Absolute honesty with ourselves about “what is,” about where we are, is where the freedom is. Are you operating out of habit only, out of a pattern that you don’t have a relationship with? Or are you operating out of a place that is quite aware, step by step? Taking back responsibility for our lives is a very bold and uncertain step; it’s not for everybody.

Mitchell May, Ph.D., spent seven years studying intensively with healer and UCLA parapsychology research staff member Jack Gray, an apprenticeship that began when Gray directly intervened to help save May’s life. Following a devastating car crash that medical experts claimed May would never survive unless he had one leg amputated, the 21-year-old patient and the elder healer began a long journey of healing work together that lasted right up to Gray’s death.

It was then that May took on the practice as healer on his own. For the first three years, in a converted garage behind his Los Angeles home, he saw clients from early morning to late night, seven days a week. Although he has since worked with thousands or people who have sought him out from every corner of the world, both over the phone and in person, May conducts very few personal healing sessions these days. He has resisted taking on a more public life until recently, when he realized that the only way to touch the large number of people wanting to work with him – his office receives about 100 letters per week, on average – was to begin teaching his approach in weekend workshops, so that people could learn to heal themselves.

By his own admission, incorrigible and insatiable in many ways, May, now 47, exudes a fresh, youthful presence laced with candid humor. He speaks slowly and softly, but with unmistakable love and passion for his fellow humans and the endless mysteries of life. Although he sometimes works and moves with agility in mystical realms where things take place that challenge standard concepts of time, space and matter, May continually emphasizes the importance of grounding every experience in practical, day-to-day life.

More often than not, a radiant ear-to-ear grin bears evidence of his infectious joy. In person, his focus and attention is simultaneously laid back, casual and laser sharp. Not surprisingly, his effect on those who spend time with him is profoundly empowering: he adamantly insists that we all have within ourselves, everything necessary for healing and flourishing.

An avid environmentalist, May also does consulting work with various large corporations, encouraging responsible business practice – whether it’s using ecologically sound packaging materials, or providing adequate health care benefits for employees.

A 6-tape audio program of May’s work, Healing, Living, and Being, will soon be released by Hay House Publishing. For the past 12 years, he has lived in a remote high desert valley near Moab, Utah, where he loves to hike in the red rock canyons.

PERSONAL TRANSFORMATION: Your own recovery from so many critical injuries sustained in the car accident you were involved in has made medical history, because there is documented evidence that you were able to regenerate bone, nerve, muscle and organ tissue, which is generally unheard of. What can you share with us that might help others to benefit and learn from your experience?

MAY: Every difficult and painful experience in our lives has enormous potency in it. If there’s a terribly challenging situation you find yourself in, and there is no way around it, then the only way I know is to fully “get with” it. What is often lost for people is the understanding that when there is a great crisis in our lives, almost all of our protective mechanisms, our defenses, our normal reference points, are stripped away, and that is where the great potential for transformation resides. There’s a rupture in the psyche. What I know about is assisting people to become comfortable in “not knowing,” and letting life reveal to and interact with them.

When I was 21-years-old, I was facing, from a medical point of view, certain death, and a terrible one at that; and if I didn’t die, I would be in such extreme pain that I would wish I had. The only way to be with the situation was to surrender to it. But surrendering, to me, didn’t mean passivity. It meant, “This is what is. Now what?” Instead of spending all my energy wrestling with why, I looked at how to be with the enormity of a situation that I had no idea how to handle.

In the weeks just before the accident, way back in 1972, I had been trying to practice Zen meditation, and reading spiritual books, and trying to do the right things, and crying for God. I had reached a place where I said to God, “I don’t know how to know you. I’ll do anything to know you.” That’s a really big piece, “I’ll do anything.” I don’t know if I’m capable of saying that again in my life, because I know the implications now, but I truly meant it.

Events will only happen in our lives to the extent that our conviction and our willingness to be with them, and all that might come with the package, is there. So if you commonly say, “I’ll do anything to be healed, or to be with this man, or with this woman, or to be happy,” maybe the reason most of those things don’t happen is that you don’t really mean it; you just want the results. In an acute situation, that’s understandable. But to live that way will never bring a deep life for you, and that will be sad.

Whether or not my plea created the space for the accident to occur, I don’t know. But I am quite certain that I needed a large energy to meet the vastness of what I was longing for. My experience is that life will use whatever is available. I had a lot of fire in me, and I was impatient. People try to tell us that we need to learn to be more patient. I say, “nonsense.” Learn to use your impatience, or whatever you have. Don’t try to be other than what you are. Use your anger, your fury, your passion, your devotion. By that I don’t mean using it unconsciously, letting it ramble any way that your upbringing has, perhaps inappropriately, channeled it; but my impatience is why I am walking. If I had more patience, I wouldn’t have my legs. On the other hand, if someone is quiet and patient by nature, and it’s authentic to them then maybe that’s how their contribution, or their healing, will come.

One time years ago, when my friend and mentor, Jack, found me crying, I begged him to teach me to be less sensitive. “No,” he said, “I’m going to teach you to use that sensitivity.”

PT: You get many requests from people wanting to apprentice with you, to learn what you have learned, or to study techniques so that they, too, can heal others and be healed themselves. What is your response to them?

MM: I get letters from a lot of very genuine and sincere people. But for anyone to think that they need me for anything is a mistake. I do teach workshops, but the invitation, as I see it, is to come and learn from me as you might learn from an artist. Don’t think that I have anything so superduper, so special, so unique that you can’t get enough of it by just being with me for a couple of days every once in a while; go and learn from your own life. If you think someone outside of you “has it” then you are on the wrong road with me; then you are on the wrong road with yourself.

I’ve never used any techniques in any formal way, only in as much as they might come out of an authentic experience of what the journey was to be with someone. Techniques and tools are really only useful if you are not in touch, and then maybe they just help you to get in touch with that zone in yourself where the spirit of life is free to express itself.

Really, in a manner of speaking, the healing is a “front.” People are captivated, fascinated, intrigued by healing, and everybody needs it, including spiritual teachers; everybody wipes out. But that just gets people in the door. To me, the real healing is freedom. The healing is using whatever situation needs to be healed in one’s life as the means of freedom.

Most people don’t realize that the voltage, the energy they need for healing is totally right within the trauma, the crisis, the confusion, or the doubt that is bringing them pain. That’s what is so astounding; you don’t have to look for the energy for the healing. It might have to be discovered, but it’s right in your life, it’s not “out there.” Often healing doesn’t mean gathering energy; it means releasing the energy that is there already because that is what is going to restore someone. Or if they don’t feel that they have any strength, I’m looking at finding out where it’s all leaking.

The image of a leaky container fits a lot of what I feel happens with people’s energy. For example, wherever we have unfinished business, by which I mean something that evokes fear, pain, shame, or a whole host of other emotions that we feel we have to close down from, you can be sure there is a big energy leak. Energy follows attention. If we are unwilling to go someplace with our attention, it’s like there’s a boulder in a river, and the water will flow around it. That component of us doesn’t have a chance to be whole.

Unfinished business “bites” us every day of our lives, especially in our intimate relationships. We experience that as not being able to feel sexual energy, or by our relationships turning dull, or by revisiting the same power plays over and over with different partners. Most people think that if they can just find the right lover, they won’t have to experience those dynamics anymore. But life is ruthless, love is ruthless: love wants to be complete, and it will continue to bring something up in our lives so that it can be re-integrated. We might hope that falling in love will solve everything, but when we do get into an intimate relationship, whatever is unfinished, “uncooked,” unresolved in our lives, comes up in spades. Life wants us to be complete so that full circuits of energy can come through us.

PT: You’ve spoken of freedom as being of primary importance to you. How does that enter into your teaching?

MM: For me, in consciousness there is no virtue in what we do; there is just either freedom or not. Absolute honesty with ourselves about “what is,” about where we are, is where the freedom is. Are you operating out of habit only, out of a pattern that you don’t have a relationship with? Or are you operating out of a place that is quite aware, step by step? Taking back responsibility for our lives is a very bold and uncertain step; it’s not for everybody.

If you don’t have a grounding in what I would call a level of vast ethics, by which I mean freedom for everyone and everything being your priority, then you will into how to manipulate fields and forces to get what you want, or what your tribe wants. And eventually that will just add suffering to almost everyone. You might be immune from it for a while, and your heirs might be immune for a while, but without a larger awareness, I don’t think you can be doing much good for folks, for anyone, in the long run.

So how do you cultivate those principles, those dynamics – the manifestation of healing in a manner that to the best of our possibilities is liberating to all? That is the core of what I try to teach, and why I don’t really teach the “way-out stuff,” the magical-sounding material, except to a more intimate atmosphere of students. I try to teach more practical things that will help someone to develop. It is always about coming back to life itself, and to the mystery, and letting that be your real home.

There’s a development of a certain form of empowerment that can be valuable. It’s about recognizing what your capabilities are, recognizing who you are as an individual identity, and seeing that you can create, make a difference, change things. But if your value system isn’t developed, it will go awry, very quickly and easily.

To bring principles of freedom into the day-to-day world, everything is a choice, every moment. I can’t bypass that; I can’t let something be easier when it’s going to violate the truth. Whatever I do, in business or in my life, I have to make sure it’s not a violation of anyone or anything.

The more we grow in consciousness, the more we know, the more we have a responsibility to life. In a sense, life can only give you more if you are responsible to what it has already given you. More of what’s real, that is. You could get more money, more fame; more of those would fuel the illusion of self-importance. It isn’t even necessarily a matter of integrating what we have learned thus far and living it, because we are all going to mess up from time to time. It’s being honest, naked with yourself, meeting yourself where you are, and being very real about it, and forgiving yourself.

The way you forgive yourself is by a true conviction, or a vow, to not repeat whatever hurtful or dishonest thing you have done. Or the moment you find that you have done it again, make amends. If you can’t actually make it right with a person, make it right with the universe by nullifying the energy and offering up a “sacrifice” so to speak. Where the sacrifice comes in, is that refraining from a certain reaction or behavior might mean being humiliated or uncomfortable, or even in pain, to keep your vow. The ritual is important only from the point of view of helping the process to be grounded in three-dimensional activity, and helping you keep that focus and attention. The ritual itself will not remedy the situation. It’s your heart, your consciousness and commitment that will transmute the energy, either for you or for that person, or even for another being, at another time and place, who is in a moment making a choice to do something similar, and chooses to not harm another person because that energy comes into consciousness. That’s one way we can all truly be in service, to transmute the energies that we have inappropriately put out there, whether we knew better at the time or not. But when we do know, that’s real responsibility.

It literally is the truth that sets you free, and that’s not metaphysical truth, or esoteric truth, or some philosophical version of truth. It’s truth as it is, day to day.

PT: What would you say about relationship to God, to mystery?

MM: I feel that a person’s relationship to God is a very intimate, private one. What I feel I have to offer is to help people create a container in their lives to develop that love relationship with the mystery – that deep, naked intimacy – so that they can discover it for themselves. I don’t think that it’s right to tell others too much about how it all works, or who I think God is, who they really are. If it’s spoken because you are friends and you are exploring that together, fine. But otherwise, there can be a disempowerment, a sense that I know and they don’t. That kind of relationship creates a dependency, a priesthood, and that’s archaic, at least for our culture. It isn’t that there can’t be keepers of certain knowledge, people who have developed themselves particularly far, but there is so much knowledge to be had in those areas, it is foolish to imagine that somebody has it all.

To me, to try to tell someone how to be with their relationship to God or mystery is like going into someone’s bedroom, uninvited. I don’t go for that, unless there is a real trust established, a real permission, and the invitation is totally conscious.

PT: How do you feel about the way spirituality is generally presented these days, in the new age forum?

MM: I have some serious concerns. If consciousness doesn’t expand simultaneously in all directions, we will inadvertently create harm. So much teaching seems to be geared to acquisition, more pleasure, more success. That establishes a highly narcissistic culture, in which as long as people are getting what they, personally, want, they think everything is fine. Also, the prevailing concept seems to be that we are in a state of health, or wealth, or abundance, because of our state of consciousness, and that if we don’t have the idealized version of whatever that is, we are somehow not in the grace of the universe, and we are interfering with the universe showering us with all we need. To me, that is such a deceitful teaching. It leads to more separation, and also to the damaging belief that if someone else doesn’t have everything they need, they must not be spiritually ready for it.

I’m concerned that something unhealthy is being bred in our consciousness. Some teachings dishonor humanity, as if our humanness, our vulnerability, even our illness, is wrong. That is not offering a road to freedom. Most of the teachers are in a position to help people awaken, at least to the first level, of how they can be free, and to make them aware of how they can fall back to sleep. But I feel students are often being lulled into a nice dream, even while they are also being offered a great deal of extraordinary information and many worthwhile options.

Many people who have had expanded awareness and increased energy experiences have not learned to embody that. They have developed a relationship with what some people might call an “energy body,” and there is an almost addictive quality, if they can get “out of the body” and out of psychological challenges in their lives, and live in another domain that is compartmentalized.

Our nervous system is designed so that our bodies can be the sensing organism for the universe getting to know itself. Without the physical body being a real participant in our consciousness work, we’re missing a big chunk of why we’re really here. The major matrix of consciousness of being here on earth has a lot to do with being in the body. It’s vital to take care of the body so that it can totally participate in the ecstasy.

PT: The public has been “knocking at your door” for a long time now, but you have remained quite secluded, out of the public eye in recent years. What has prompted you to start saying “Yes,” by offering more opportunities for people to study and spend time with you lately?

MM: Well, I feel that it’s time. Truthfully, I have a very large desire to give not because I feel I should, or because I’ll get rewarded for it. It’s what I want, and I am rewarded for it: I get to be in the presence of other people opening up to themselves, to God, to healing. People ask me where my energy comes from. It’s from that – the meaningful purpose I engender in my work – that is the real source for me. I’m more interested in my immortality being what I did in the world, rather than living forever. I want my actions to have been truly real. I want to jam in as much as I can, and hope that somewhere, sometime, it makes a difference, and I don’t need it to be recognized that it was Mitchell May. I hope I’ll be surprised by where I am or am not, in forty years, because I am so absolutely surprised at where my life is now.

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