Going Through Hell to Find Heaven: Fleet Maull and Dawson Church in Conversation

2025-10-30

Fleet Maull, PhD, is a consultant, motivational speaker, social entrepreneur, and authorized teacher in the Zen and Tibetan Buddhist traditions. He also founded Prison Mindfulness Institute and National Prison Hospice Association, catalyzing two national movements, while serving a 14-year mandatory-minimum federal drug sentence from 1985 to 1999. 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 ...

Fleet Maull, PhD, is a consultant, motivational speaker, social entrepreneur, and authorized teacher in the Zen and Tibetan Buddhist traditions. He also founded Prison Mindfulness Institute and National Prison Hospice Association, catalyzing two national movements, while serving a 14-year mandatory-minimum federal drug sentence from 1985 to 1999. 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.

Fleet founded the Heart Mind Institute, offering online summits, courses, and coaching programs integrating western science with ancestral & contemplative wisdom and addressing themes of trauma healing, resilience building, post-traumatic growth, expanded states of consciousness, psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy, conscious entrepreneurship, and more.

Here he and Dawson discuss:

Fleet's background
The ways each of us has our own hero’s journey
The truth of "the only way out is through"
The pain paradox: that joy lies on the other side of pain
Our own inner channel
How the suffering of great spiritual masters sensitizes them to the world’s suffering
A deeply embodied approach to meditation
The Task Positive Network
Why when plugging into source our nervous system untangles itself
Feeling the physicality of the body which will calm your mind
Spontaneous experiences of Samadhi or awakened states
Why deeper states of awakening require consistent practice
When deep states produce the risk of clinging to them