TV cameras, SUV’s everywhere, 9mm guns pointed at me, I am being arrested in Panama in a spectacular mid-day raid in the heart of the Panama business district conducted by the FBI and the Judicial Technical Police (PTJ).

Abandoned in a dark Panama 10×10 dungeon with seven other men…ankle and wrist shackles…extradited from the Republic of Panama…

THOMAS E. McMURRAIN V. THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, charged with 153 counts of mail fraud, wire fraud, bank fraud, securities fraud and money laundering… more charges than Bernie Ebbers, Bernie Madoff and the Enron executives combined ….

Facing 25 years to life…my children, my wife…what the f*ck have I done?

This is where my spiritual journey begins…

I punched the walls so hard in the Panama dungeon that my knuckles bled, the singing and yelling in Spanish went on 24 hours a day. Ancon Prison, Republic of Panama, Hell on Earth. I slept about every other day. I was bloated from years of heavy drinking two to three bottles of Jack D. a week, 270lbs and Bi-polar as hell. The detox was a bitch. 24 hour lock down, sleeping toe to head on a urine stained cement floor, two plates of rice per day, lentil beans and an occasional piece of cooked SPAM. Eight years later I still avoid white rice, lentils and I have never liked SPAM.

Truth: US Federal Prisons are like the Ritz Carlton compared to a Central American prison. If you have to go to prison, do it in the USA, and go Federal.

I waited in pre-trial for 10 months, no sun, no grass, just cigarettes, Honeybuns and Mountain Dew, I fought like a Barracuda not wanting to come in the boat, I cussed everyone, the Judge, my lawyer, my wife, the district attorney and anyone else I could. I am not a fraud – I never intended to hurt anyone! The biggest infraction I ever had was driving on a suspended license, how could I deserve this type of treatment? My lawyer told me that based on the dollar amount that I was only looking at 18-36 months, then why does it say 25 years to life? I would rather be dead than spend 25 years in a ‘human warehouse’, a term used by Wall Street.

Eight years later….

In retrospect, prison was one of the best things that ever happened to me. Truth be told,  I was already in one even before being arrested. Maybe prison was my time under the Bodhi tree, my 40 days in the desert, what Viktor Frankl in his book “A Man’s Search for Meaning” describes as an existential experience.

The joke was….everything that meant anything to me was taken, millions in assets, my Jaguar XJR, all my Penn fishing reels and Tuna Sticks, my resort, my ‘Noriega’ house, furniture, my fishing boat, oh and my family (I say this tongue and cheek).

How stupid I was to think that anything material had any lasting value. I had cancer in my early thirties, now prison at 36 years old…my thirties sucked and yet my family stuck by my side.

I owed it to them to come out a warrior…

The night before sentencing I lost it. I realized that another man,  Federal Judge Hunt was going to determine how long I was going to be confined beyond my control. I dropped to my knees crying and I asked the universe for a miracle. If I got 25 years I would quickly find a way to kill myself.

I was walking into court with an open sentence, my lawyer arguing for something less than sixty months – I got 87 months… Quickly doing the math in my head as my heart started to sink…my kids would be entering middle school before I came home, would my wife wait for me? 82% of released offenders get divorced. It was three times more than I was expecting.

In the federal system you have to do 87% of your sentence and you get up to 10% of your total sentence in a halfway house. I had already been locked up for 15 months so, 87 minus 13% good time takes it to 75 months minus 15 months I have already done takes it to 60 months… minus 8 months in a halfway house. So 52 months, just over 4 years…I can do this. To make it even shorter I qualified for a 500 hr drug and rehabilitation course that knocked an additional 12 months off my sentence – so all in all I am going to be confined for just over five years – 63 months to be exact….I counted every single one. (See Here)

I can do this….I will be 41 years old and I can rebuild my life…but I really need a better plan!

I think it was Einstein that said, “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them”… Bulls-eye!

During my pre-detention I started reading books, something I had never done in my life. I started gaining some self awareness, the alcohol was out of my system, and my mood swings from manic to severe depression had reduced. I got off the sugar and I had been taking psychotropic drugs to help me sleep. Ultimately, I think they helped me gain awareness of what it was like to not have the hypomanic swings. For the first time in my life I started to feel content…in prison.

Could I actually find peace in prison?

I created a quote that has profoundly changed my life;

“Until you start asking the right questions, you will continue getting the wrong answers.”

Facing 25 years to life, being extradited, yeah, I would have to say that I was not asking the right questions! I truly believe that we are a product, a result of what questions we ask the universe. During my ‘incarca-sabbatical’, I began my journey for Self-Awareness and the battle with my horribly ignorant ego began.

The ego or the shadow as I call it (our alternative ID) is something that we spend many years building, we invest in it, we feed it and we justify everything it does. I fed mine alcohol starting from 6^th grade, I built it into a deceitful machine to avoid the (in hindsight, justifiable) wrath of my father. I adorned it with expensive clothes, I was the most self-important person that I knew, a wrecking ball that left a path like a category 5 hurricane. I was heading down the wrong side of the highway with my eyes closed. I was a total sleepwalker…

I spent the last 18 year of my life running from the first 18 years and I landed in the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary lost without a bread crumb trail.

After almost 18 months of very confined hard time, I transferred to the Federal camp in Atlanta. I went to the commissary and I spent $300 buying real clothes, shoes, a walkman and real food. I remember stopping halfway across the gravel covered prison yard – catching a glimpse of the moon and stars, something I had not seen in a while. I sat down to enjoy the fresh air and the precious view and pulled out my new (very overpriced government issued) walkman, I inserted the batteries, pre-programmed the channels and put it on the local rock channel and U2 ‘A Beautiful Day’ had just started…I never cried so hard in my life – Imagine the circumstances and listen to the lyrics of the song.

That night I was placed in a cube with two other guys and the first thing I was offered that night after the 8pm count was a pint of Seagrams 7. I drank it and passed out. I woke the next day smelling with the heavy smell of bourbon around me and one of the worst hangovers I have ever had in my life… I hit bottom. I had no more tears…I had lost everything, most importantly the clarity I had tasted over 18 months of sobriety.

I had climbed what I thought was the ladder of success, only to find that it was leaning against the wrong wall and I plummeted to the ground face first. (I thank Dr. Stephen Covey for this awareness in such a profound quote)

In prison you become a number, you are no longer a member of society. Your clothes are chosen for you as are your meals – the guards are bitter and no one is paid to make your life easier – Prison is one of the worst places on earth. In prison every one pretends to be someone they are not – As a side note:  before the ‘Crack” sentencing reduction bill that Congress passed, everyone was a Kingpin drug dealer after the Bill was passed and the ‘King Pins”  realized they could get 24 months off their sentence they all became petty crack dealers. – We used to make bets on who we would see in the legal library tying up their motions. Snitches were hated, but most were at the Camp because they got reduced sentences for snitching out all their friends. If there was more than one person on your indictment and you were at a camp, you were most likely a snitch. My indictment with amendments was almost 80 pages long and I was the only person listed at the top.

In prison you learn the truth about human nature – you realize that without self-awareness most human beings act no differently animals, and in survival mode they are reduced to scavengers. In prison you see the true essence of the ignorant man.

I did however meet one very interesting individual; he had a deep radio announcer’s voice, one that was familiar to me. Everyone said to stay away from him, that he was pompous, an elitist and a bit of a freak. He was a freak with a big gray beard, he sat on his bed like Yoda and he eyebrows created snowflakes of dandruff on his glasses. But he had 4,000 plus books memorized in his head and a 220+ IQ. I introduced myself to him and he started peeling me back like an onion with questions I could not answer, simple questions that frustrated me. He challenged me to read books with names I could not pronounce like Boethius, Machiavelli, Prudentius, Bhagavad Gita, Polybius, Plutarch and Coehlo.

Here are five books that change my life:

• Principle Centered Leadership by Dr. Stephen Covey
• The Bhagavad Gita
• The Alchemist by Paulo Coehlo
• From Onions to Pearls by Santyam Nadeem
• A Diamond in Your Pocket by Gangaji

If you are struggling with mood swings I recommend Struggling with Demons by Manfred Kets De Vries.

Back to my Yoda friend….

He asked me one specific question that provided with the inspiration to pour through 400+ books looking for THE answer. I filled my mind with knowledge, the knowledge started manifesting in Self Awareness and peace ensued. Bliss was tasted when I put down all the books and stopped looking for the answer.  I discovered mediation, yoga and Zen Buddhism as described by the author Christmas Humphries. Indifference and detachment became one of my greatest realizations. I was now able to bring the waves of the ocean to the surface of the mind and I could see clearly into my soul. It was awesome!

I could not count the days, so I would count the months. There were no classes to speak of so I talked the camp warden into allowing us to start a prisoner re-entry program called ITEA! – The program consisted of eight classes that covered Personal Development, Business Plans, Business Law, Logotherapy, Business Finance, and Spirituality.

We reached out to Best Selling Authors, like Robert Kiyosaki, Rick Warren, Rich and David Sloan, The Viktor Frankl foundation, Entrepreneur Magazine and Stephen Scott to contribute books and they responded in kind. Typically about 10% of the camp was enrolled in the classes and over 500 graduated from our program.

Teaching these classes re-centered me and taught me that unless you are helping other people grow that you will never reach your highest potential. I now see why teachers in public and private school systems do what they do for very little pay – the reward is in watching people grow.

Teachers might be the truest angels of all.

Looking back on the whole experience, I was simply Santiago, the shepherd in the Alchemist going through this journey searching for the treasure under the pyramid, only to find that it was located in the place that God originally put it – in my heart. One of the greatest gifts I gained in prison was the practice of mediation. I connected with the space between the inhale and the exhale and tasted the sweet nectar of bliss.

I spent four years carrying around the book of the dead, not wanting to get rid of my sheep and seeking the answer to my treasure.

My journey began with a question in an unlikely place, prison, where I found peace in silence, from someone nobody liked, a Guru – a spiritual being in a human warehouse

His question ‘Koan’  incase you were wondering was: What is the Absolute Source of Power? – A seemingly simple to answer question that can only be revealed when you can bring your mind to a blissfully silent state. Hard to do in today’s world, yes?

In the present day – My girlfriend (wife) of 20 years is madly in love with me – my kids are my best friends and the irony – I am the global business development director for a top 1% ranked website in the world called of all things Escapeartist.

Whether you are desiring to escape from a country, a bad relationship, an addiction or a one way dead end job, my passion at Escapeartist is to provide you with the knowledge to:

“Live where you want to live, live how you want to live, love who you want to love, and make money doing it.”

During my tenure at “Camp Fed” I gained an appreciation for the Lakota Sweat lodge ceremony, the Sacred Pipe written by Black Elk and the story of the White Buffalo Woman. I had the honor of serving the tribe for two years as a medicine man and I was given a Lakota name, “Man without Shadow”.

Every week, I looked forward to Saturday morning.  I enjoyed watching the egotistical ‘tough guys’ enter the Inipi laughing and cussing and see them leave crying for their mom. Few left the mother’s womb as a warrior. I know without a doubt that I did. That sweat lodge and my fellow native friends changed my life forever.  If the prison would allow me, I would go back every Saturday to conduct a sweat lodge ceremony. It brought me so much peace and it crushed my ego.

I learned what a warrior spirit was from Chief Yellowknife and Tim from Kentucky – they were the strongest guys I ever met in prison – they could endure heat and pain more than anyone that I had ever known.  While guys were crying, gasping for air through the grass, Tim’s prayers would come from the ceiling of the Inipi…because he was standing and enduring the most extreme heat. The extreme heat initiated the battle between the ego and the spirit and the only way you could make it through four rounds was to side with your spirit – the ego is really weak and will do whatever it can to avoid pain. The Ego is a p*ssy (forgive my French)

In the Inipi (Sweat Lodge) we had all faiths represented, Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, Atheists and Native Americans. On the first round of prayers we prayed for the children, the second round, the women, the third round was an open round for each person to say a prayer of their own faith and in the fourth round we did a mediation round that turned into a warrior round where the Chief would continue to pour water on the hot rocks until someone yelled….

Aho Mitakuyase!

To this day I still pack the Canupa Wakan with prayers and I burn sage in my gym as it brings back many memories of a place where I left my terribly ignorant ego….prison, a great place for it.

I chased my shadow for 36 years and eventually caught it only to realize that is was no-thing.

Today, I live by a poetic phrase: ” A tug-of-war, drop the rope, oneness is realized”

Thomas McMurrain is the global business development director for one of the largest international lifestyle websites in the world. He is responsible for the development and sales of the Escapeartist Media Bureau program, Escapeartist Home Business, EscapeMD Medical Tourism, Investment Group International, EscapeBlogger and EscapeDates International Dating, Social and Business Network Marketing Community. His areas of strengths are in social media, search engine optimization and sales. His driving passion is to help people realize their greatest potential. Mr. McMurrain is available for public and private speaking engagements and personal consulting. Please contact mahira@escapeartist.com to check available dates.

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