About

Sean Bowers spent his formative years in and out of juvenile corrections, on and off the streets. Bowers comes from a lineage of violence and addiction, that lead to over a decade of homelessness, gang violence, alcoholism & drug addiction, sex work, train hopping & hitch hiking, and eventual collapse into alcohol fueled isolation and depression. It wasn’t till his mid 20s that he was able to get sober and get off the street. This last ditch effort of eeking out some vague semblance of life landed Bowers 3,000 miles from his hometown in Boston, Massachusetts. There Bowers dove head first into an odd world of recovery, punk rock, and Buddhism. He is the co-founder of Profound Existence, a counter-culture approach to Buddhism. That is where he met Fleet Maull, who would become a guiding Dharma teacher for years to come.

In 2010, after a series of dead end jobs and failed relationships, Bowers moved back to his hometown of Portland, Oregon to finally make right the wrongs of his past. Within a year of landing back in Portland, Bowers would enroll in college, publish his first collection of poetry, and meet documentarian Sarah Barab. Sarah enlisted Bowers in a film depicting the transformative effects of Buddhist mindfulness in the West. And for the next 7 to 8 years, Barab and Bowers flew around the country filming Bowers study under Maull. Bowers would go on to become a mindfulness teacher through the Engaged Mindfulness Institute.

In 2018, Bowers graduated Portland State University with a Bachelor of Arts, majoring in English with a Minor in Creative Writing. But by this time Bowers had become disillusioned with the literary world as a whole, as well as academia, which he had originally wanted to join as a professor. Bowers soon transitioned into social services case managing homeless veterans. However, the world in social services proved to be astronomically more emotionally taxing than he had originally thought and began studying IT. His father growing up had been a computer programmer for Portland General Electric, and Bowers proved, at a young age, himself to have quite the aptitude and love for technology. Having learned to read playing King’s Quest on his father’s IBM PC Jr., Bowers was forever drawn to computers.

Bowers currently lives in Portland, studying IT and cybersecurity, trying to reshape his life one last time, as he races into his later years. While at his current age, constantly shifting can be exhausting, he claims it is never too late to fulfill one last dream.