Fleet Maull is a dedicated man. Founder and director of both the Prison Dharma Network and the National Prison Hospice Association, this fifty-five-year-old professor at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado, is also a longtime teacher of Shambhala Buddhism, an ordained Zen Peacemaker priest, and the U.S. director of the interfaith Peacemaker Community. Perhaps most compellingly, Maull is a man who turned a life of contradiction into a life of integrity. In 1985, at the age of thirty-five, he was indicted for drug trafficking, sentenced to thirty years without parole, and thus began a fourteen-year odyssey of transformation behind bars at the U.S. Medical Center for Federal Prisoners, a maximum security prison hospital in Springfield, Missouri. Torn away from his family and his spiritual community, he was left alone to face himself and the choices that had led him to a point of no return.

Maull came of age during the cultural revolution of the sixties. Like many of his generation, he openly rebelled against the conservative world of his parents, searching for adventure and a life of vividness and intensity. Traveling to South America, he found something of what he was looking for living on a sailboat in the Caribbean. Later, he found it working a small farm in a valley high in the Peruvian Andes. And eventually, he also began to find it in the danger- and adrenaline-filled world of the international narcotics trade. In the mid-seventies, he read an article in Rolling Stone about Naropa and its founder, the renowned meditation master Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, who was instrumental in bringing Tibetan Buddhism to the West. Immediately, Maull knew that he had to go there. With his Peruvian wife, who was pregnant at the time, he moved to Colorado, enrolled, and soon became a student of Trungpa. But he lived a double life. On one hand, he was engaged in a serious study of psychology and the Buddha-dharma; on the other, he was caught up in a drug habit and secretly hauling backpacks full of cocaine on smuggling runs from Bolivia. By the early eighties, he had become one of Trungpa's closest attendants, yet he was in turmoil over his inability to resolve the incongruities of his life, and his marriage was falling apart. When he finally quit smuggling for good, it wasn't long before his former partners fingered him, and he was confronted with the choice to run or face the possibility of life in prison. He told his guru everything, and after considering the matter for a few days, Trungpa advised him to turn himself in. “That was the first time,” Maull says, “that I ever followed his advice.”

It was in jail that Maull turned his life around, beginning to meditate in earnest. He completed the Tibetan practice of the ngondro (a foundational practice that includes 100,000 prostrations) in his tiny cell, received initiation from Tibetan lama Thrangu Rinpoche, and took novice vows as a monk. He taught GED and ESL classes all day, cared for dying prisoners in a hospice program he helped develop, led meditation groups in the chapel in the evenings, and eventually matured into a national prison reform activist. In fact, he became so committed to the work he was doing at his high security institution that when given the opportunity to finish out his sentence at a minimum security facility, he turned it down, staying until his early release for good behavior in 1999.

I went to Peru looking for some kind of authentic life. I lived for years up in the sacred valley of the Incas, and there was one particular time when I really had a deep visionary experience of non-separateness. This was after taking a plant called San Pedro that contains mescaline. There was an energetic fluidity to the world, and the boundaries that I normally perceive as my own body were completely liquid and contiguous with everything else. My whole previous notion of the distinction between animate and inanimate objects completely broke down in that moment—in the experience of one living organic reality and energetic aliveness. The experience just continued and continued, even after the mescaline wore off. When I would put my foot down, I did not even have the sense that it was going to hit something solid.

Part of what had driven me into becoming an expatriate and living outside the system was my very polarized “us vs. them” attitude. But after that experience, I could never go back to seeing the world that way, because I had seen that we are all a part of one process.

Every summer in Colorado, Trungpa Rinpoche held a two-week retreat for his committed students up at the Rocky Mountain Dharma Center. We were in a big field up in the mountains, with tents all around, and Tibetan banners flying, doing military-style training, with meditation and teachings and so forth. It was a complete vajrayana world.

Walking up from the lower gate one day, I saw Trungpa coming down the hill, heading toward the big tent where the teachings and meditation practice happened. And suddenly I saw him like I had never seen him before. I saw a dharma king, a magical Buddha figure. It was a powerful visionary experience that's very hard to put into words, but in some way it was similar to what I'd seen in Peru. It was as if I saw his essence.

This changed my whole relationship to Trungpa and to his teachings. Prior to that, I was very much trying to be in his world on my own terms, trying to hold onto as much of my own world as I could. Afterwards, I wasn't holding onto anything. When I saw that his essence was so impersonal, he became a mirror to my own condition. Being in his presence was either a joyful experience of coming home and being held in the essence of my own being, or, if I resisted, it was terrifying. In the nakedness of the experience, I was absolutely confronted with my ego.

When I got sentenced to thirty years my knees actually buckled. I didn't fall to the floor—my lawyer was standing by my side, and he kind of grabbed my arm and held me up. They took me back to the county jail, and that evening they put me in a solitary cell in an empty wing of the building. There was only one tiny window way up high; if I stood on the sink I could almost see the security lights outside. It was very dark. Every now and then I'd hear some sounds echoing through the chamber, but there was nobody else in the whole wing. I don't think I fell asleep until four or five in the morning.

At some point in the middle of the night, I came to a very dark precipice, and I had to make a choice between living and dying. It wasn't like I was contemplating suicide—it was a matter of choice about whether to live or to give up. By this time, I'd already been locked up for about six months awaiting sentencing. Most of the time I was in a cell with ten other guys, a cell filled with chaos, noise, fighting, and craziness. You couldn't sleep; it was insane. But on this night they left me isolated with the fact that I'd been sentenced to thirty years with no parole, and I thought that meant I would not get out until I was sixty-five years old. My son was nine at the time. As I stood there on the edge of this bottomless pit, I felt something well up in me and make a decision to live. It wasn't like the bells were ringing, “It's okay now.” It was just utter darkness. But somehow, a will had risen up in me like an instinctual thing and made a choice for life.

The next day, I finally began to experience the weight of the grief and the pain of what I'd done to my son, to myself, to my family and my community—the utter waste and insanity of it. I'd never really been confronted with the consequences of the decisions I'd been making; I'd gotten away with a lot over the years. Now, my back was up against the wall, and I couldn't deny my own complicity in creating all this damage. And that fueled me throughout the rest of my time in prison. I became radically committed to eradicating every kind of negativity and uselessness from my life.

I started practicing like my hair was on fire. I spent a lot of time alone in my cell at night, reading dharma books from nine until twelve and then meditating until I went to sleep at two. I'd get up again at seven for a full day teaching school and doing hospice work.

Once a year they gave you a week off from your prison job, and I would get some food from the commissary that I could heat up in a microwave, hole up in my cell for nine or ten days, and do a full-blown intensive retreat. This was twelve to fourteen hours of practice a day. About four or five days into my second retreat—this would have been 1991, six years into my sentence—I was suddenly in that luminous world again, the world of the guru's mind, that fluid contiguous relationship with the rest of reality that I had experienced in Peru. But this time there was nothing in my surroundings to support the experience in any way. My guru had been dead for four years.

The only thing that was giving me access to this space was the practice, and it was an incredibly powerful moment when I realized that. It confirmed everything my teacher had ever said. When we would try to psychoanalyze his practices and teachings and figure them out, he often told us, “Hey, just do it. When you get into that Cadillac or Mercedes or Porsche, you don't have to be a master mechanic to turn it on and enjoy the ride, right? Just do the practice. It works.” In that moment, I saw the reality of those words. I had rediscovered what I'd been looking for my whole life.

The prison environment is hellish, but the deepest pain is that you've managed to get yourself torn out of your life and away from your loved ones. Sometimes when I was alone in my cell, I would suddenly be flooded with the absolute, excruciating reality of not being there for my son. It would just hit me like a blinding, searing light.

One night I was at the point of starting to bang my head on the wall. I think I was standing up at the time. I was really about to beat my head into the concrete, but for some reason I just stayed with the experience, kind of holding it. A space started emerging around this white-hot ball of pain and despair. And my awareness of this space grew and grew until suddenly the pain just dissolved into it, and I went through the other side into a kind of ecstasy. I felt ashamed, like, “How dare I?” But I just found myself landing on the other side of that experience in the elation of my own being. This happened in the midst of looking at the stark reality of being in a shit-hole hell realm of a prison full of aggression and violence and abuse, and the pain of not knowing whether you're ever going to get out.

If you bump into somebody in prison, you have to clean it up real quick and say sorry or they come back and knife you. There was a big African-American guy who had just come from Leavenworth, a very tough maximum security prison where you walk around with magazines under your shirt to keep somebody from knifing you, and people are killing each other all the time. And he picked a beef with me over something completely stupid. I came out of my room, he was mopping up, and he accused me of screwing up his floor. But the floor was completely dry—he was just grandstanding for a couple of buddies.

Normally, I would have sucked it up and said, “Oh, yes, hey, I'm sorry man, it won't happen again.” And that would have been that. I did that hundreds of other times. But for some reason I just wasn't in the mood for it. So I told him, “Man, get off it. If you want to entertain your buddies, go somewhere else.” Looking back on it, it was a very crazy thing to do. He started getting pretty ugly and intense, and eventually he took off. But I knew this was a very dangerous situation, and it wasn't going away. I knew it had to be dealt with.

So I went looking for him, and I found him in one of the large bathrooms. He had gone back to his bunk, and he had gotten a knife. He wasn't holding it, but I found out later that he had it on him. I walked up to him and got in his face and really laid into him. It was almost like an out-of-body experience, because it was so unlike the way I'd ever dealt with stuff in there. I was completely winging it, confronting him on his bullshit. We were nose to nose, and it was going to come to blows any moment.

There are very intense racial issues in prison. And you know, I worked hard not to buy into any of that, even though most of the other white guys around me ended up hating the black guys. It's kind of this cross-cultural clash that happens, and people just end up hating each other. But I was determined not to absorb any of it. In actuality, I spent my life in the prison school every day taking a lot of risks teaching primarily African-American guys to learn how to read, to get their GEDs. There's a big thing in prison about everybody being equal, and you cross a lot of boundaries being a teacher, because anybody that tries to act any different than anybody else tends to get called out. I spent two or three more hours every day doing hospice work with this guy's brothers, wiping their butts and holding them in my arms when they cried and wailed and died. So I just didn't feel like I needed to take a lot of shit off him. I was the white guy, you know, it was that kind of thing.

So I told him that. I said, “Wake up. This is not just another white guy you're going to push around. This is who I am. Relate to me.” I took a chance. And you know, he finally settled down. He even told me that he was instinctively operating out of fear, in his Leavenworth mode. He admitted that he had gone and gotten his knife, and he thought that I was going to do the same thing, because that's what you do in Leavenworth. We didn't exactly become buddies or hang out, but we did end up in a friendship of sorts.

I think there's something magic about being committed. When you commit yourself in a certain direction, the universe begins to cooperate with you. You're willing to take risks that ordinarily you wouldn't take. You throw yourself into a situation and you do what has to be done.

I could easily have died in prison. Hospice work was very much a confrontation with my own mortality. I had a patient named Lyle who had come to the hospital from another prison for AIDS treatment. He got involved in the meditation group I was running, and we became friends. Later, he was transferred back to the prison he came from, but eventually he got very ill and they brought him back. I hadn't seen him in almost a year. He was lying there shriveled up on his bed, completely emaciated, and he had tuberculosis. Because they thought he might still be contagious, they had him in an isolation room, and I had to wear a mask to go in. They closed the door and locked me in there.

As soon as he saw me, he wanted to get up. He was talking about how he had developed such a strong practice at the other prison, and how he felt so bad that he couldn't meditate now. I kept telling him, “Just lie down, lie down,” but he wanted to sit up and meditate. He wanted to meditate with me. So we sat there knee to knee, him on his little bunk and me in a metal folding chair. Our faces were only eighteen inches apart. At first it was fine, but then the thought started creeping into my head that I was basically exchanging breaths with this man—my dear friend—who might have active tuberculosis. My surgical mask was starting to get wet with my breath, and I knew they were only good for about fifteen minutes. Once they get wet, they don't really work.

I tried to dismiss it, but the fear just kept building and building. I started thinking, “Where is the chaplain? He said I could only stay for fifteen minutes, and I think I've been here for at least twenty. When is he going to knock at the door?” Finally, I panicked and asked my friend to lie down, told him I'd be back up later that night. I'd been doing hospice work for a long time, but I hadn't gotten over my fear of death. I had to knock on the window to get the chaplain to come and let me out.

“Grab your stuff. You're going,” the guard told me. “Where am I going?” I asked. “Just go,” he said. “You're going down to R&D.” That's where they take people who are getting out. When I got down there, they gave me some street clothes to wear, and they took me upstairs, got me $50 from my commissary account, called a taxi, opened the door, and said, “You've got three days. Don't be late.”

I was going home for my father's funeral. They wouldn't let me see him before he died except with a full guard escort, in shackles and leg irons, and I refused. I didn't want to bring that shame into my family's world. Then when he died it was the same thing—I had to have four guards, so I refused. The warden came and talked to me, saying I had to go. “I'm not going that way,” I told him. The next morning the guard came and woke me up at five o'clock and sent me out alone.

So there I was, standing outside. I hadn't been out of that building in thirteen and a half years, and there was a brilliant blue sky. There were flag poles in front, and the flags were fluttering. I was just flooded with grief over the death of my father. Years before, when I was in prison and Trungpa Rinpoche died, I expected it to be utterly depressing. But instead I woke up every morning in a kind of bliss, and when I would go outside his presence was everywhere, the whole sky was him. He had this oceanic mind that would just hold you. And on this day again the whole sky was him, and it was my father; it was devastation and bliss and joy all mingled together.

The taxi came, and I went home for three days and then came back. Five months later, I got out of prison. I could barely deal with the speed of the world; I was actually afraid to cross streets. It took me about a year before I sped up to it and became a maniac again like everybody else.