashram Project and the Human Kindness Foundation many, many years ago. They had been in touch with many, many long-term prisoners. And of course, through our work, we’ve been in touch with many lifers and long-term prisoners who have, in some really tough places, become really serious practitioners and found their own way to make that very hellish place their monastery, in a sense—their practice place.
But, it certainly doesn’t lend itself to that. So, I suppose you could say that if you’re able to do that, it’s a very powerful field of practice because of everything you’re confronted with.
In the outside world, we have a little more control of our environments—a lot of us—at least those who have that privilege. So, it’s often a little easier to not be so wakeful and not be so mindful because we can kind of move around in our world with a lot of familiarity and sense of control. Whereas in that environment—in the environment in prison—the environment is in your face constantly. You’re just immediately aware—especially if you have any background in practice—you’re immediately aware of your state of mind at all times because it’s just in that confrontation with the environment.
So, in that sense, it’s a very powerful place to practice. If you have a practice, it’s probably a very challenging place for people to begin a practice.
TS: I’m curious: you talked about the noise of the environment. What did you learn from meditating in a super-noisy situation?
FM: Well, I think it’s just another aspect of working with our minds. Interestingly, at some point during prison I remember reading a book by the Korean Zen teacher Seung Sahn, who’s famous for the expression, “Only don’t. Only don’t know mind. Only don’t know.” This book had correspondence from students in it, and I think it was a prisoner who was writing to him and talking about the noise and the chaos. He spoke about it as being a very advantageous opportunity for practice.
But, in my experience, that was the case because when we’re practicing various forms of mindfulness-awareness meditation—Shamatha-Vipassana meditation—we learn to work with all of the sense perceptions. We may start really grounding our practice in the sensate field of the body and the breath, but we also work with visual perceptions and auditory and olfactory and gustatory perceptions. Sound is one that’s really immediately available.
Sound also can be very advantageous for practice because it’s not so solid. We can all get in working with our thoughts and, once we have a little practice under our belts, to see the ephemeral nature of thoughts and that they kind of come and go. They come and go, and they come out of nowhere. They disappear to nowhere and they’re very ephemeral. It’s easier to see that kind of emptiness or non-solidity within our thoughts.
Now, if you’re mediating on physical contact or a wooden table in front of you, it might be a little harder to get that sense. But sound, kind of like thought, comes and goes and is more ephemeral in nature. So, it’s actually a very interesting thing to practice with—perhaps from a Mahamudra perspective, for example—of doing those kind of investigations into the nature of mind.
TS: But Fleet, I’m also curious—I guess—how you would deal with the pure agitation and irritation. I know, for me, if I just have a neighbor who’s using their lawnmower or something like that, it’s like, “Oh, I don’t want to meditate while there’s someone mowing their lawn next door.” Just how irritated I would be. That’s what I’m imagining.
FM: Again, that’s what I was thinking—how that environment in prison is so much in your face all the time. I really could really tell the quality of my practice all the time—especially once I had that single cell.
I would come out into the hallway—because you almost always would step out into a certain level of chaos, especially in the evenings. When my practice was kind of good—or at least felt good and I was in that kind of mode—I could step out into that environment, and see and hear the chaos—feel the chaos—and just kind of go, “Ah, interesting.” When I wasn’t quite in that mode, I’d step out there [and] what immediately was in my face was irritation or resistance.
So, when sound would come up and the chaos in the environment would come up, paying attention to how I was reacting to it—whether it did bring up resistance or irritation or pain or aversion—that was something to really see about my state of mind. And then noticing when the aversion didn’t arise, and there was just a sort of curiosity about the energy of the chaos and the noise in the environment.
So, that was kind of a real sort of marker of practice in a certain way. It was just interesting to experience those differences. Not that at any one point in time, it’s about making judgments about the practice. But, just seeing those differences really helped me tune into really working with my state of mind as a practice—like having my very state of mind be an object of the mindfulness and awareness practice.
TS: Now, you also mentioned, Fleet, that when you were incarcerated originally, that you had a son who was nine years old at the time. There you were, leaving your son [and] not being able to be there as a father. I’m curious how you worked with the regret and self-recrimination and blame—how you worked with that as part of your dharma practice.
FM: Well, it was one of the great challenges. I went in the beginning—especially during the seven months I spent in a county jail during my trial and sentencing, and then awaiting transfer to a federal prison—that was a real dark night of the soul experience for me.
Once I got to the federal prison and became really engaged in that world, at that point—just because I became very engaged in teaching and serving and helping to create the first hospice program in a prison anywhere, and teaching meditation—getting very engaged in that community—that it wasn’t that same kind of dark night of the soul experience. But, the underlying devastation or regret just fueled my practice.
You know that expression, “Practicing like one’s hair is on fire?” Well, it really was the way I felt. I had this real urgency to practice, and I became really dedicated to eradicating any of the negativity out of my life. I wanted to leave my son a better legacy than just “his dad went to prison.”
I had no surety at all that I would survive prison. I went in with a 30-year, no-parole sentence and it took me a few years to figure out the “good time” and all that, and figure out that I would actually end up doing 14-and-a-half on that if I stayed out of trouble—which still felt like forever at that time.
But, I was determined to leave a better legacy for my son than just, “Your dad went to prison,” or even died in prison.
I was in touch with my son. I stayed in touch with him. He and his mom [were] from Peru, and so they moved back to Peru. I stayed in touch with them by correspondence and a little bit by phone when I could afford to every now and then. But, my family very kindly brought my son up every other year from South America and he spent—during his school vacation down there, which was the wintertime here—he came up and spent a month or two months living with my family. They would bring him down on weekends to see me.
Another time, close friends in the Shambhala Buddhist Community—which is my primary sangha and community—also paid to bring Robert up one time to visit with me. They also paid for him to go up to a youth program called Sun Camp up in Nova Scotia when he was there that time.
So, I was able to stay in touch with him. But, the devastation and regret I felt about my son, about letting my teacher down, about letting my family down—and then, as I spent time in recovery and really saw the harmful nature and the impact of what I’d been involved in in terms of trafficking in drugs, that deep regret about the harm I’d caused through those activities—all of that just became fuel to really just dedicate my life to practice and service while I was in there.
TS: Now, Fleet, I’m wondering if somebody’s listening and they have a level of regret in their life, but it hasn’t turned into fuel. It’s just something that stews around in their inner experience. They just sort of circle around in it. What might you be able to suggest to help that person find fuel from the experience instead of just more self-terrible talk?
FM: Yes. Well, I think there’s two things. One: my practice—I’m very fortunate to have been a close student of Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche back in the 1970s and early ‘80s. My practice has always been really grounded in this idea of basic goodness—or in more Buddhist language, perhaps buddha nature—and really having a sense of my own inherent goodness.
So, even though I was devastated about what I had done and recognizing the incredible selfishness of the decisions I’d been making for so long and the negative impact it had had on my son and others—and the deep regret I felt [around] that—that didn’t really obscure for me my faith in my own innate goodness and the goodness of others. It also gave me the strength and resilience to really embrace that regret.
I remember listening to a videotape—I think with Jack Kornfield—while I was in prison. He referenced—I think this is the right reference. But, he referenced a placard or a sign that’s on the wall of a Christian monastery somewhere in England, in the United Kingdom. He’d either been there or heard about it. I can’t remember the story. But, the big placard said, “The only way out is through.” I think that’s become a common expression—and very much my experience.
For me, the most painful thing about being incarcerated is being separated from your loved ones. I think most prisoners would say the same.
Prisons vary in terms of how hellish an environment they are. There are no “nice prisons.” People talk about country club prisons, or some of the minimum security prisons. They may be better on some level, but most of them are so overcrowded that they’re pretty hellish anyway. And then some prisons are just off-the-charts, complete hell realms.
So, there’s a lot of cause for suffering in the environment of a prison. But still, I think for most people the most painful thing is being separated from your loved ones. That pain for me—especially in terms of my son—would come up at times that would just [be] almost like blinding me on the spot. It was just like this flash of white heat—just excruciating agony and pain. It felt like I was going to die. [I] couldn’t withstand [it].
I remember this hitting me in my cell and feeling like I just wanted to smash my head on the concrete wall. Somehow, because of my practice—and I was practicing a lot. I didn’t try to do this. It just happened. But, there was that agonizing pain that was just felt like it was going to burn my brain away. Then, just very naturally, a kind of awareness formed around that and expanded. That pain and agony dissolved in the midst of that larger awareness. Then there I was on the other side of it, feeling bliss—which was a very disturbing experience the first time it happened.
It was like one minute I’m in this devastation and agony about my son and not being there for him and being separated. In the next moment, I’m in this blissful state of heightened awareness. That was very disturbing.
But, over time, I kind of came to recognize what it was, realizing that by embracing the pain, embracing the regret, embracing the devastation that on the other side of that is some kind of release—some kind of freedom. It doesn’t invalidate the feelings or invalidate the context of the feelings. But, somehow it moves us beyond that personal identification with it and can really be a springboard into—I think—great compassion because we tap into a more universal level of it.
I think that was a combination that I was practicing several hours every day and many more hours on weekends, and doing retreats whenever I could. I was also very engaged in hospice care on a daily basis, taking care of men who were dying and finding ways to give back—and holding the intention around my son. That worked.
So, it was a combination of those things that allowed me to embrace the pain, embrace the regret, and have it actually be a springboard to deeper awareness and deeper compassion.
So, I don’t know if that makes any sense for someone who’s just working with regret in their life. But, I think the basic idea is we have to work with it. There’s no escape from it. You can’t jump around it or go over it. We do have to find some way to embrace it and be willing to feel it and own it—and go through it.
I think that’s the spiritual journey, with our whole human experience [and] our willingness to really feel every inch of our humanity—the light and the dark—and be willing to go through it, really own it, and move through it and embrace it. I think that’s where our evolutionary possibilities lie.
TS: Now, you mentioned this teaching about basic goodness that you learned from Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche. I want to go into that a little bit more, because it seems like if any situation might make one question the basic goodness of others—you talked about it in terms of relationship to yourself, but let’s just talk about other people being basically good—it would be being in a prison and seeing [potentially] really messed up people with tremendous cruelty and behavior that might seem very hard to accept. “Really? This person has basic goodness?”
So, talk to me about that a little bit.
FM: Well, it’s interesting you bring that up because I had a bit of a project going for a while in prison. It was kind of a participatory, phenomenological research project, I guess. And this question came up for me. I’m originally from Missouri, the Show-Me State, so I’m kind of skeptical by nature and had a good, skeptical, rationalist, modern, Western education and so forth. So, even though I’ve always had a sense of that sense of basic goodness—I think even before ever being introduced to those teachings—and had a real sense of it and faith in it.
But still, these questions came up exactly as you’re saying. There were a lot of candidates in that environment—both among my fellow prisoners and among some of the prison staff and the guards—who would make you wonder. Right? So, I actually was kind of following some of these characters and looking for that person that actually doesn’t have basic goodness—to prove the theory or disprove the null hypothesis, or something.
So, interestingly enough, every time—this went on for quite some years until I finally gave it up—but every time I kind of thought I had my man—this was mostly male prisoners and mostly male guards. Some female guards. But, every time I thought I’d found that person—that this person clearly does not have basic goodness or has no redeemable qualities at all—the minute I thought I had found that person, they would inevitably reveal their heart in some way—reveal their humanity to me, reveal their basic goodness, and so on.
It was uncanny how it would happen. Some of the toughest guards that just seemed like they probably chewed nails for breakfast, and came in and [I] got nothing but hate and venom from them. I would be [watching], and then—boom. That person would reveal their humanity and their basic goodness to me.
It was uncanny. I finally retired the project after a number of years.
TS: How does that perspective about the basic goodness in yourself and all other people—how does that inform the way you go about your life and work?
FM: Well, very importantly, because working with a lot of the work I do and all the wonderful people in the world that we support and train to our organization to do this kind of work—[they] work with a lot of people who are suffering, work with a lot of people with a lot of trauma in their backgrounds, work with a lot of people who are in some kind of dysfunctional kind of situation in their present situation. It could be very easy to get into a mode of wanting to fix them or seeing their brokenness, or having some kind of rescuer mentality—which is the antithesis of how we train people to work and how I work with people.
I always work from a perspective of seeing someone’s wholeness; seeing their basic healthiness, their intrinsic sanity, their own wisdom. And really, what we’re doing in the work is holding space for another person to find their own feet so they can do their own healing work. Really, I think it’s really important that we—even though people can be in a very un-resourced state and need help. We can all find ourselves in that place.
But, to really work from a perspective of seeing their own strengths and their intrinsic goodness and wholeness and integrity. That’s what we’re mirroring back to them and that’s [how] we’re supporting them in discovering themselves. [It’s] a very different way of working with people than when we kind of focus on people being broken and we’re going to come in and somehow fix them or put them back together. So, I think it’s really important.
Actually, we’ve been working with prisoners and training people who work with prisoners for over 26 years. In the last five or six years, we’ve had the opportunity to start working with correctional officers and other corrections professionals, training them in mindfulness-based programs of various kinds. We’re especially focusing now on a program that we call “Mindfulness-Based Wellness and Resiliency,” because correctional officers are at extreme risk for depression, anxiety, and suicide, or early death and severe illness from all the chronic stress-related illnesses. Officers who have worked in a secure institution for more than 20 years have a life expectancy as low as 58 years, if you can imagine that. And many of them retire and die.
There’s a lot of suicides. It’s almost a kind of pandemic of suicides in corrections—much worse than law enforcement, and as bad or worse than among combat veterans.
So, we’re bringing this kind of program now to correctional officers and also to law enforcement and first responders. The first major contract we got was—actually, we did some work here in Rhode Island with corrections professionals here. Then we got a contract in Oregon to do work there. We’re still working there very proactively.
We were told that the reason why we got the contract instead of a different provider was that they really liked our approach grounded in intrinsic healthiness. They felt the other organization, although they did good work, was coming in kind of with a pathological perspective—kind of saying, “Your staff are really all suffering from PTSD and they’re all traumatized. We’re going to bring this program in to kind of fix them.”
Instead, we were coming from the perspective of recognizing their intrinsic healthiness and giving them a skill-based training to help them build on that, and to build on their resilience—more of an assets-building approach. So, I think this perspective of basic goodness or intrinsic healthiness is incredibly important to the work we do.
TS: Now, Fleet, if it’s OK, I’m going to push this just a little bit further—because I’m imagining someone listening who—I don’t know if it’s a Show-Me State kind of thing or what it is—but who’s like, “Come on. There are these people who are sociopaths—these people who have hurt children. Really? We’re going to focus on their intrinsic health? Aw, come on.”
FM: Yes. It’s a great question. Of course, that’s what people often bring up—“What about the sociopaths?” Of course, that’s a pretty broad category and you’d have to be clear about defining that. But, people do really heinous and harmful things.
Interestingly, a colleague of mine has done work in San Quentin for many years. He leads these wonderful, long-term programs with lifers and people doing really long-term incarceration. In one of the groups, one of the prisoners made the comment that, “Hurt people hurt people.”
We know that people who get involved in harmful, violent, destructive behavior have themselves been hurt. I mean, it’s just inevitable. We just know that. People who become abusers have been abused themselves. That’s just without question.
Fortunately, not all people who have experienced some kind of abuse in their childhood become abusers. But, all people who are involved in some kind of chronic abuse and violence—inevitably you will find that damage and that abuse of some kind—psychological, emotional, sexual, physical—in their childhood.
So, that’s the first point. Second is, it appears—what we know from research, and we know more and more about the brain all the time—that with some types of individuals where there’s some range of what would be called “sociopathic,” that the empathy circuitry is simply not functioning. It’s not hooked up. People are able to harm others because they don’t really [inaudible] the other. They’re objectifying. They don’t really see or recognize the personhood of the other. Of course, that makes people very dangerous—especially when they’re hurt and they’re full of fear and anger and resentment and pain.
So, I think we don’t know yet whether we will learn how to help people reconnect the empathy circuitry in their brain in a kind of a programmatic way. But we know these certain types of people that suffer from this particular kind of sociopathic condition—that we’ll be able to do these things and it will reach those results.
At the same time, though, we have countless stories of people that have committed what most people would consider very heinous crimes who have turned their lives around and who are leading exemplary lives. Certainly people who have murdered. Actually, one of the lowest recidivism rates of any type of crime is that of murder. Many murders, of course, are crimes of passion. That’s very different from if you have a situation where you have someone who’s chronically violent, or a serial murderer or killer, or something like that. It’s very different.
But, there are many people who have committed murder who have turned their lives around to become exemplary human beings. There are people who have committed rape and turned their lives around [to] become exemplary human beings. There are people who have committed sexual offenses against children and have turned their lives around.
So, we don’t yet know that we can have confidence that we can do this in a programmatic way. But, having said all that, the true sociopath is an extremely small number of people who are in prison. We’re talking about a very small percent of the people who are in prison today [who] fall into that category. So, the vast majority of prisoners are actually nonviolent offenders. But, even among those who have committed violence, it’s a very small percentage who would be described clinically as sociopathic.
Whether the empathy circuitry—just the last thing I’ll say. For me—and I’ve been around such people. I did time with such people. I’ve met such people on the inside. I’ve met such people on the outside.
For me, my intuitive sense is that even though their brain may be dysfunctional in a certain way—there may be damage there; their empathy circuitry may not be hooked up; they may be sociopathic and dangerous—but I can still see the humanity. I’ve spent time in Rwanda with genocideers. I’ve been to prisons and prison farms [on a number of occasions], and sat knee to knee with men and women who have committed horrific genocide crimes.
Initially—I remember being in one prison farm and sitting in a circle with about a dozen men who had all committed just horrific crimes. Initially, I got this flash that I was actually seeing some kind of evil. It was the first time I had even really had that thought. But, as I sat longer with those men, I realized that’s not what I was seeing. What I was seeing in their eyes was deep, deep fear. And I could see the humanity behind the fear.
That’s my personal experience, but that’s what I rely on.
TS: Now, Fleet, you mentioned that relatively early on in your prison experience, you said that you became engaged in a certain way—that you started a hospice project and other projects inside prison. I notice part of me thinks, “Really? There’s a way to be an innovator and launch projects in the midst of being in prison?” How does that work?
FM: Well, I’m not the only prisoner that’s done such things. But, it is a little bit unusual.
In that environment, if you walk up to any staff person and say, “You know, we’d like to try this,” or, “Maybe we could try this,” or, “Could we start that program?” or, “Could we do this?” the first answer’s always, “No.” And if you say, “Why?” they may want to lock you up just for questioning them.
But, if they are going to give you an answer, they’ll rattle off a story of, “Well, we used do something like that, but boom boom boom—this happened and we don’t it anymore because it got abused,” or whatever. So, that’s the kind of environment you’re in.
You’re also in an environment where—it is what sociologists call a “total institution,” which means it’s a totalitarian environment. It’s, “Resistance is futile.”
The place where I was, which was a maximum-security federal prison hospital, I was one of the general-population inmates there that are just there to help run the place—to work in food service or hospital orderlies or the carpentry shop. Because I had an education, I taught school. That was my day job for 14 years. Nine to five, I taught school—helping other prisoners get their GED, learn to read, so forth—or learn English.
But at any rate, there were about 1300 prisoners—about 600 medical, about 400 psychiatric, and about 300 of the general population inmates. If you tried to buck the system, you would literally be in the psychiatric wing somewhere in four-point restraints on a concrete bench, full of thorazine, getting hosed down at night. I mean, literally. You cannot buck the system in there.
Prisoners do. They get thrown in the hole again and again until they get any access to a law book. They’ll try to file grievances and file lawsuits. Then, depending on the system, they might start shipping them from system to system, or between county jail and county jail, into other prisons and other prisons so they don’t have access to the law books.
But, it’s pretty tough to buck the system. If you buck the system, you’re really going to pay for it.
So, there I was. I realized this was going to be a huge chunk of my life and I wanted to do something with it. I had the inspiration of my spiritual teacher, Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, there right on my shoulder all the time—this man who, for me, had just dedicated his life 24/7 to waking others up and serving humanity.
And so, I was in this world of tremendous suffering. That was actually—when I first arrived at that federal prison, as you can imagine I was pretty caught up in the drama of my own situation. I had just received a 30-year, no-parole sentence. I thought I would be 65 years old when I got out. I was just caught in the drama of my own circumstances.
Within a couple days of being in this federal prison and seeing around me men in prison who were blind and being guided around by somebody; who were paraplegic or quadriplegic, being wheeled around in a wheelchair by someone; or who were emaciated from cancer or AIDS; and seeing men from the psychiatric wing doing the thorazine two-step down the hall and talking—I was just surrounded by all this suffering. It really woke me up and snapped me out of that preoccupation with my own situation. [It] really inspired me to figure out some way to show up and serve in this place.
So, I became very dedicated to doing that. I was trying to figure out how, in an environment where you have absolutely no power at all and the answer to everything is, “No,” how do you get anything done? I really relied on my Buddhist training and my training from Trungpa Rinpoche. He always placed a great emphasis on skillful means.
So, it wasn’t so much getting caught in what’s right or wrong, or justice and injustice. Not that we aren’t concerned about right and wrong and justice and injustice, but more focusing on what works and what doesn’t work—what’s beneficial and what’s not beneficial.
So, I was always saying, “OK, how do I work with this situation?” I came to see the human beings—even the most challenging human beings—among my fellow prisoners and the prison staff. We all have these buttons on us—kind of like a vending machine. That’s probably not a great analogy. But, you push this button [and] you get one thing. You push another button and you get another thing. I found that everybody’s got a “human being” button somewhere.
If you go up to staff and push their authority button, that’s what you’re going to get. But, if you’re considerate and professional and patient and you work with people, I found that you could get things done.
In taking that approach, rather than a combative or adversarial approach, I managed to start—with another inmate and the help of a staff psychologist and a staff chaplain—we started the first hospice program in a prison anywhere. Then I started a national organization and got that model out into the world—all while I was in prison. There’s now 70 or 80 hospices in state and federal prisons around the country. [I] started a Prison Dharma Network—what’s now called Prison Mindfulness Institute—from my prison cell.
[They] would have given me permission to do [none of those things]. I just did it and kept working with people and working with people, finding a way to engage them with kindness and courtesy. Over time, it worked. It’s very unusual, but I’m very grateful to my training that allowed me to get that done—and very grateful to all the staff that did cooperate with me in allowing those things to happen.
TS: You know, Fleet, when I was reading a book that’s a collection of your writings—this book called Dharma in Hell—the last chapter is on service and how, really, your own engagement in service was a huge part of your own transformative process while you were in prison. I thought of how often people have this idea that, “Conditions need to be different before I start to serve. I need to have accomplished this or that. Before I volunteer, I need to have made a certain amount of money. I don’t really have the time.”
I just thought, “Here was Fleet in prison, dedicating himself to being of service.” So, I wonder if you could talk a little about how that provided a path of transformation for you.
FM: Yes. It was a huge part of my path. I’m very grateful that I was inspired in that direction by my teacher—not so much that he was telling me, “This is what you need to do in prison,” but just by the example of his life.
Interestingly, I started a meditation group not long after arriving in prison. That was kind of an interesting story in of itself, because I went to the chapel and there were two or three staff chaplains. The one I spoke to that day was a woman. She was a Methodist minister, I think. I said, “I’m a Buddhist and a meditator, and I’m trained as a teacher. I wonder if we have any kind of meditation or yoga group—anything like that—in the prison. If not, I would like to try to get something started.”
She said, “Well, we don’t have anything like that. Prisoners aren’t starting anything around here. It has to be started by an outside group, and we’ve got a long list of organizations that want to start programs here, so forget about it.”
So, I had noticed that the actual chapel space outside her office was empty. I said, “Well, would you mind if I just go in there and sit and meditate in silence?” I could tell she was looking for a reason to say no, but she couldn’t come up with one. So, I did and I just started coming down at times when I knew it was empty, and started sitting. [I] got some other guys to come sit with me. Over time, they came to accept us and we became a regular prison group.
But at any rate, in the early days, I would put some posters up around the institution. I worked for the education department, so I had the ability to go around and put up posters for education programs. Guys would meet me and get interested. But, guys periodically would come to the group in the chapel for our meditation group—we met on Saturdays and Wednesdays; Wednesday evenings and Saturday mornings. To begin with, I noticed that guys would come and they might seem interested, but if it was a nice day they would rather be outside playing softball or something—sports.
So, I remember thinking, “Well, my fellow prisoners—they seem to be kind of a not very motivated bunch.” Of course, fortunately I recognized that as not very helpful, judgmental thinking. I said, “Well, maybe the way I’m presenting this is not enough or not helpful.” So, I was always thinking about that.
What happened next was there was a woman that I connected with who was able to come into the prison and share some dharma teaching with us. Her name was Mary Jo Meadow, [who] is a student of Joseph Goldstein. But, she was also involved in contemplative Christianity. She was like a Third Order Franciscan, I think. She was very involved in bringing Vipassana—like the insight meditation—to Twelve Step groups. She had this whole approach to integrating the Twelve Step recovery model with Vipassana meditation.
So, we got her in. I invited some of the men from the Twelve Step group I was very involved with to come. So, we got some of those involved. Now I had a group of men—including myself—to kind of do my research on who were doing both the Twelve Step work and the meditation. I started to see more change.
Then, when we started the hospice program, I naturally recruited men from the meditation group and the Twelve Step group—not exclusively, because we recruited men of all different faiths. But, I had some men then who were doing the meditation group, the Twelve Step work, and the hospice service. Some were doing some other kind of genuine spiritual work—some really committed spiritual path other than the Buddhist path. But, they were involved in the Twelve Step work and the hospice service. I started to see really deep change.
The hospice service—it was kind of different than being a hospice volunteer on the outside. We were really like surrogate family members, because these men were terribly isolated. Many of them were sent there from the high-security penitentiaries. All the prisoners who came for medical care or psychiatric care at this federal prison came from the major US penitentiaries like Louisberg in Atlanta and Montauk and so forth.
So—sorry, I lost my train of thought there for a moment.
But—oh! They were very isolated because, for many of these men serving a long time, they weren’t that connected to their families on the outside anymore. Their real close friends or family were their fellow prisoners back in some penitentiary. Or, if they still were connected to their family, most tended to be from the East Coast and the West Coast, and this was in the middle of the country. Many were African-American; many Latino. Many of their families couldn’t afford to come visit them. Or, if they could, they could come once during their illness.
So, we spent time with them every day—hours with them every day—up there on our meal breaks, our dinner breaks, evenings, weekends. So, we were doing every kind of care but medical care—bathing them; psychosocial care; spiritual care; helping them with the practicalities like taking them out to the yard, taking them to the chapel, helping the write letters home and so forth.
You really became closely identified with them. You realize that there but for the grace of whatever goes you. Many of them were younger and dying of AIDS, and you realized that could easily happen to you. Or they’re dying of cancer. We actually had two hospice volunteers who were great volunteers who were healthy, and became sick while they were there. [They] ended up in the hospital and ended up as hospice patients. One of them was a very close friend of mine, and the other one ended up being my hospice patient.
So, it really gave you a powerful sense of your own mortality. It was in your face all the time. At the same time, these men—prisoners have pretty good radar with each other, and they’d check you out. If they felt they could trust you, they pulled you in and made you like their brother, their son, their father—whatever the age relationship was, and a very powerful relationship.
One of the most powerful things I think about service altogether is the value of simply getting our attention off ourselves and onto somebody else, because most of our suffering is caused by [the fact] that we’re too focused on our own needs. That’s not to say that we’re supposed to abandon our own needs. But, the conundrum of even spiritual work, I think—because we’re suffering, and to one degree or another; maybe we have some kind of hole in our gut from our pain or childhood pain—we naturally think by focusing more on ourselves, we’ll take care of ourselves. But, we actually make ourselves and everyone else more miserable in that way.
Most spiritual paths begin with a kind of self-focus. So, how do you do that without it becoming narcissistic and without it just increasing the pain and the self-identification?
So, I think service is a real antidote to that. You actually spend some time where you’re really focused on another’s suffering, and it’s not about you. It’s about them. I think that is just incredibly powerful and transformative.
TS: Now, Fleet, there are so many things that I’d like to talk with you about. But, just a couple of more topics that I want to be sure to cover.
One is that I know that you’ve explored and investigated quite deeply what is needed right now in terms of transforming the prison system—making it a system that actually works for our society instead of—you’ve pointed out even in this conversation many of the aspects of the prison system that don’t help rehabilitate people. So, what would you say if you were going to give me your kind of pith manifesto about transforming the prison system? What’s required?
FM: Well, fortunately, we are at a time over the last couple of years where there is a mood of reform in the country. People on both sides of the political spectrum are realizing that the system is broken—that it’s both a policy failure and a moral failure—and, really, an embarrassment that we’re incarcerating 25 percent of the world’s prisoners. And we’re doing a lousy job of it.
So, there is an opportunity for reform that’s quite new. Even six or seven years ago, to us it felt like we were just lighting candles in the darkness, and the darkness was growing—even though we knew we were doing really good work and helping a lot of people.
So, in terms of what’s needed: we’re working on a number of fronts. One is to establish mindfulness—the reason we changed the name of our organization from Prison Dharma Network to Prison Mindfulness Institute was [that] we still very much support chapel-based and faith-based, dharma-based programs throughout the prison system. We feel it’s very important. But, we also wanted to get secular mindfulness-based interventions into the mainstream of corrections—in rehabilitation programming, prerelease and or reentry programming, drug and alcohol treatment programming—because unfortunately only a minority of prisoners will ever access chapel programming.
So, we’re working hard to establish mindfulness-based interventions like our Path program—which is a mindfulness-based emotional intelligence curriculum—and some other programs that colleagues of ours have started around the country—similar programs. We’re working very hard to do the research to establish those as evidence-based practice for the field of corrections.
So, that’s one avenue that we feel is very important because, up until now, the only thing that’s really considered evidence-based for prison programming is cognitive behavioral treatment. Of course, there is a mindfulness-based cognitive behavioral model. So, our Path of Freedom program includes part of the cognitive behavioral model as well.
So, we’re working very hard to do that. That’s very important—so that we can mainstream these kinds of interventions into the field of corrections.
We also feel it’s not enough to just work with prisoners. So, fortunately, we’ve been getting the opportunity over the last four or five years to work with corrections professionals as well. We’re now offering what we call a mindfulness-based wellness and resiliency training. We’re also doing some mindfulness-based motivational interviewing training. Motivational interviewing is considered one of the best practices in case management for probation, parole, and case managers.
But, we’re doing these kind of mindfulness-based trainings with more and more correctional staff. We’re doing research around all those so we can demonstrate that these are also evidence-based approaches. Corrections professionals are just off-the-charts at risk for anxiety, depression, and suicide, all the chronic stress-related illnesses, and have a very low life expectancy if they’ve been working at a secure facility for more than 20 years. So, we’re addressing that need, which corrections is starting to awaken to.
We’re also beginning to look at the whole system front to back. We’ve launched a project in collaboration with one entity at the Berkeley Law School two-and-a-half years ago. We’re calling it The Mindful Justice Initiative. It’s to work with the whole system front to back, and look at how we can bring reform to this whole criminal justice system—including law enforcement, the courts, corrections, reentry, post-release programming, victim advocates: the whole spectrum of the criminal justice system. How can we get engaged in this wave of reform that’s in the air now and bring the mindfulness perspective to this? And what can add to that so we can create a downsized, much more humane, more effective, more compassionate, more mindful criminal justice system?
So, we had our first conference. The Boettcher Institute sponsored our first conference this past September. We had 24 very influential leaders from every part of the criminal justice system. We went out and did workshops in all the areas where there has not yet been mindfulness-based programming. There’s been a lot of prisoner programming and continues to be. We’ve been doing work with correctional officers.
We went out and did workshops with community corrections professionals, with judges, with probation officers, with public defenders, with district attorneys, and had papers written around all this. All this built towards this meeting at the Boettcher Institute conference center last September. A whole new round of initiatives was coming out of that. So, we’re working with others and collaborators to engage this national effort to come up with front-to-back solutions that have a mindfulness perspective.
Finally, as the mainstream gets interested in mindfulness and mindfulness-based interventions, we all know the mindfulness movement—what some call the secular or nonsectarian mindfulness movement—has just taken off. Healthcare, education—starting to move into corrections and law enforcement with our work and others. Many sectors of society.
The question is: who’s going to deliver this? Up until now, most of the mindfulness-based programming that’s been in the mainstream has been brought into various sectors of the mainstream by dharma practitioners as volunteers. Jon Kabat-Zinn’s organization—the Center for Mindfulness at University of Massachusetts—has led the way—especially in healthcare—in getting professionals engaged in mindfulness and becoming mindfulness teachers, and had some success there. But, it’s mostly been the dharma people. But, that’s a very small pool—and a very small pool among those that have been trained as teachers or want to do this kind of work.
So, clearly, for any of this to go to scale is the mainstream waking up and saying, “We want this.” It’s becoming a no-brainer, really, [for] preschool through to the last stage of our life, to include some kind of mindfulness and some kind of social-emotional learning. It’s just becoming a no-brainer to give people the tools to manage their own physiology, to manage their own emotions, and to be more present, more aware.
And how do we manage this complex thing called the human body and the human brain? We now have the simple tools for being much more in charge of our own situation. So, that’s becoming a no-brainer. But, who’s going to teach it?
So, we went to Engaged Mindfulness Institute this past year as a division of Prison Mindfulness Institute. We call it the Engaged Mindfulness Institute as a kind of parallel to the engaged Buddhism movement, but also because it’s not going to just be about prisons. We’re training people—professionals and paraprofessionals—who are working with at-risk individuals and underserved or marginalized communities, in various realms of the criminal justice spectrum, other areas of social service—working with people with a lot of trauma in their backgrounds, whether it’s at-risk youth or abused women or people who are experiencing homelessness.
So, we started this program to train them to become mindfulness facilitators and mindfulness teachers. So, we have 42 students in our first year now. If they complete this first year—and it’s a very daunting curriculum—then they can go through a certification process and apply for certification. It’ll be like a 200-hour certification as a mindfulness facilitator. And there’s a second year that they can go on to immediately or several years later. It’ll involve a lot more practice teaching and more training that could lead to a 500-hour certification as a mindfulness teacher.
In this first year, we have teachers where—even though it’s a secular program—we want to make sure they’re getting a classical, foundational training in mindfulness. So, the first course has teachers like Jack Kornfield, Sharon Salzberg, John Halifax, Elizabeth Mattis-Namgyel, Pema Chödrön. We have neuroscientists like Rick Hanson and Rich Fernandez and Kelly McGonigal. We have senior teachers from other training programs like Diana Winston, who leads the MARC program at UCLA; Saki Santorelli, who now heads up the Center for Mindfulness, Jon Kabat-Zinn’s organization at UMass.
So, we’re really involving this really stellar group of online faculty, combining with that with live retreats to really train people up. We’re just getting started with this, but it’s a long-term project to produce a lot more people who are trained to deliver this kind of work. The requests that we’re beginning to get—to bring this kind of mindfulness-based work to correctional officers and law enforcement—is really growing. I think the floodgates are going to break pretty soon, and it’s really going to be a challenge to find people to meet the need.
TS: Now, for listeners who are inspired to get involved and support the work that Fleet Maull’s doing, if you’re interested in this teacher training component, you can visit engagedmindfulness.org. If you’re interested in the work that Fleet has been doing to bring mindfulness directly to prisoners, you can visit prisonmindfulness.org.
Fleet, just two final questions for you. Here’s the first one: On your website, it talk about how you have been inspired by Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche’s vision of creating an enlightened society. I know as I hear you talk about what a vision might be for a mindful criminal justice system, I think, “OK. This is a lot of aspirational—if you will—vision.” A mindful criminal justice system—what it might actually be to work together to create an enlightened society.
My question is: do you think this is something that actually can exist here on Planet Earth? Or is this something we just toil towards and keep working towards in an aspirational kind of way—but it’s always somewhat out of reach?
FM: Well, I think yes to both. The idea of an enlightened society is not some kind of utopian society. It’s more a society that’s grounded in our recognition of the innate goodness of humanity and where we’re continually inspired just to take care of business—like doing the laundry. You never get the laundry done forever. We have to do the laundry every day. You got to do the dishes every day. You got to take care of your kids every day.
It’s a society of people who are connected to some faith in their own goodness and the goodness of others, who feel good about humanity, and embrace a kind of fearlessness and a commitment to taking care of everybody—to taking care of themselves, their children, their neighbors, and to take care of society. It’s really bringing back in the humanity.
If we don’t feel good about ourselves as human beings, we’re going to create fear-based institutions that are going to bring about a lot of collateral damage, basically. So, I think we really have to shift the conversation—to have the audacity to begin talking about human goodness and the goodness of humanity, and to try to begin creating institutions grounded in that rather than always focusing on the lowest common denominator and creating all of these fear-based institutions that really lose their humanity so quickly.
So, I think it is possible, but I agree: I think it’s something we’re always working towards. It’s not something we’re ever going to perfect. But, I think we can see major shifts. I actually have a lot of—in particular for the criminal justice system. I’m not naïve about this at all. I’m like the least naïve person in this work. And yet, I really have a strong, positive sense of what’s possible today.
The one great thing about the economic collapse of 2008, which created so much damage to so many people and unfortunately led to no accountability for those who brought it about—but it did put the brakes on what sociologists call “the prison-industrial complex.” There just wasn’t any more money. The states started running out of money. We’ve been siphoning funds out of every part of society that would take care of people and keep people out of prison to warehouse human beings as an industry.
So, I think they recognized—at least for now—the party’s over in terms of the growth of that industry. There’s a real possibility of downsizing the system and getting it to work better, focusing more on communities. I think we’re waking up [and] a lot of it’s very painful. What we’ve seen with all the violence against African-American young people at the hands of the police—this is very painful stuff to work with and recognize. We don’t want to demonize the police either, but at the same time we’re grappling with this stuff. I think it can lead to real, systemic, and cultural change that’ll be very positive.
I actually have a lot of hope for that today.
TS: And one last question for you, Fleet. You mentioned that your 14-and-a-half years in prison “woke you up.” I notice people use that term—waking up; spiritual awakening—they use it in different ways and mean different things. So, I’d love to just know what that means to you—waking up, spiritual awakening. What does that mean to you?
FM: Well, I think it was twofold at least. It was probably multidimensional. But, on the one hand, I simply woke up to how I’d been leading my life. Despite that I had been sincerely involved in a spiritual path, I’d been compartmentalizing my life and still allowing myself to make incredibly selfish decisions—and that a good part of my life was still guided by my inner demons and childhood stuff. I was not really leading a conscious life, and as a result I was causing a lot of harm—even though at the same time I was doing good with parts of my life.
So, I woke up to the harm I’d been causing and experienced that deep regret. I think, in some ways, the real spiritual path or the path of human evolution—we’re always in it, but you could say it begins at that point where we at least have a profound desire to not cause any more harm—at least not cause any more harm. So, I woke up to that, and that became a lever from tremendous change in my life.
Secondly, to me waking up means just becoming conscious—which means that we start to have an access to an awareness that is not [concentrated] in our more mechanical, conditioned nature. We can see that the operation of our kind of fear-based and highly conditioned nature—which is part of our human survival instinct; you couldn’t be without it. Some of that condition and programming we have is useful. A lot of it’s not so helpful. But, it’s not who we are. It’s certainly not all of who we are.
To the extent that we wake up to and become grounded in an awareness and a context that’s outside of that more mechanical part of our nature—that’s outside of the limited view of the self—to me, that changes everything. It changes our relationship to our everyday life—our moment-to-moment life. It changes our relationship to our own challenges and suffering. It opens us to a much greater capacity to be with the suffering of others and to have compassion for others.
So, I think that’s what waking up [was for me.] Waking up to the damage of my unconscious behaviors, and then waking up to a context beyond the limited self, if you will—from which to begin leading my life.
TS: I’ve been speaking with Fleet Maull. If you’re interested in knowing more about his work and supporting it, you can check out the Prison Mindfulness Institute at prisonmindfulness.org and also a new division of the Prison Mindfulness Institute that’s focused on transformational leadership training: engagedmindfulness.org.
Fleet, thank you so much for all of your tremendous work—and your great honesty and just forthrightness. I really appreciate it. Thank you so much.
FM: Well, thank you for having me on, Tami. It’s been a pleasure.
TS: SoundsTrue.com. Many voices, one journey. Thanks for listening.
