Mindrolling – Raghu Markus – Ep. 294 – Radical Responsibility with Fleet Maull

Fleet Maull

Fleet Maull visits Raghu on the Mindrolling Podcast for a conversation about the practices and perspectives that can help us all move about our daily lives with grace.

Fleet Maull, PhD, CMT-P, is an author, consultant, trainer and executive coach. Fleet also serves as a meditation teacher, consultant, trainer, social entrepreneur, and end-of-life care educator.

In this episode, Fleet shares how the practices of service, mindfulness and compassion enabled positive personal transformation during his 15 years in prison. He looks at how taking radical responsibility for our life can allow us to move beyond fear.

Discovering Radical Responsibility

Fleet shares his early life, describing the pull of contemplative practice that would eventually lead him out of his destructive lifestyle. We hear how a Rolling Stone article featuring Ram Dass and Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche would bring Fleet out of the mountains of Peru to Naropa University However, Fleet did not leave behind his risky lifestyle, which would cause him to serve 15 years in prison. Fleet shares how he was able to use that time to do serious transformative work on himself.

“Prison is an incredibly debilitating situation for most people. Most people come out worse than when they went in. For me, I was able to turn it into a very transformational journey for myself. I was devistated by how I had let down my community, my teacher, my family. But more than anything – what I had done to my son. I became radically dedicated to get any negativity out of my life.” – Fleet Maull

Fuel for Practice (9:15)

What kind of fear does one experience while serving 15 years on a 30-year sentence? Fleet talks about calming his fears with the compassion that he felt for his fellow prisoners. He describes how he spent his 15 years focused on study, practice and service to others.

“When I got to prison, I was just surrounded by this world of suffering. I saw men being wheeled around in wheelchairs, emaciated from cancer and AIDs. Blind and being guided around. Men in the psychiatric wing, many overmedicated. You would see them one day and they are ok. The next day they are talking to the trees or themselves. It was a world of such hellacious suffering. That kind of shook me out of my own drama.” – Fleet Maull 

Wake Up, Grow Up, Clean Up, Show Up (17:45)

Fleet and Raghu talk about the transformative power that service can have on us. Fleet looks at how opening our hearts to the positive in life can raise our resiliency and allow us to show up for life.

“Many of us go through things that are not as dramatic as what you went through (in prison), but they are dramatic in our own subjective world. When His Holiness talks about developing compassion, service is the way for us to show up as humans.” – Raghu Markus 

Power of Empathic Awareness (38:30)

How can awareness practices cultivate our emotional intelligence? Fleet looks at how these practices allow us to becomes embodied and connect to others.

   

Images via Everett Collection