Vera Lopez Shapiro is not your ordinary travel agent. The Des Plaines resident organizes several trips each year to Peru, but if you’re looking for good shopping tips or sunny beaches, this isn’t the tour for you.
If, on the other hand, you’re looking for “a transformational process of rediscovery of self,” as Shapiro calls it, and are open to having an ancient Inca priestess named Chuma as your spirit guide, then a Spirits of the Earth tour might be your cup of herbal tea.
Vera’s husband, Joshua Shapiro, is a computer systems administrator by day, at 360 Communications in Chicago. But in his free time, he speaks at seminars about UFOs, writes books on New Age topics and is something of an authority on crystal skulls, which are ancient quartz crystals shaped like human skulls and believed by some New Age followers to have special healing and spiritual powers.
Des Plaines and the rest of northwest suburbia, as one might guess, are not a hotbed of New Age thinking. Joshua Shapiro admits that he’s more likely to find people with beliefs similar to his and Vera’s in California or New York, rather than in Schaumburg or Elgin.
But the Shapiros believe they have found a niche with their VJ Enterprises, a New Age organization founded in 1991 that has a goal of sharing information and offering products and services such as the trips to Peru. The Shapiros give workshops locally and speak at national conferences on their offbeat areas of interest.
“There actually are quite a number of people here (in the Chicago area with New Age interests),” Joshua Shapiro says. “Maybe 15 to 20 percent of the people here share interests in things like Native American (culture and philosophies) or holistic things.
“The crystal skulls and UFOs are a little more on the fringe for the Chicago area. I’d like to see people a little more receptive to these things, but that’s up to them. I can only share what I believe. And because of the Internet, I’m able to share information with people all over the planet.”
In addition, Joshua is co-author of a self-published book, “Mysteries of the Crystal Skulls Revealed.” He has been interviewed by the BBC for a program they did on the skulls and is talking with Hollywood filmmakers about a movie on the skulls, which he says he envisions being a kind of “Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skulls.”
Along with her spiritual trips to Peru, Vera is a master/teacher of Reiki, the ancient art of healing through hand positions, and “a metaphysical teacher of the healing and energetic quality of crystals,” according to her biography.
It was at a UFO seminar several years ago that Mercedes Moncion, a family practice physician from Skokie, heard about the Spirits of the Earth trips. “I’d always wanted to go to Peru, especially Machu Picchu, and I thought this was my chance,” Moncion says, adding that the trip changed her life.
“It’s hard to describe,” she says, “but I could see my problems more clearly and how to solve them after the trip. I felt a lot happier.
“(Vera) added so much to the trip because she’s so enthusiastic and so friendly. I really felt I had a special connection with her. She is a special person.”
The VJ Enterprises Web site, which the Shapiros have run from their home office since 1995, gets 4,000 hits a week from all over the world. (The address is http://www.execpc.com/vjentpr/ .)
The site lists lectures, trips and classes the Shapiros will be participating in this year. It also includes descriptions of their metaphysical areas of interest and has links to other New Age sites.
Joshua sees the site as part of a “New Age network” that technologically connects people all over the world. Vera adds that the computer has made it easier for her to keep in touch with people who have taken her tours.
“You start to create a group of friends who all are searching for something deeper,” she says.
Joshua says the popularity of the Web site is a testament, perhaps, to the growing number of people either looking for answers to life’s mysteries or just plain attracted to the bizarre.
Carol Hannig belongs to a group called Circle Unending, which meets twice a month at the Cary Senior Center. She describes it as a kind of metaphysical study group that brings in speakers on New Age topics. Usually 20 to 30 people show up, but lately it hasn’t been unusual for the numbers to swell to 50.
“More people seem to be open to looking for alternatives,” says Hannig, who lives in the northwest suburbs. “People feel they can learn something from us and not feel so powerless.”
Vera and Joshua both admit to being something other than ordinary as children. Vera, 39, grew up in Sao Paulo, Brazil, and was a loner. “I had connections with spirits, and I would know things and not know how I knew them,” she says.
She studied at a spiritual center and then worked at that center as a channeler and healer. While traveling to the ancient ruins of Machu Picchu, she says she received a “message” from a spirit named Chuma, who later told her she should unite North and South America by bringing North Americans on trips to Peru.
Joshua, who grew up in Skokie and got a bachelor’s degree in computer science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1977, says his parents thought him a bit “different” as a child, but he didn’t start researching spirituality until he graduated from college.
Joshua was speaking about crystal skulls at a conference in Brazil when he met Vera in 1990. Although they didn’t speak each other’s language, they say they had an instant psychic connection. They married one year later and moved to the U.S.
Vera says most people are spiritually changed when they go to Peru, which she describes as an energy vortex. Her tours are not for spiritual skeptics. They include communing with spirits, coca leaf readings and meeting with Andes priests who perform ancient rituals.
Since a national best-selling book “The Celestine Prophecy” (describing a spiritual quest in Peru) came out in 1993, tours to Peru have multiplied. “Now everyone wants to take a group,” Vera says. Consequently, the locals are trying to make more off the tourists and charging more for rooms and guides.
Word of mouth, the Internet and people she meets at workshops bring in enough customers to keep her in business.
“This work I do is not about money,” she says. “It’s very spiritual work.”
