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In the New Day Herald, January 2010
By David Sand
Michael Hayes does spiritual healing and clearing work privately and at MSIA events. Many people see him alongside John-Roger and John Morton taking questions and answers, so we thought we’d introduce him in this interview so people could get to know a bit more about him.
DS: So how did you start doing this work?
MH: I had a spiritual healing when I was 21. I’d had a back problem for about a year. Basically, I was in pain all the time. I could get it adjusted and it would come back again and again. Then I met somebody who said they worked with the Christ, which didn’t mean anything to me. (My parents were atheists, and I was into metaphysical things but I was actually more interested in Indian spirituality and the gurus. I didn’t have a teacher but I was going around meeting these guys, who you might call spiritual teachers, and I’d been doing that since I was about 17 or 18.)
So I went to get treated for this back problem, and I had a spiritual healing. The person looked into my eyes and said you have to forgive yourself, and something popped in me. I had a tremendous release of energy and emotions, which seemed like it went back to when I was a baby, and even back farther than that, and just cried and cried and cried. And when I was done, my back was totally healed, and more than that I just had this awakening of awareness where I experienced what at that time I called the Christ. It was everywhere I looked — in the trees and the rocks and the moon and the sky. And at that moment I remember going down on my knees and offering myself to God to be an instrument—to, in a sense, do what had been done for me.
I remember offering myself to the Holy Spirit. I don’t really know whether I had much idea what that meant back then, but that’s what I did. And then I started doing some healing work. As a start, I went to massage school for 3 or 4 months, and then I started doing massage. As I worked on people, funny things would happen. I’d put hands on people and they’d start vibrating or they’d start shaking.
It was around that time that I came into MSIA, so I started working with MSIA people, and they wouldn’t just start vibrating and shaking, but they’d start telling me about all these things they were seeing. These were people who had been in MSIA for quite a while, and they described angels and Jesus—and I couldn’t see a thing. All I knew was that I would touch people and I would go into my heart, and I would experience this deep connectedness to something, to that thing that I had experienced when I was healed of my back problem, and then these things just kept happening.
It was interesting because in my mind, a voice would always say, “It’s not going to happen this time, because you don’t know what you’re doing.” All I was basically doing was putting my hands on people, and doing whatever came to me, and yet every time, something would happen.
That went on for a few years, and then I got exposed to people working with consciousness through muscle-testing. That whole thing was just beginning, and very few people were really doing it, and I got interested in that. I thought, wow, if you change what’s going on in somebody’s consciousness, you can bring balancing to their body. It was fascinating to me. So I started learning about that from somebody who was doing that work,and then at one point I just started including it in my healing work.
I think a big thing that led me more into working with consciousness was when I got my ministerial blessing, when I was around 25. In my ministerial blessing there was special blessing placed upon my joy, that it might awaken the spontaneity and the brilliance of my inner knowing. And it seemed like after the blessing came, all of a sudden I started to get this intuitive sense of what was going on, and it started to emerge from me. But I didn’t really rely on it, or trust it that much, and my background was really more to test it mentally—a “check it out” approach, I was raised to doubt things. So I gradually worked with it, and over the years used muscle testing more and more as a way of checking the information that I was getting.
DS: To check information that you were hearing or seeing?
MH: Well I would hear it and see it and feel it and then I would see if their body confirmed it, and see if results came, and over time I began to trust it and find out what I couldn’t trust, through experimentation. As the years went on, it seemed like the intuition side of it became more and more something I could trust, and after many more years I started working with people more over the telephone, so I wasn’t going to be able to muscle test their body. (Originally I didn’t trust muscle testing on myself, I wanted to test on them.) So I had to figure out how to test myself, and use muscle-testing as a check against what I was hearing inside or seeing. And then of course over the years, it just kind of shifted and changed, and as I got more attuned, it seemed like my ability to assist people increased.
DS: And were you having metaphysical experiences from the time you were a child?
MH: Yes, but it’s kind of strange, I can remember when I was about 4, sitting on the couch and being very blissed out because there were all these angels. I knew that. And then I had experiences growing up that were metaphysical, but it wasn’t like I was aware of God or angels or people’s auras, as much as I was very sensitive, and I would have experiences that would just take me to another level. I remember when I was about 7 or 8 years old, I was with my family and we went into a cemetery, and I’d never thought about death or talked about it with anybody, and my father pointed to a grave and said, “That’s where you’ll end up, that’s where everybody ends up.” My parents were scientific, agnostic/aetheist-type people, and they had no concept of an afterlife. I remember it hit me very deeply, and I went into a profound distress that was very difficult for me. I remember being at home that night in my bed and just crying and crying and crying. I couldn’t stop. It felt to me that there was no purpose, so why go on with life, if all I could ever accomplish and achieve and do was going to mean nothing because I would end up rotting in the ground.
And I remember that something happened where I popped into another state of awareness, and I started moving up through these different levels, with these different lights, and expanding into greater and greater lights until I just burst into this extremely amazing place, and then everything was okay. Somehow that experience gave me the answer that I could go on living with, because even though mentally I was taught the ideas of my parents, on another level I was freed from the despair of that. But I wasn’t seeing everybody’s aura, or knowing everything about everybody.
I remember I was in fourth grade, I was a tough little kid, and we used to get into fights, and there was a boy I didn’t like. I can’t remember what had happened, but I punched him in the stomach, and he fell on his knees and screamed. And when he screamed, it was like something in me was just suddenly struck by the wrongness of it. It’s almost like I felt the suffering of all the people that had ever suffered or that ever could suffer, and it shook me so deeply inside that, even though I was a tough kid, in a school with a lot of tough kids, I couldn’t fight anymore. And after that, I just couldn’t get myself to fight. Even if I got in a fight, I’d get beat up, because I couldn’t fight back. It was a very strange thing.
DS: And so you progressed through learning all these different ways of working with people. How did you start coming into assisting in sharings with J-R and John?
MH: That’s a good question. I’d never really thought about that. I’d worked with 
John-Roger for a long time, but it wasn’t like I did it publicly. I just assisted him in his own process. It’s probably been about 20 years now. I didn’t start working with him when I first came into MSIA, but after a period of time I did. The work we did together was supportive of him, but also supportive of other people, because the work he was doing was supporting other people. So I guess the ability I had was recognized. And at one of the first Living in Graces, the one on the East Coast, which was maybe 75 people, everybody in the training got to have a sharing with J-R. That was the only Living in Grace I know where that happened.And at one point, when J-R was working with somebody, he turned to me, called me up and said, “Why don’t you take care of this one?” So I worked with the person on stage, with John-Roger, and it seemed to work. That was the first time.
So then over time, in seminars or Living in Graces, John-Roger would call me in and say, “What do you see here?” or “What would you do here?” It wasn’t a regular thing, or a scheduled thing. It just happened when he was guided to do that, and I really didn’t know when it would happen, or if it would happen, but it happened more and more over time. At some of the Living in Graces it got to be more and more common. The Best of Super II trainings I think were the first where I got really involved, and John-Roger was asking me, with almost every person, “What do you see? What do you see? What do you see?” It would also happen in the early days the Founder’s Dinner, when it was just J-R, and John didn’t really get involved. After while it would be set up as part of the process, that I would be one of the sharers with J-R and John.
DS: And what would you say are the differences between the way you work with people and the way J-R works?
MH: I don’t know if I can answer that. I think in some ways the way I work with people is very similar to the way J-R works with people in that—and this is my perception—it seems like we both are just following the guidance, and we just do whatever the guidance tells us or shows us. I think the aptitude that he brings is phenomenal, and I still see myself very much as the student learning from him in working with people. I remember when I first saw him doing some of the things he was doing with people, many years ago, decades ago, I was just flabbergasted, and then I realized over time that some of those things I saw him do I was now able to do. And then of course he would stretch into another level, and I’d go well, he keeps pushing the envelope, so I’ve got to keep stretching my consciousness as well.
DS: To me the way you do it seems that you are giving people information. With J-R, it’s as though it’s physical and emotional as well, so it’s on all the different levels, where yours tends to be more informational and verbal.
MH: It can be, but it’s other things too. My experience of J-R is that he is so present in the Spirit that being present with him usually starts to bring everybody present to the Spirit, and that evokes tremendous emotion. And Spirit will clearly come through him to people, in a greater way than I’ve seen with anybody else I’ve ever met. I think his level of surrender to being the instrument of Spirit is the most complete that I’ve ever seen, so that’s why I say I’m the student. Do you keep trying to do what he does? No, I keep trying to surrender like he does. My calling is to make myself more available to the Spirit, and I think he demonstrates to us a giving over to Spirit that is unique. He sets the bar, he gives us a target to keep aiming for, so we can all keep reaching for it. Like Jesus says, “These things I do you too shall do, you too shall do and even greater.” I go okay, well Jesus isn’t in the body right now for me to know exactly what that is. I know that there’s some stuff written in the Bible, but J-R is here, and I can keep looking at that and go, he’s a great role model for me, showing how can I make myself available to the work of the Spirit. I think we have different styles in there somewhere, but I think there are more similarities in how we work than there are differences. Not because I try it that way. It just seems like that’s how it’s come about for me. Or maybe because by watching him I say well, that’s the way I want to be. I want less of me in there and more of whatever is brought through.
DS: And what kinds of safeguards or ways of checking do you have, to know whether it’s the Spirit guiding you versus something else?
MH: Well originally that’s why I used muscle testing, to try and get a check against things, and so even when it seemed like my intuition was really working well, I’d be using muscle testing as a check, and if the muscle testing and my intuition weren’t in sync, I would stop, and I would go, “Either I’m being fooled in the muscle testing, or I’m being fooled in my intuition, or maybe I’m misinterpreting something.” And at a certain point, it’s hard to say when, (I’m going to guess probably 20 years ago) I started to see the Light when I worked. And I started to say well, what if that could be my reference? For example, how would I know when this session should be over? Well, I would watch this Light pick up. And so I began to track that, and to watch the movement of the Light, to watch how the Light moves in and through people when I’m working.
I can often see the Spirit as it moves on a person and when it moves a certain way, I know they’re going to have a big release. Many times before they have a release I already know it’s coming because I’ve seen the Spirit touch them. Probably that’s the thing that I use more than anything else, the seeing of it. And then there’s also the basic mandate, “Do no harm.” I’m always about results, so I don’t necessarily know that what I tell people is so, but I’m looking to see if it brings a positive change for them. And if I can see the aura change I can see the Spiritual Light move through them. That’s probably the major thing that I track. There are also guiding sources inside of me that tell me things like “Well, that’s done, that’s complete.” Probably I trust the seeing most. I’m not saying you can’t be fooled, but it seems to be very hard to fool that.
DS: I’ve heard J-R say that seeing is above all.
MH: That’s what I’ve come to, I’ve found that there are times when I’ll end some work with somebody and I haven’t seen that Light pick up, and lo-and-behold I’m back in there with that person, 15 minutes later or 2 hours later, dealing with it because I didn’t do what was there to do. I’m talking to the person again, because I didn’t go with that.
DS: Do you find in your work any interference or resistance, from your ego, from negativity, and what are your ways of dealing with that?
MH: Not from my ego very much anymore. For a long time, I was having to work with that a lot. It’s not that I don’t have my ego, and my ego wouldn’t like to take charge, it’s just that most of the time I can catch that pretty fast. So the ego isn’t really much of a problem now. The negativity can move against me in subtle ways, and can inhibit me accessing—and this is a strange way to say this—when it moves on me it’s not so much that it changes what I access, but if negativity is on me, it can affect how I would be given over, or how something would come through me in the service. Like in the recent Living in Grace training, the last night of the sharing, there was a point when I came under a psychic attack. It found a way to get at me, and I was aware of it, and I was able to contain it enough, and I could keep doing the sharing, and the information could come through effectively. But in the first sharing, there was a message from a higher consciousness, a Master of the spirit world had come in for something, and I was able to be used be that consciousness to help somebody. When the negativity was challenging me, that didn’t happen. I could still do the work with their karma and their story, but during the period where I was being challenged, I didn’t have any higher beings working through my consciousness in the way they can. So that would be an example of how negativity would get in the way. Once I finally figured it out and moved it off, that started happening again. So yes, we have to deal with that like everybody else. It’s subtler, it’s not like a lot of the stuff that most people deal with, because I can just see that and pick it up very quickly. So yes, I can still be challenged. That’s not the biggest obstacle I have though. For me, my biggest obstacle is in my unconscious, which has to do with coming to the point of being willing to surrender more and more, and in a sense, be less and less involved, less and less “there,” so the Spirit can be even more and more there.
DS: And your unconscious resists that?
MH: Yeah, I find the resistance is out of the unconscious, because it involves letting go of the “me,” letting go of the sense of separate existence, letting go of attachment, letting go of personal identification in subtler and subtler ways. That’s the thing where I find myself the most stretched.
DS: And how do you deal with that?
MH: I just meditate a lot, and work with it, and pray, and look at it, and try and figure out what it is that, back somewhere inside of me, is the basis by which it says, “We can’t let go,” and then I can find that, and then get it to let go. It’s a lot about how can I be more available?
DS: And in the early days you said your ego interfered. What kind of interference would you get and how would you deal with it?
MH: Well, I mean ego has so many ways of interfering, mostly it wants to be special. So it wants to take credit, and it wants to be recognized, and there’s nothing wrong with having that, as long as it doesn’t become the determiner of what you say or do. So my ego would come in to try and get me to, for example, steer a conversation or have me take an action that would draw attention to myself, or somehow aggrandize myself.
DS: In the eyes of the person you were working with?
MH: In the eyes of the person I was working with, and maybe my own ideal of myself. Can it still happen? Sure. I think I’m more aware of when it’s attempting to do that, and I think most of the time I don’t allow it.
DS: Do you find in the process of letting go, and of letting go of the sense of separation in the unconscious, that it helps to be grounded so that you have something physical to hold you here?
MH: It helps to have things that I love and care about in the world. And one of the things I often tell people, which is something I’ve been told in the spirit world for many years, is that for a tree to grow taller it has to sink its roots deeper. So yes, it helps to have that which I really care about in the world, so that I re-orient to the world if I let go.
DS: I think J-R’s had that with people around him, Claire especially.
MH: That’s exactly what I’m talking about. Something that gets you personally willing to invest in the world enough that you can stay connected to it. If you get too impersonal, why do anything?
DS: And how do you not let the grounding aspects interfere with your letting go process?
MH: It’s a balance between the two. Let go and then be grounded. I think as the old song says, feet in the sand, head in the clouds. I remember J-R describing in the Christmas Eve 1968 tape that they played at Living in Grace, how Jesus was so strong he could drive the money-changers out of the temple, and so tender you could see him tucking in his disciples in at night. You also find that he could raise the dead, so he could be very grounded and he could be very able to give over to the Spirit. I think J-R’s been a good example of that. A very grounded person—when you think about when he became the Traveler, he was also teaching school, and dealing with those high school kids, and that has to be very grounding. So there’s a kind of perfection to be had in something that keeps you very grounded when you’re very high, so you can hold that balance. Idealistically, I used to think, well, you’d do better to have just some little inconsequential thing you do physically and just go off and meditate so you can be connected to Spirit as much as possible. But it seems like it works really well to have things that you’re fully involved with in the world. That’s how it’s been done for me.
DS: Do you find yourself taking things through your body the way J-R does?
MH: No, I don’t do that anymore, and I don’t know that J-R is taking as much through his body as he once did. But for me, I don’t do it a lot, but that’s 32 years of working with people, so at some point, there are certain levels of dis-identification with my body, which seems to give me some protection against it going through my body. That wasn’t always the case. For a long time I did pick up a lot of stuff through my body, but at some point I just sort of figured out how to not do that.
DS: You talk about picking up stuff as though that’s like a side effect, or an accident that happens, rather than a method of working with people. It seemed like for a lot of years in the movement, J-R would talk about it as one of the ways he works with people.
MH: The way I’ve heard it described, is that when you’re the instrument of change, or the release of karma, the karma that’s released will come to you. I’ve always looked at it well, if I’m identified as the one who does it, then it comes to me and I’m responsible. But if I’m not identified as being the one who’s doing it, I’m just a servant of the Light, or the Traveler, or the Christ, or any of these Master forms that are doing it, or the Archangels, then they take it. And so I experience it come towards me and be pulled up and into the Light. So most of the time, if it comes through my body, it comes through very quickly, like it comes through and goes out. Sometimes it doesn’t, and that’s where I have to get cleared. But if it stays with me, I look to see how have I created, promoted or allowed this? And there will be something I’ve done, or some karma I had with that person, something about the situation which let that take place. I still need to check myself and clear myself, and I do. But I don’t have a lot of physical distress usually when I’m working. Sometimes I’ll have a physical sensation, that lets me know the other person’s having a physical sensation, but I don’t do that too much. I try and do it more as awareness than feeling. It’s like if you’re in a room with people and somebody has a headache, I’d rather be aware that somebody has a headache thanhave a headache in order to know somebody has a headache. But there’s sort of a line where you can cross over from being aware of it through the the sensation to being aware of it just as awareness.
DS: Can you describe what your ministry to J-R is?
MH: I guess it varies at different points. I mean, I love him. There was a time when my karma was finished and I was going to die, and there was a very clear awareness in me of going to the Spirit world, and making an agreement to stay, and the two things I remember agreeing to do was to get married and have a family, and to stay to take care of J-R. Now to me that doesn’t mean that I’m the only one who takes care of J-R. There are the people around him, there’s immediate staff, and others that at this point do more than I do. There were some periods of time when there was just a lot for me to do, and that was good, and I was able to assist him a lot, and now I do what I can when he needs it, but fortunately for all of us, he’s doing so much better, that he doesn’t need what I do as much. But I think I’m like everybody else, I’m just available there for him.
A lot of it’s clearing work, and when I first did it with him it had more to do with just constantly clearing negativity, the way negativity will try and attack him or the work or the organizations that he’s brought forward, or just keeping the negativity out. Now a lot of it is more as though I don’t even talk about it as much as just do it. I just move with awareness and move things away. In the beginning I didn’t have that ability, so we had to go in and sort of search it out.
DS: Now you just see it more clearly?
MH: It comes to me much more clearly, I didn’t have that ability when I first started.
DS: And you’re on call pretty much 24 hours?
MH: Always. But he’s doing so much better, it makes it much easier. There are many things I don’t talk too much about, because a lot of it is personal, between me and him, just like if I worked with you it would be between you and me. Most of the work we do for the planet that I’ve supported him in has not been talked about, because I’ve never really gotten an OK to talk about it. But some of it was talked about, like when we’ve been on trips. The first time I talked about it, it was J-R who suggested it. In the summer in Israel, we talked a little bit about the the tsunami and earthquake, and the big clearing that had taken place before that, so that would be one of probably hundreds of times that kind of work has gone on, and it’s just not been talked about.That’s been happening for years.
DS: Do you work with John at all?
MH: Sometimes. It’s different, but I do at times.
DS: Why would J-R of John need someone to work with them? It’s an interesting question.
MH: It’s often set up that nobody’s supposed to be exempt from needing assistance from outside. I think it helps keep us all human. I’ll need support for different things. I might need less support in some areas, but more support in others. So we’re not here to be self-sufficient in that sense, because then that creates a kind of an exclusion, or it exempts us from the ordinariness of life. So everybody has something that we need help with, and that’s kind of how it’s done.
DS: How do you keep yourself clear when you’re working with people? Do you have a certain limit that you place on yourself during the day? Do you only work with a certain number of people?
MH: No it’s not a number of people. Probably the biggest limit I have is I’ll get tired of it, and my basic self gets tired of it, like after 10, 12, or 15 people I start to lose my edge. Because the hard thing is that it’s not like sitting and talking with a person all day, it’s being quiet inside, or still inside to wait for the guidance and information, so at a certain point it becomes almost wearing on me to be so quiet. And part of me goes, “I want to go do something else.” That’s the bigger limitation—I start to do too much, and it just starts to get harder for me to stay in the quiet.
It’s like anything which takes a high concentration. It’s not a high mental concentration, it’s like a high concentration of staying empty and staying light, so I’ll get to the point where I know I need a break. If I don’t, I can tell I’m not quite there like I can be.
DS: Do you find yourself getting bored with it?
MH: If I’m working too much, I’m overworking, I’ll start to get like bored, I’ll get distracted, like oh I don’t want to do another one of these, because most of what I do is very easy for me to do. So it’s not really stretching me, because I’m not really doing it, so there’s not a lot of fascination in it. I don’t really get very bored because I like to help people, and everything’s new when I do it, so when people come to me there’s a newness. I don’t get bored with the information—but some are more interesting than others.
DS: Do you envision yourself doing this 10, 20, 30 years from now?
MH: I don’t really have a vision of the future, but maybe, maybe not, I don’t know. I don’t know what I’ll end up doing. Maybe I’ll work with groups. J-R told me many years ago that I’ll be working with groups. He’s been right about just about everything I’ve ever heard him say, not always about the timeline, so I assume that that’ll probably happen, but that’s sort of happening now.
DS: Is there a place you’d like the work to go? Is it, “This is my calling, I’m just doing what Spirit asks.” Or is do you ever think, “I’d like to do this, I’d like to do that.?”
MH: I’m not really aware of anything in that sense, where I would like to do anything in particular. I don’t really have any goal around it. It comes into my mind sometimes, that maybe after my kids are grown, I could see myself maybe traveling a little bit—because I used to travel a little bit. I don’t really like traveling to do the work particularly, but I could see that it might be good to reach out. It just seems that there are people out there that are still looking for the Light, that are looking for assistance, and that the particular way that I do what I do would be useful. But that’s probably down the line. With my family, with children being pretty young, it’s not an easy thing when I travel now. But at some point maybe. I’ll just follow the lead of the Spirit. The important thing I’ve always found is that it’s about the connection. If I honor that connection, and I keep that connection clear, then whatever I do from that place will be good. But I’m very committed to supporting J-R’s work and John’s work, and all the works of MSIA. I’m very supportive to all of that.
DS: It definitely seems like, as the Light comes in more to the planet, there’s more and more negativity to be cleared.
MH: It’s pushing it up. It’s pushing it up to be out.
DS: Do you have any suggestions for people in dealing with that? I think a lot of people are faced with that who might be reading the New Day Herald.
MH: The main thing is don’t get caught up in the collective panic, or the fear that’s being propagated by 2012 and all that stuff. Don’t give energy to that. This is really a marvelous time, for all the Light that’s coming into the planet. And that would be what we want to keep focusing on, and not focus on the other. And then, the answer I always got inside was, “Go within. Find the place of peace and then be in that peace. And carry that peace and share that peace.” And that seems to help. I mean, if God wants you to be someplace where something bad is going to happen, then you’ll be there, and if that’s not God’s will for you, you won’t. So there’s a surrendered way of looking at it, sort of fatalistic. What can we do? Keep bringing positive Light in. There’s a lot of good news here, though the media wants to focus on the bad news, because that sells. There’s a lot of good news.
