As if gently unzipping my skin to reveal complex inner worlds, Mitchell May is entering into another way of seeing. I immediately notice the change in his gaze. The bright and intense hazel eyes that have met mine directly, without waver, as we’ve talked, are now looking slightly past my face, as though he’s noticed something just behind or beside me. His attention, though, is clearly nowhere else. In fact, I feel it directed toward me more than ever, and draw in a deep breath.

About to begin our first healing session together, we are seated a few feet apart, facing one another, comfortably settled around the elbow curve of a well-creased butterscotch leather sofa that has been faded by years of exposure to the full desert sunlight pouring through giant picture windows, blending heat with the benign but potent silence.

May is as intense, compassionate and dedicated to carrying the fire that has been lit in him into the world, as he is joyful and energetic. Slim and fit at forty- eight, he has evolved from critically-injured patient to much sought-after healer, in the years since a devastating car crash threatened to take his life at the age of twenty-one.

He had been the front seat passenger in a Volkswagen van headed for a bluegrass festival, when the full-fledged impact of an oncoming car threw him halfway through the van’s windshield, feet first. It was on that Alabama road slick with rain, in 1972, that May’s life changed forever. In fact, he was pronounced dead at the scene.

Talking to me in his home in the remote Utah canyonlands on a bright spring afternoon, he says he doesn’t remember very much of what happened immediately after the accident, except being resuscitated. “But I knew that what had happened to me was big. I knew somehow: ‘This is the one. You either say “Yes” with no idea what you are saying “Yes” to, or you can say “No,” and check out. It wasn’t as if there was a morality, but there was a voice that said, in effect: ‘You know, Mitchell, in some ways you’ve never really gone for it. You’ve wanted to, longed to, tried to, but you never really have. And so if you go for it, we’re not promising anything here.’”

When an emergency crew finally extracted May from the wreck, almost an hour after the accident, his heart was failing and his lungs were punctured and collapsed. His condition then deteriorated even further, and they thought they’d lost him. But when his vital functions were finally stabilized at the hospital, it was his right leg, fractured in forty places, and a potential source of deadly infection, that quickly became the focus of the doctors’ concern. As soon as he was well enough to endure surgery, they insisted the leg would have to be amputated to save his life.

Meanwhile, with severely damaged and exposed nerves in the leg, May was in constant, excruciating pain. Just the movement of air caused by someone entering his room would cause him to shriek in agony, as if the leg had received a sharp blow. Even narcotics afforded him no relief. Still, he adamantly refused to give consent for the operation.

“I just knew,” he recalls, “that there had to be another way. It was more than a question of losing my leg. That operation would have altered my whole life, my relationships, everything. I wasn’t ready to surrender my power, to let others decide my fate, my future.” So he continued to say, “No,” even when, in desperation, a team of orthopedic surgeons threatened to obtain a court order that would force May’s compliance.

“I knew that there would be no bigger ride possible,” May recalls. Not long before the accident, he had been praying earnestly for something in life that would bring him closer to a real experience of the Mystery of life. “And here I was. That was how I approached it. Sometimes it was like a roller coaster, and at times I wanted off; I freely admit to that. I knew that the energy was there, and that’s what I needed: full on amperage from the universe, in the human experience, to get what I was looking for. And here it was, so why check out? I knew this was the rarest of all opportunities to go on a full ride.”

Several months had passed, when May’s mother, becoming increasingly desperate to ease her son’s suffering, contacted Dr. Thelma Moss at the parapsychology department at UCLA, where she had heard there was research underway involving some unorthodox healing methods. One of the lab’s primary researchers -- and its most consistently impressive subject -- was a healer in his sixties by the name of Jack Gray.

Far from the Zen master or exotic Indian guru that May might have imagined at the time could help him to navigate such difficult territory, and bearing no resemblance to the dramatic image of healer Kathryn Kuhlman that May remembered being fascinated by when he saw her on television as a child, Gray was an average-looking sixty-five year old family man.

May was in a cast from neck to toe when Jack Gray walked into the intensive care unit where, with raging infection and high fever, May had been placed in isolation. It was immediately apparent to May that this man possessed some kind of rare understanding. For one thing, as Gray first entered, he paused and moved his hands slowly in the air, well away from the perimeter of May’s acutely-sensitive leg, as if respecting an invisible boundary at precisely the distance from the leg that prevented triggering an intense jolt of pain.

“He touched me on the forehead, with the most exquisite touch I’d ever felt, and met me eye to eye, and scared me, because he really met me,” May recalls. “By that I mean he saw through me, all the way. He saw soul, essence, vulnerability, shame, confusion, and anger. There was no hiding it. My defenses were already just about shot, from months of being close to death; but you still cling to them, or at least I did, at that time. Jack just looked right into it, through it all.

“Then he said to me: ‘Mitchell, you are created in the image and likeness of God. Therefore anything you will ever need is within you. Anything you will ever need is already within you.’

“And I understood exactly what he meant. I understood who I was, who he was, what the Great Mystery and everything was. For a moment, just a moment.”

Gray stayed for twelve hours, and returned for three nights in a row. Working all through the night with guttural chants and other sounds as well as his hands, and at times talking to May, he never sat down or slept.

“He took me toward the deepest spaces that my psyche had ever traveled into. The power of this man was beyond anything I had ever come close to experiencing in my life,” May says of his early sessions with Gray. “And it was clearly his awareness, his connection with that fire of life, his contact with spirit, with the creative forces that was giving me an environment in which my consciousness could change. He wasn’t changing my consciousness; he was creating an atmosphere for me to explore, giving me options, guiding and directing me until I knew the way.”

Thus began a seven-year journey that grew from a healing relationship into an intense and loving apprenticeship. Right from the beginning, Gray took May into the exploration of any unexamined corner of his psyche, helping re-direct habitualness of consciousness toward unlimited possibilities.

“He was ‘in my face’ all the time. He was merciless. I never doubted that he loved me, but I never got to rest. There was too much work to do. He would never abandon me as long as my conviction and commitment was there. And even when I couldn’t do the work, as long as my attempts were there, as long as I was earnest and real, and honest, that’s what was important to him, regardless of my level of success.”

The two spent almost all of their time together for seven years. “With Jack was where I wanted to be,” May remembers. Gray used every situation they encountered in the course of daily living as a training ground for his work with May. Whether they were fixing an old car, playing cards, fishing or attending to clients together, Gray was educating his apprentice. Meanwhile, he also encouraged May to continue his formal education. May went back to college to earn his Ph.D. in transpersonal psychology and became licensed as a psychotherapist.

When May speaks of his time with Gray, it’s abundantly clear that his love for the elder healer is without bounds, and that those years inform his life every day.

Though the circumstances are vastly different, as I sit with May now, I imagine that I might be feeling shades of what he has described in his own experience of having been seen so intimately, so thoroughly, when Gray first entered May’s hospital room and met his eyes with such profound vision.

“The shift actually began about fifteen minutes ago,” May tells me, when I mention the difference I detect in his eyes. “I’m moving into a more blended space with you. I’m seeing you, but not really looking at details. I guess you might say it’s like adjusting the relationship between figure and ground, as if one were focusing a lens so that some things in the foreground are fuzzy, and the background is crystal clear. Your physical form is not engaging my primary attention. How I move, how I breathe now, all has an impact on this experience for me. So my movements tend to get a little rounder, and my voice gets softer. That helps to keep my consciousness more fluid.”

I feel myself becoming profoundly exposed, vulnerable, and at the same time totally safe. I give him full permission -- ask him, really -- to see and work with me at whatever depth he feels is appropriate, no holds barred. I feel certain that he is genuine and kind, if disarmingly honest and laser-direct. Already I’ve been struck more than once by his uncompromising integrity, and I’m only just beginning to know this sprightly healer called Mitchell May.

“Part of my task, as I see it,” he quietly explains, “is to take on a different mantle, to not stay engaged with you at the same personal level.”

It isn’t easy to pinpoint what’s different, but I sense that we are indeed entering into a form of relationship which is paradoxically less personal and yet more intimate, more fundamental. It’s as if we’re entering a cocoon made of membranes which nothing inauthentic can permeate.

This leg of our journey seems to have started when I arrived days earlier at his home, a rustic timber house perched on one side of a sprawling high desert valley, with views across miles of red rock mesas, buttes, spires and snow-veined mountains. He immediately welcomed me to join a small gathering of friends for an evening of informal discourse and some meditative time together. I had come here to interview May in person after months of telephone calls and correspondence, and several brief meetings.

Immediately I was embraced by the warmth of a homecoming, as I put my feet up and relaxed into the peaceful and deep comfort created by the sound of May playing softly on an Indian flute. Even after a day spent in airports and airplanes, I felt the subtly-sacred atmosphere soothing me within the first hour. Occasionally, my mind buzzed with curiosity and anticipation of our conversations in the days ahead. I sensed, already, the approach of grace.

May’s homesite blends into the red-rock landscape, with small softly-sculptured adobe buildings nestled into the staggered terrain below his house. Though everything is solar-powered, May reports that the energy is completely reliable and smooth. “People come to me,” he adds, “when their power goes out.” I can’t help chuckling at the irony of that remark, as I witness the steady voltage and passion for life that seems to emanate from May, who is not an easy man to keep up with.

He expends his energy in enough directions to exhaust the average person. In addition to his healing work, he is actively involved on a daily basis as CEO of The Synergy Company™, a Moab, Utah-based manufacturing operation which grew out of numerous requests for a green powdered superfood formula May originally developed to support his personal healing process. His friends and colleagues were always asking how he managed to have such consistently high levels of energy. When he mentioned that he was taking a homemade mixture of herbs, algae, mushrooms and several other natural ingredients, collectively referred to as “greenie,” they wanted to give it a try themselves.

Now known as Pure Synergy™, the highly charged and precisely balanced nutritional supplement has quietly gained international acclaim in recent years. With unsolicited personal endorsements from such prominent authors as Christiane Northrup M.D., Louise Hay, Ram Dass, John Robbins and Gabriel Cousens M.D., the demand for May’s product is currently escalating once more. Plans are already in the works for a new, much larger, production laboratory.

Until recently, May had been intentionally keeping a very low profile. In the years immediately following Jack Gray’s death, May took on the elder’s client load, and began to conduct private healing sessions practically around the clock. As word of his work spread around the Los Angeles area where he then lived, he saw people seven days a week for several years, until finally deciding that it was time to re-orient his life. Though he had been flourishing in that context, barely needing to eat or sleep, and seeing remarkable results with clients, he knew that he needed to find other avenues for his work.

Stepping back from the public eye and grounding his life in regular daily activities and relationships at that stage was a movement he cites as crucial to his balanced development. He transferred his passionate drive and almost boundless energy to a variety of endeavors that would allow him to touch thousands of people.

For May, carrying out a full slate of workshops and speaking engagements every few weeks, working on new life-enhancing products he’s developing, recording audio tapes, gathering material for an upcoming book, and keeping up with a huge volume of correspondence, is just about enough to keep him busy. It’s not too much to keep him from envisioning and laying the groundwork for several new projects he’s excited about or travelling to far corners of the world to explore them.

One of the most striking aspects of spending time with May is that it expands one’s definition of healing. While he has often assisted clients who presented him with physiological injuries and illnesses, to him the physical body is only one of several ‘bodies’ that make up who we are.

“The emotional/psychological body is where we house our personal history, culture and family dynamics,” he explains.

What he calls, “the body of the imagination” is the realm of archetypes and myths. “That’s the body of the dreamworld, the one where the shaman dwells, outside of ordinary time and space.” A certain form of healing, he says, can take place in this unseen dimension, and transfer to the visible world.

“I learned a lot about that world with Jack,” May explains, “In our culture, we don’t take advantage of it very much; in fact it’s quite often ridiculed, called ‘just a dream.’ We spend one-third of our lives asleep, and we don’t even know how to use sleep for what it’s designed to do: to heal, regenerate and ‘re-source’ ourselves. Most sleep time is used for trying to come to terms with the things we’ve accumulated during the day, because we don’t know how to clear as we go, to process things during waking time.”

That’s the body May says he uses when he’s called to help someone out of a coma. One young girl, who was comatose when May was brought in to help years ago, has now grown up to be a bright and vital young woman. I witnessed their reunion at one of May’s weekend workshops last year. She beamed as she told him that she was studying to fulfill her dream of becoming a healer.

Then there’s the luminous, or energy body, which runs through all the others. “By ‘energy’ I don’t mean vitality or virility,” he clarifies, “it’s more pervasive, a quality rather than a quantity of energy.” And lastly, he says, there’s the spiritual body, “a vast beingness that exists before, in, and after time. It’s where we come from, and where we return to.” May uses all of the bodies in his healing work.

“One of the arts of healing is inclusiveness,” he says, “being able to meet someone where he or she needs to be met, not fitting an individual into a prescribed overlay. My job is to look and see where that person is not ‘inhabiting,’ because inevitably power is leaking out there.”

Grounding that concept in daily life, May says that any place where we have made an agreement and then not kept it, is an example of where we are ‘hemorrhaging,’ losing energy. That interferes with getting what we want in our lives. Many of us live week after week -- even year upon year -- with numerous unfinished engagements like that, and then wonder why we don’t seem to be able to muster the energy we need for healing or flourishing the way we’d like to.

May has no time for ways of thinking that discount the value of the physical organism by focusing on ‘getting out of the body’ and placing greater importance on strictly ‘spiritual’ realms. To him, the human body is “miraculous, designed to fully participate in the ecstasy. It’s the sensing mechanism, the nervous system for the universe getting to know itself.”

May rejects any view that doesn’t deeply honor the whole range of human experience, and he is adamant that we each have access to unlimited and unimagined possibilities for healing on every level. He doesn’t accept projections that he is somehow ‘special,’ despite having attracted a lot of media attention because his own healing was a rarely-documented case of regenerating nerve, bone and organ tissue when the medical establishment insisted it was impossible.

“In our day and age these stories are too rare,” he laments. “What happened to me should be commonplace, available to everyone, but we’re not quite there yet.”

During the period of his life when May was seeing a steady stream of clients for private healing sessions, he recalls that most of them were able to experience some level of contact with an essence, a vast current of life, no matter what their prior experience was, or how skeptical they were. “Most everybody hungers for such a contact, deeply and dearly,” he believes. When he speaks of that longing, his voice fills with compassion and drops to a whisper. I feel as if some kind of gentle presence hovers nearby.

As I sit facing May, he says that it is time to turn to some healing work with me. We have discussed, at an earlier stage, my interest in experiencing his healing work personally, and because of our work together he agreed. May’s work is in such demand that it is impossible for him to attend to the volume of individual requests he receives for private healing sessions. His focus nowadays is on reaching as many people as possible through audiotapes and the Healing, Living, and Being workshops he offers around the world.

We settle in quietly together, and I sense right away that I am stepping onto new ground, fertile with possibility, and that all I can do is be fully present for the experience, letting go of any agenda.

There are a variety of places for you to explore,” he says quietly. Normally he wouldn’t be doing much talking at this stage, but we have agreed that today he will articulate his process for me whenever possible. I am taken by surprise when the next words out of his mouth disarm me at once.

“You’re quite successful with a particular persona for yourself: you’re very pleasant, very nice. It’s your way of navigating in the world. Yet I have a sense of the opposite to that in you: ‘the witch,’ we might call her.”

For me, as I hear him, there is no question of even attempting to defend myself, nor any sense of the need to. He’s absolutely right. I can be generous, sweet and accommodating to a fault, but I’ve also been known to dish out some harsh verbal lashings. My presence is vested with a certain sense of authority that I don’t always wield as responsibly as I might.

Before I can become embarrassed or chastise myself, May elaborates. He casts my behavior in a different light.

“I think you need her,” he says of the aspect of myself that he’s referring to, in archetypal terms, as “the witch.” He encourages me to become familiar with her workings, to ask, ‘What is the configuration that created her? What role did she originally serve, and why is she still here? Where is she authentic, and where is she a ‘knot’ in my consciousness?’

I realize that she was born out of fear, configured as an early survival strategy for keeping any threat at a safe distance. Now a bristly, aggressive side of my nature kicks in habitually at times, even when I actually crave closeness. But I can’t always call that fierceness up at will, when the situation truly calls for focused power.

I sense that he’s suggesting the possibility of forging a new relationship to the cunning, shrewdness and formidable strength that characterizes “the witch.” Trouble is, I can’t imagine how to locate the seat of that power, where to begin making contact with that source in myself in a way that is tangible and real. Silently, I try to make those connections.

“It is this area,” he says, reaching toward me, indicating my abdomen, “that needs to ‘come home.’ Energy is leaking from here. This movement -- re-engaging the energies in this part of your body -- needs to be accompanied by emotional and spiritual work, but it also requires something much more fundamental. I sense the need for an active process that involves bones, flesh, physical, raw, ‘womanness.’”

“Are you talking about belly dancing?” I ask with a sudden surge of laughter.

Without breaking his stride, May immediately joins in the humor. “That’s really not a bad idea,” he answers. “But it’ll take more than that, too,” he adds, now serious. “What I’m referring to is cultivating a very intimate relationship with yourself. This is real ‘fire’ stuff that’s in you, and it got averted, dramatically, through trauma. That part of a person’s life is often cut off for much more subtle energetic reasons.

“The difficulty, and simultaneously the good fortune here, is that this wounding is kept visible by the presence of scars. It’s actually to your benefit that there is no deception possible with this; it’s very hard to go unconscious. In a sense, your path is, ‘No Deception.’ The authenticity of your being is what needs to burn through everything. It doesn’t mean there can’t be incredible softness, and cuddles, but there’s fierceness here, and I suspect that “the witch” isn’t serving the fierceness. It’s become a protection, or it’s been converted into something else, though the pulse is toward authenticity.”

As May continues, I feel the first twinges, hints that it might be possible to re-engage with the section of my body that I have resented for many years. Far from being what I once heard Jungian analyst Marion Woodman refer to as, “the cradle of the body,” to me this is a vacant zone, a vacuum. It is here that surgeons once hastily carved my flesh in emergency surgeries, removing organs, altering years of my life and killing the dream that I’d some day have children. Every day, the mirror reflects evidence of deep suffering and irretrievable loss. Acute peritonitis, life-threatening poisoning from an untreated infection in adolescence, left behind permanent and jagged etchings of pain, shame, and anger. With tears and vehemence, for years I have said, “No” to all that the middle of my body represents. I have covered it with shame, and rarely let it be touched.

Later, when I express to him that I feel I might never had made the connection between that physical trauma and a powerful energy I can access and reclaim, he tells me that our healing work together really began days ago. Looking back, I realize that the first clue came when I had told May how frustrating I had found it over the years to hear from well-meaning friends that having a belly full of dramatic scars ‘didn’t matter,’ or that it was ‘beautiful.’

Well-etched by scalpels himself, May was the first person I’d ever met who truly seemed to understand, and to offer a vision I could live with. “Don’t try to go to beauty,” he said, “Go to power. That’s what this represents. These are the markings of your journey. You survived. An energy that almost killed you is a big energy; it contains a lot of power, and you can reclaim that, bring it back home.”

Clearly, he knows whereof he speaks.

He reminds me to breathe as I climb onto his worktable and stretch out on my back. Suddenly I tense up like a frightened child at the doctor’s office, and quickly mutter something designed to hide the nervousness that I didn’t expect to feel with him. He stays unflinchingly present, and squeezes my hand, relaxes me with soft words, gentle chuckles.

Though he has already asked whether it would be alright to touch my scars directly, and I have expressly granted that permission, he quietly checks with me again before making contact. I deeply trust his promise to be gentle, sensitive and respectful.

Immediately I feel as though his touch is coaxing, inviting, almost prodding life back to layers of muscle and skin that have been dormant, half-dead. Subtle vibrations, like the “buzz” of a silent pager, seem to originate from within a band of muscle just under the skin on my left side. It’s as if a few square inches of sleeping flesh suddenly stirs, stretches and says “Hello.” The shock ignites a quick shiver of fright before I discern that what I’m feeling is not pain. Tears stream from the corners of my eyes as I realize that I haven’t felt anything in this part of my body for more than twenty years.

After a few minutes, May begins to move around the table, his hands moving gently, purposefully, through the air around me, imperceptibly shifting from one direction or speed to another. Loose and relaxed-looking as he steps here and there in the vicinity of the table, he gestures with one hand and then the other in large circular movements, seeming to trace and interact with an energy field that I can’t see but with which May appears to enjoy a familiar working relationship.

Afterwards as I lie resting on the table, I close my eyes and sink into tracking a gentle ‘purring’ vibration that has begun crisscrossing my belly. I stay still, basking in the luxury of an unnameable freedom.

“Here’s your homework,” he says. “You know how that area wants to be touched. Massage those scars. Feel them. You know what you need, don’t you?” His tone is profoundly tender. He waits silently, staying right with me until I answer with a yielding, definite, “Yes.”

As I surrender and open to take it all in, awash in the undeniable feeling that he is striking a crucial chord with me, I begin to understand more of what May’s own experience -- his journey of self-revelation under Jack Gray’s relentless tutelage -- must have been like. I feel the inherent power, the inevitable discomfort, and the strange relief of knowing I’ve been truly seen -- no secrets -- by another human being.

As May talks and works with me further, I feel no sense whatsoever of judgement or even preference coming from him. His attention ranges across my life, pointing out the need to make amends in some of my relationships, reminding me to look carefully at the responsibilities of my work in the world, inviting me to scrutinize the places where I have been lying to myself, and pointing out where I need to give myself a break. He guides me as I re-visit my intention to be more conscious, to not exclude any aspect of my psyche from a close and careful look. Never does he chide or admonish. Often he reminds me that his is only one particular point of view.

When the healing session seems to come naturally to a close, we chat quietly. As if looking through eyes just becoming accustomed to a new light, I survey flat benches of desert rock, tinged warm pink by the low afternoon sun. I am invigorated and empowered, but deeply relaxed. I am bathed in the sense that my life has beauty, wisdom and dignity. I feel fortunate and grateful to have shared this time with May.

On the airplane, heading home, I remember something May said, with obvious fondness, about Gray, his dear friend and mentor. Looking down over the clouds, I smile at how well the healer’s apprentice has carried on the tradition.

“Jack was an old timer,” May told me. “They didn’t talk love, they lived it.”

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