Eye of the Yantra

We’re sitting in a booth at Bear Tooth when Keith Sherwood suggests I open my
heart chakra.

"Just focus and say, ‘I intend to open the back of my heart chakra,’" he
says.

I repeat this aloud and wait. I am suddenly conscious of the Muzak. It’s
"Hotel California" by the Eagles.

"Now let’s go for your eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth chakras."

Sherwood has a subtle New York accent. He speaks of my "energy vortexes" in
the same insistent, matter-of-fact tone he might use to order a pastrami
sandwich.

"There you go. Don’t you feel lighter?"

I feel dizzy and warm and my vision’s fuzzy. I am on my third cup of
caffeinated tea. All warmness and fuzziness could be related to chemicals, not
enlightenment. But I decide to give Sherwood the benefit of the doubt.

"Can you feel that?" he asks. I nod.

Sherwood, 51, has thick, silver hair, a mustache and gray eyes. He says he
can tell my chakras are open because he can see energy fields. He’s psychic,
too. Before the interview, his assistant called to tell me that I should
remember he can read my thoughts.

"You will have no secrets from him," she said.

I asked her if Sherwood could predict the future.

"He’s not that kind of psychic," she said. "You can ask him personal
questions about your life and he can help you heal them."

Sherwood, a well-known psychic healer, has just opened The Center For Inner
Awareness in a converted warehouse on Arctic Boulevard. The center offers free
meditation sessions and $10 yoga classes. Sherwood also gives private healing
consultations where, he says, he psychically removes blockages from people’s
energy fields. These cost $90 for an hour.

In the late ‘70s, Sherwood started the American Psychic Association and in
1986, he published his first book, The Art of Spiritual Healing, which has since
been reprinted in several languages. Over 200,000 people have ordered it from
Amazon.com alone. His equally popular second book, Chakra Therapy, was published
in 1988.

Sherwood’s belief system focuses on individual personalities and the way
energy flows through the body, centering in areas called chakras. If your energy
is good and flowing properly, you’re healthy. If not, you get sick. If you have
good energy and hang around other people with bad energy they can make you sick
also.

"There is no such thing as physical illness," Sherwood says. "There is no
such thing as disease outside of human relationships."

But what about a kind-hearted woman who gets breast cancer?

"How do you know if she is a good, kind woman?" asks Sherwood. She could be
manipulating her children by loving them too much.... You can’t judge by
appearances."

Within Sherwood’s ideology, only he can be the judge, because he’s the only
one who can see energy fields. He also can sense energy fields over the phone
and see them on television. When he was younger, this constant other
consciousness used to be very distracting but now that he’s more mature, he
says, he’s got a handle on it. His energy is very, very good and because of this
he sees himself as a kind of spiritual healer.

"It’s very hard to be around me and live a lie because I live my truth," he
says. "Being me is very intense."

Born into a large Jewish family in Brooklyn, Sherwood says he’s been
"different" since he was a child.

"I have always experienced things not on a physical plane. Like my parents
would tell me to do something and I would say, ‘I am sensing you are telling me
to do this because you want to go into the back room with daddy.’ My parents
thought I was very strange."

Sherwood first came to Alaska in 1995 as part of a spiritual sojourn.

"I was at a place in my life I didn’t want to see people for a while. I
bought a kayak in Whitehorse and planned to kayak through the inside passage
until I wanted to see people again. I ended up in Juneau, then I went to
Fairbanks, then to Anchorage."

Currently Sherwood commutes between Oregon and Alaska.

Tuesday night about 10 people in their late twenties and thirties gather with
Sherwood among cushions on the white carpeted floor at The Center For Inner
Awareness. The energy is generally bad.

"Planets are colliding, I’m sure of it," Sherwood says. "People are very
agitated." Sherwood’s voice takes a serious tone: "Actually, they’re freaking
out."

A woman with long black hair standing next to him nods gravely. Sherwood then
discusses how he discovered that day his faucet is leaking, a bad sign in Feng
Shui. This means that he may soon be losing money.

The interior of The Center has little furniture except a table and a few
lamps. Everything is completely white except for the red railing of a staircase
to a loft. Sherwood and six people who study with him paid to refinish it.

On the wall hangs a large Yantra, a black line drawing that resembles a
flower with many over-lapping triangles in its center. All of the triangles are
pointed toward a small central dot. This is a meditation tool used to focus the
mind.

"The mind is like a crazy monkey that falls from a tree and gets bitten by a
scorpion," Sherwood says.

When the meditation begins, someone dims the lights and Sherwood sits in a
folding chair. People gather around him on cushions. He leads a deep breathing
exercise and then asks people to focus on the Yantra.

"See," Sherwood says to me. "You’ve opened your heart chakra already. Can you
feel that? Of course you can."

When I stare at the Yantra I see breaks in the lines where there are none, I
feel a pressure above my eyes like I’m going cross-eyed. I can hear the rain
outside. The Yantra reminds me of an old "Batman" episode where Robin was
captured and forced to stare at a spinning spiral while he is being
interrogated. About half-way through the 25-minute session, I realize my leg is
asleep and I try to shake it out without making any noise.

When the meditation is over, Sherwood invites people to snack on cookies and
coffee. I slip out the door but return a moment later because I think I have
left my car keys. When I enter, everyone is seated again and Sherwood stops
mid-sentence to look at me. I feel as if I’ve interrupted kindergarten during
story time.

"Did it every occur to you that you didn’t come back because you lost your
keys?" Sherwood asks. Everyone seated on the floor turns to look at me. "Did it
occur to you that you are here... because you never wanted to leave?" Sherwood
smiles, the Yantra behind him.