Mitchell values the contributions of both western medicine and less conventional approaches as the right and left hand working together. He embraces both the ordinariness of everyday life and the invisible and ineffable, beholding the mysteries of both. Mitchell meets the impersonal lessons of life on earth with equanimous delight, humor and compassionate intolerance for what currently flourishes in the marketplace as "New Age".

At the core of the story of your healing was the decision about your right leg. When all apparent authority was saying it must be amputated, and the failure to do so would not only jeopardize your other leg but perhaps also your life, how do you explain your choice?

I was in excruciating pain with causalgia, a condition where nerves are severed and exposed. There is no escape from the pain. The concept of living the rest of my life in that state was inconceivable to me. Infections spreading in my body threatened the loss of kidney function, eyesight and hearing damage, and damage to every organ, every gland.

I was surrounded by fear from the medical community about the dangers of not amputating. With all of those voices, there was still this sense in me that the real seed of what this experience was about had yet to be contacted. If the choice for me, like it is for so many people, was not to be in pain, I would have lost my leg. If I amputated my leg and maybe the other leg as well, which was the only way to stop the pain, I would be interfering with a deeper process that I was too young to understand. There's something that somehow knows, even before you have enough experience in life to trust that knowing. Prior to the accident, I had been on a deep spiritual search for myself so I was relating everything that happened to me as part of my evolution. The accident was not something separate from my life.

Have you thought that the extreme pain you were in has to do with how the healing could occur? That most of us are never put into such a consciousness.

Most of us are not put into a physical situation that's so ongoing, without release. But most of us in our "other bodies", our emotional body, our mental body or in some place in our lives do have quite extreme pain, if you haven't been numbing it with different forms of defenses, going unconscious, distractions of all kinds. If somebody really wants freedom in their life, they have to go back to re-inhabit those places that they disembodied. I use this form with people if they are willing to go that way with me. If not, there are other more passive healing methods, but they will not engage their soulful evolution.

You've said that "the direct experience of the soul" is your life's work now. What is direct experience of the soul for you?

I call it soul, but that is a personal preference. Other people call it essence; other people call it Buddha nature; no self; higher self. The direct experience of the soul is something that I had momentary encounters with my whole life. It could have been in just a moment of excitement at watching my dog come running towards me. The way I define soul is that interface between what some call the "spiritual" and the "material". My interest is that edge where they touch. You are both in the nervous system and you're in the universal energies — vastness. It's right on the edge of the skin, where I feel that world and this world, and I can participate with it. That's where ecstasy is for me.

My first contact with the realm of soul came through my grandfather who was beautiful. He practiced Judaism, and he'd wrap himself up in this shawl with the skull cap and kind of sway back and forth saying his prayers. I used to watch him, and I would be inducted into that space. I was in awe of that space. I know he used to see me hiding behind the couch watching him. He let me taste those energies rather than give me concepts about it. His including us in what was the highest value without words was an experience of unconditional love. He would bring that out in us.

Direct experience of the soul is so sensuous, it's so passionate for me. I don't go into direct experience with the soul because that's what I should be doing. It's because that's where the action is. That's where you're playing and the ball field just gets bigger, that's all. And I'm interested in the ball field getting larger and larger until I hopefully am ready someday to inhabit the universe at large. I can do that at moments, or at least I believe I am, but I can go as far as I can go, and I'm honest with myself.

My mother, whose father I'm speaking about, has a pretty developed sense of intuition, and so it was her sense to call Thelma Moss at the lab. But what’s important here are the roles that both male and female energies served. When my mother was looking for possibilities — how can we stop this pain; what can we do to help him, there’s got to be another way — my father was holding ground, sort of saying, "Mitchell, don’t give in. You can do it", from a really tough place, though. "Be a man!" Something that in some ways has been really mocked today, but done appropriately has great potential. He held ground and my mother found that hidden needle in the haystack. Both energies were essential.

My teacher, Jack, was also very strong male energy and warrior energy. He was so sweet with most everybody, but not me. With women, his sweetness was just beautiful. Kindness and consideration were, to him, the core of relationship. Yet he could cut through defenses, and for several years one of his techniques was to embarrass me in public. Even if 99% of what I was communicating was true, he'd call me on any untruth in front of everybody. It was humiliating. There was no hiding.

You were in the hospital in continuous pain, when Jack brought a different understanding about healing. Who was he and what happened?

My real experience of pain had, to Jack, become a habit. It no longer served the function of saying something is wrong for this system and if it's not changed, damage will occur to this being. It caught me, based on my past experiences with fear and pain, and right and wrong. I only experienced that nerve current in one way: absolute fear and absolute pain. And then the nervous system took over, stimulus/response.

In comes this guy who says "it doesn't have to happen that way." He's saying that the power is within me to create it whatever way I need. To do this he took me into what some people call "trance" states, or altered states. He used the rhythm of his voice, chanting, color, light, the movement of his hands, and his personal presence to capture my attention, because my attention had been captured by pain. Jack took me into places where there were other options, such as "it doesn't have to hurt". "You don't have to experience pain here". "You can experience that same energy as feeding you".

He told me at the very beginning "You are created in the image and likeness of God; therefore, everything you need for healing is already within you! You can heal this leg!" He was on fire and the first thing he took his dagger out about was my spiritual ideals. "You don't live by ideas. You live by direct experience, and your ideas are in the way of your having direct experience."

He experienced my energy field as so disorganized from the severity of the injuries, we need to recreate things from what used to be called the "etheric double". We'd create it in the etheric body, and then it would manifest in the physical body.

Jack would come at all hours. He'd come at two in the morning and chant for hours or he'd put his hand on my forehead for two seconds and then leave. He would guide me, lead me, induce me. He had created strobes and color wheels that had certain frequencies of color and certain pulsation when they would come on and off. He used hand made cobalt blue glass from Austria. He would pass the most beautiful deep rich blue around my body for hours on end. It would blink, stay on for certain length and blink at certain speeds. He would point the color wheel at certain parts of my body, and I would start to vibrate or hallucinate.

He would pierce his skin with a big needle and say, "Mitchell, you can choose to bleed or choose not to bleed". He held his hand in fire and would say "you can choose to burn or not burn". And he would hold it there for two or three minutes. Everything was geared toward altering perception for me.

We don't recognize the absolute privilege of attention. Attention is the key. Where our attention is, that's where our life will be. There is a way of holding the attention, of pulling the attention away from ordinary focus, whatever has your fixation, and giving the person another way of experiencing what's going on. And that has power. That has enormous capability and power.

To do that, a healer must go beyond techniques to be an artist or a magician, don't you think?

It is an art. That's what our life is. We need to live it as an art. And it doesn't matter to me if it's a mechanic art, or a garden art, or a music art, or a healing art. I don't see any one of them as any higher spirituality or holiness than any other one. This is just what I do.

What did you learn from your experience with Jack about healing?

What I learned from Jack was your life is your spiritual path: your spiritual path is your life. And what I heard from other teachers was you have to leave your life behind and be really good and really disciplined, and then you control you’re anger, you control your spirituality, you control your feelings. Jack was also into control, but not for controlling anything, but so that you were master of your experiences rather than a victim of the forces throwing you all around, because there are so many forces in this world.

When Jack came in the hospital one day I was crying. He asked me what was wrong, and I said "Is there anything you can do to make me not so sensitive?" I had always assumed my sensitivity was wrong. He looked at me with fierceness and said, "Mitchell, we are not going to ever teach you not to be sensitive, we're going to teach you how to use your sensitivity appropriately." That was a whole new idea for me, to actually be who I am but to be in relationship with it, to utilize it. It wasn't until Jack that I realized it was possible to cultivate this way of experience.

Did Jack teach you to be a healer?

I am not a healer in my mind. Healing is the way people have a reason to knock on my door. But that's all it is. Certainly, I'm interested in people not suffering, in people having full capability and potential of their body, physical, emotional, mental, spiritual, at whatever level, to have full capacity. But I am not interested in being a "spiritual" doctor, and just giving people energy or some other concoction in lieu of surgery or a prescription. Because then there is no difference. The dependency issue is identical. Dependency is one of the major ailments in our culture right now.

Are there specific healing techniques, such as Jack used, that are important?

Techniques are very valuable if they allow you to enter into a realm where all possibilities can occur. But if it never lets you go anywhere, it's not useful for evolution. If you're looking for a way to maneuver and manipulate certain things, it might be useful. Surgery can be exquisitely helpful in certain circumstances. Any techniques have value if they're appropriate and you use them with discernment.

What do you see as the role of western medicine in healing? Can alternative methods be integrated or do you see two polarized paradigms, one that works from the outside in and the other which seems to work from the inside out?

It has nothing to do with what the systems have to offer each other. It has to do with the attitudes of the practitioners. When the two are working together it is so powerful because you have a left hand and a right hand to do the task. To do something with one hand only is absurd, especially when it's out of arrogance, ignorance, a position or judgment. When the spiritual healing says the physical doesn't matter and is archaic, and physical medicine looks at spiritual ways as vague and without basis, both are immature in their responses and both so unrepresentative of their own roots. The scientific approach with a reality base of cause and effect could see that alternative methods bring results in a systematic way. If the spiritual approach would really honor the inclusion of everything and not have an exclusionary point of view, then of course they would include western medicine. There's nothing incongruent at all. Each is just another way of moving energy. I wouldn't be here if it weren't for western medicine. I wouldn't be alive!

Immaturity is inherent in the growing process, like a child. How could our approach to healing become more mature other than with time?

The same way as in any art form or in our life, by the recognition of your vulnerability, by your recognition of your humanness which includes being wrong, not knowing. But not in a way that makes being "vulnerable" just another buzz word. There's a consumerism in all of these things. The maturity comes through the willingness to have experiences and to have the wind knocked out of you at times or to succeed at times and be willing to keep learning from it, bring it back and inhabit that information. To live it! That's how I see it!

How have you’re theories and practices of healing evolved?

My way is to see what's happening in the moment. My practice is what can keep me fluid and being with what's happening in the moment. My techniques are for me, not the other person. What is going to help me stay open, not what is going to open them. I can't open another person up. How arrogant! The more open I am, the more opportunity they have. That's my responsibility: to stay as close to the truth of beingness as I am capable of, and to address that, moment by moment, with self and with another.

A teaching that had a great influence on me was Victor E. Frankl who survived through concentration camps. He was put into a situation over which he had no control, and yet his power came through choice in a situation where he had no power. To me, that existential place is very, very important. And that's how I see my accident; that's how I see each moment.

What are the practices to keep oneself open and functioning at the best level? Do you believe that any certain diet or specific daily routine is critical?

I happen to have a constitution and a nervous system that is extremely sensitive to all forms of energy and stimulus. I don't have any one prescription for everyone other than whatever helps one to stay true to themselves and helps somebody know themselves so they can stay in authenticity with themselves. That may include diet, meditation, stretching, exercising, dancing, whatever it includes.

In the context of your accident, some twenty years later, do you have any sense of why that happened to you in your life?

People ask me all the time…what's funny is, they go, "Well the reason he had this accident was so he could meet Jack and so he could teach…"

There's an arrogance in thinking we know the mystery…of why someone got sick, why they got cancer and the forces involved, of how healing works, what spirituality is all about, the male and the female, the shadow and the light…

The whole new spiritual movement really thinks they have discovered something themselves. There's a great lack today in the so-called New Age healing of real compassion. It's as if to be ill is wrong. And that if you weren't uptight, if you weren't angry you wouldn't have these issues, you wouldn't have illness or accidents. Nothing could be further from the truth! Nobody really knows why what happens, happens.

Are you cynical about this?

It's not cynicism. I react to the superficiality and arrogance and the attempt to control. So much of the spiritual movement now is how you can control everything. You can control your health. You can control your abundance. You can control your love life. It's all around fear. Because we are living in times where everything is out of control, and we don't know what is going on. There's a breakdown at so many different levels, and people are attempting to find a way to control. That to me is the essence of illness; a cultural disease is the attempt to control and not be in relationship with what is going on.

You carry a kind of legacy from Jack. Do you feel a burden of responsibility to teach?

I'm really coming back to a lot of the things Jack taught me that I wasn't large enough to inhabit. I was the only one he really taught as one would an apprentice. He had been studying this for fifty years. It was so important to him to pour everything into me, and for me to be the container.

I feel a great deal of responsibility for that, and I want to teach it but I really don't know it all the way, and I'm still pretty young that way. There's a maturing process; there's an in-the-worldness that I needed to get to round me out. I love my healing work but it wasn't really the world. That's part of what the business is about these days.

I fasted for more than two years once, using Pure Synergy and carrot juice and healing sixteen hours a day, seven days a week with people. What I found was I was in ecstasy all the time, needed two or three hours sleep, never dreamed, had no sexual desire, lost my attachments to almost everything, however, I didn't grow.

This approach became more of a denial of the world. Why be born? It was an important stage for me, because it helped me to resolve issues, but it was all about control. Controlling certain energies that I didn't know how to deal with in my life: sexual energy for one, anger, fear, dispute, money, power. I didn't have to deal with those things. I was protecting, which was the very thing I needed to resolve, my tendency to protect. The only way to touch the world was to let it touch me.

How are you doing that now? What is your focus in the present/future?

My perspective is to always stay open. I enjoy being surprised, and I am constantly being surprised. I would have never imagined I would be in business. That's where my healing heart is now. It seems to me that business is one of the biggest places that moves energy, and effects change on the planet as a whole.

I enjoy being involved in all of it and staying clean and clear, and true. I enjoy giving people a product that is real. I felt a personal need to touch so many people that I can't personally touch. The way I can do that is through Synergy, and that's why it's so important for me to put my energy into every bottle.

For me, it's my spiritual work. I'm very conscious in every interaction that I can't cheat. Everybody wants you to compromise it. Everything that comes up I have to face: my greed, my failure issues, my deficiencies, projections people place on me. I, like most people, have to continue to engender what I am doing with who I am.

What is your intention with the product Pure Synergy?

My intention is to restore the "chi", the life force in a person. Most people's energies are depleted by habitual thinking, by poor lifestyles habits, by thought processes, by environmental influences, emotional things, without any restoring or rebuilding. The challenge is how to rebuild and to feed the body what it truly needs at the most fundamental level so the body can do the healing instead of a supplement. Most supplements are stimulants, over stimulating the body. The idea with Synergy and with healing work is to expand the body's capacity to handle greater levels of energy so you can handle more and more life.

When I was doing spiritual healing more exclusively, I noticed that a lot of people were not attending to the very practical grounded real needs of the human experience and the body, the metabolism, having a glandular system, and a nervous system and a respiratory system and a blood system. Those things were being ignored, through ignorance and through habit. When new energies came in, they were not able to hold them. A lot of healing took place on the emotional body, on the mental body on the spiritual body but not on the physical body. I got very interested in what would help the physical body (and our other bodies) to have a more active participatory relationship with having a body.

What Pure Synergy does is allow you to have more access to who you are, more access to your essence energy. When you have more access to yourself and more energy, you're going to make more choices in your life that benefit yourself and others.

Do you make a direct connection between physical substances and consciousness? Do herbs and plants generate change cellularly that support expansion and evolution?

Absolutely! We are absolutely foolish to not take advantage of that knowledge today. We live in a world that is in relationship and when that relationship is conscious then we have active evolution.

What happens when we are participants in our evolution?

We're evolving either way, but there's a difference. The difference is that you're a participant! You're there! You get to be at the ball game. Otherwise, you're simply totally identified with whatever role you happen to be in, whether you are the victim, or the conqueror, or the sexy one, or the deformed one or whatever your trip is: that's all you are. And you are lost to it. You have no relationship whatsoever. You are simply in karma. You are stimulus/response, cause and effect. When you begin to participate with it, you can try on different costumes, which is a lot of fun. You get to experience all the energies that are moving around, and you get to experience……ecstasy!

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