Lessons from Local Leaders:

Cara Cutro

The Art of Coming Home to Yourself: How Cara Cutro Built Abracadabra Massage & Wellness into a Refuge for the Whole Person

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There’s a moment on the drive into Sperryville, Virginia, when the road opens up and the Blue Ridge Mountains come into view. Shoulders drop. Breathing slows. Before anyone has stepped through the door at Abracadabra Massage & Wellness, the healing has already begun.

Cara Cutro wasn’t trying to build a wellness destination when she started. She was trying to get better. What she created along the way turned out to be exactly what her community needed too: a full-service spa, apothecary, and teaching space in the mountains of Rappahannock County, rooted in care for the whole person.

A Different Kind of Childhood Education

Cara’s education in the healing arts began long before massage school.

Her father was fascinated by psychology and divination. A self-taught amateur astrologer, he even used birth charts in his janitorial business to pair compatible employees before sending them out on jobs together. He introduced young Cara to the I Ching, Jungian psychology, and color-based reflection tools that could reveal, with surprising accuracy, where someone was emotionally on a given day.

“I was always really into that kind of deep, inner reflection, and doing it with friends and family.”

Then there were the parents of her childhood friends, who lived in an entirely different world. Their bohemian homes were filled with art, elaborate meals inspired by cultures around the globe, homemade herbal remedies, bodywork, and crystals, along with a deep respect for the natural and the intuitive. Compared with her own more conventional household, visiting them felt like stepping into another dimension.

“It was hugely inspiring,” she recalls. “Like this adventure, because it was so different from your own upbringing.”

Those two early influences, her father’s philosophical curiosity and her friends’ families’ earthy, embodied approach to wellness, ran quietly through her childhood and eventually merged into something she couldn’t ignore. When her own health challenges arrived, she already knew where to look for answers.

Healing Herself First

Cara is candid that her path into the healing arts wasn’t purely philosophical. It was personal, and it was urgent.

“I had different issues and problems. Physical issues, mental problems, emotional problems. Pretty severe stuff going on in my early life that led me to looking for healing and to get better.”

By circumstance and instinct, she was drawn to holistic approaches like bodywork, herbs, and energy medicine. Her search for her own healing became the foundation for everything she would later offer others.

When a friend suggested massage school, the idea clicked immediately. It wasn’t just about learning a modality. It was a way in.

“Having a massage license would allow me to access people in a way,” she explains. “It kind of gives you a foundation to lay hands on people, to help people, to have them come in to see you.”

She earned her license, named her business Abracadabra, and began offering mobile services, visiting clients’ homes and working at inns and bed and breakfasts across rural Rappahannock County.

At the same time, she was immersed in a decade of intensive herbal medicine study that would become one of the defining pillars of her practice. Acupuncture was transforming her own health. Reiki entered her life and became not just a technique but a spiritual path. Tarot became a tool for reflection, and later something she would teach. Each thread was distinct, yet all of them shared one intention: understanding the self and helping others do the same.

“It’s been herbs, body work, and the more spiritual side of things,” she says. “Which kind of goes back to the stuff with my father.”

A Business With a Life of Its Own

For years, Abracadabra was a side business. Cara offered massage part time while working for a natural skincare company, doing landscape gardening, and continuing her herbal studies. The business was real and growing, but it wasn’t yet the center of her professional life.

Then came 2020.

While the pandemic devastated many spa and wellness businesses, it quietly sent new energy toward Abracadabra. Tucked into the mountains of Sperryville, the practice became a haven for people seeking space and calm amid the anxiety and confinement of pandemic life.

A stroke of timing reshaped the business too. The apartment directly above Cara’s office became available after the tenant, a teacher, lost his job and had to move. With almost no one looking to rent, the unit sat empty. Cara took it, moved her apothecary out of her home and into the new space, and expanded.

“Abracadabra just boomed. I didn’t anticipate that.”

She had been planning to shift toward online teaching, turning her workshops and tarot classes into digital programs. Instead, that plan was set aside as the in-person business grew faster than she could keep up with.

“Abracadabra has a life of its own,” she says with a laugh. “I’m kind of along for the ride at this point. I’m like, ‘Okay, what are we doing? How many people work here?'”

Today, Abracadabra is a full-service spa and wellness practice with a team of skilled practitioners, an in-house apothecary, a growing line of handcrafted products, and classes ranging from tarot workshops to Reiki training. It has also become a destination, the kind of place people happily drive an hour or more to reach.

A Refuge in the Mountains

Running a business in rural Rappahannock County comes with real challenges. Staffing is the biggest one, since many qualified practitioners would rather not commute away from the city. But the location also offers something impossible to manufacture: a true sense of arrival.

“If you drive out to where we are, the drive itself is an experience. Your whole nervous system resets just from the drive. Once you get out on the open road and you start to see the mountains in front of you, it’s just beautiful.”

Clients come from neighboring towns and counties and from across Northern Virginia, often as part of a mountain weekend that includes hiking, art galleries, wineries, and the kind of quiet only rural Virginia can offer.

“Having a healing arts business in one of the most healing places on Earth, the mountains of Virginia, it definitely supports the business and the vibes of the business,” she says.

That setting shapes how Cara sees Abracadabra at its core. It’s a refuge, a place where people can arrive with any level of need, whether they simply want an hour of quiet or are working through specific physical or emotional challenges. She resists narrowing that definition.

“When you’re dealing with wellness or a spa environment, everybody needs that to some degree in some way.”

The Apothecary and The Tattooed Herbalist

After years of studying herbal medicine, including a pivotal apprenticeship with herbalist Teresa Boardwine at the Green Comfort School of Herbal Medicine from 2011 to 2012, Cara had accumulated more remedies than she knew what to do with. She had learned to formulate personalized blends, wild-harvest plants, and prepare extracts from an apothecary of her own making.

“I must use these herbs,” she remembers thinking. And so the apothecary found its way into the business.

Today, Abracadabra offers a line of handcrafted body care products, including body oils, perfume oils, salves, and candles, all made in-house with the same intention Cara brings to everything else. That isn’t incidental. It’s part of the integrity of the place.

Alongside the spa is The Tattooed Herbalist, Cara’s alter ego and her vehicle for internal herbal medicines like tinctures and targeted formulas for different ailments. Currently available at the spa, the line is preparing for a formal online launch, a process Cara is approaching carefully and methodically.

“We’re getting that all legitimized before launching online, which is a whole big thing you have to do,” she says.

Managing several creative identities under one roof while keeping the business healthy is something she’s learned through experience.

“They all sort of stay under the umbrella of Abracadabra for now anyway. They do have their own identities, but they feed each other.”

Teaching as a Way of Going Deeper

Education has become one of the most vibrant parts of Cara’s work, and she’s refreshingly honest about why.

“I love learning. And in order to continue deepening my understanding, if there’s something I’m really interested in and I wanna go deeper with it, I will often decide I’m gonna teach it, because then I have to study it.”

There’s something delightfully circular about that logic, and it works. Standing in front of students demands a different kind of mastery, one that can handle unexpected questions and find words for things that are mostly felt or intuited.

She began teaching tarot after a friend invited her to lead a class at her business. Reiki followed. Cara earned her master level with the intention of teaching, believing that passing the knowledge on was part of the commitment she made by receiving it.

“It was like part of the duty and responsibility of that, that you must teach,” she says.

The classroom continues to humble her. A student with no tarot experience will look at a card and offer an insight so fresh and unburdened by years of study that it opens something new in Cara’s own understanding.

“Here’s this person who knows nothing, and they give you this incredible insight,” she says. For her, it’s proof that teaching is never a one-way street.

Her next big goal is to take this work online, making her knowledge of tarot, herbal medicine, Reiki, and sound healing available to people far beyond the mountains. It’s a step she hasn’t quite taken yet.

“I’m getting there,” she says, “because I’ve gotta have the space to do it.”

Crossing the Threshold: A Fall Retreat

This autumn, Cara and her collaborator Karen Loving are hosting their second retreat together at Seven Oaks in Madison, Virginia, and the timing is entirely intentional.

Called Crossing the Threshold, the retreat is built around the themes of fall: letting go, acceptance, transition, and the wisdom that comes from sitting with endings. Guests can expect sound healing, tarot exercises, somatic body awareness work through the Alexander Technique, a fire ceremony, and a tea meditation.

“We are gonna touch on themes around death some,” Cara says. Not morbidly, but honestly, in the way the season naturally invites.

She’s just as proud of what the retreat isn’t: overscheduled.

“I’ve been to retreats where it’s like boom, and it’s like, whoa. I’m already out in the world at that pace.”

Crossing the Threshold is designed with spaciousness built in, leaving room to rest, wander, and let things settle. Seven Oaks supports that intention beautifully. Set in the natural landscape of Madison, the land has been lovingly tended by people who understand that the earth itself is part of the healing.

“The leaves will be changing. You know how the mountains of Virginia in the fall is just like…” She trails off, and the pause says more than words could.

What can happen when people give themselves a few days of that kind of space? Cara doesn’t hesitate.

“Real, deep rest. Real change. People can start to break free from patterns that maybe they’re ready to release. Get inspired in ways they’re searching for.” And sometimes, she adds, rest alone is enough. “Even just to get some real rest can be, like, life-changing.”

Listening as the Foundation of Everything

Across the massage, herbs, Reiki, tarot, apothecary, and retreats, one practice ties it all together. Cara returns to it again and again as the foundation of genuine care: listening.

“One of the biggest problems, maybe in any arena, but especially in health and wellness environments, is people aren’t listening. You sit down with somebody and you’re like, ‘Okay, this person isn’t really listening to me.’ They’re listening, but they’re not really listening.”

She has felt that frustration as both a client and a practitioner, and it has become a core value she instills in her entire team.

Listening means hearing what someone is asking for. It also means recognizing when you aren’t the right person to help, and saying so, even when there’s business pressure to say yes.

“If we can’t help them, we tell them that we can’t, and refer them to someone we think can,” she says. That kind of honesty isn’t always easy, but she believes it’s always right.

The same attentiveness shapes how she hires, a process she has refined through what she cheerfully calls lots of mistakes. Systems matter, instincts matter, and receiving a massage from a prospective therapist before hiring them is plain common sense. Yet in the rush of running a growing business, it’s surprisingly easy to skip.

“Why didn’t I get a massage from that person?” she says, laughing at herself. The answer is always the same. You get busy, you take shortcuts, and then you learn.

Coming Home to Yourself

Cara Cutro isn’t finished building. The online teaching platform is on its way. The Tattooed Herbalist is expanding. The retreats will continue. And Abracadabra will keep growing, guided by a woman who runs her business the way she treats a client: with curiosity, presence, and a willingness to follow where the work leads.

“I love Abracadabra. I love what it is and I love what we’ve been able to build as a team.”

She began by searching for her own healing, and in the process, she created a place where others can find theirs. Whether someone needs a massage, an herbal remedy, a tarot reading, a Reiki session, a few days of rest in the mountains, or simply someone who will truly listen, Abracadabra offers a way back to themselves.

And for many, that homecoming starts the moment the mountains come into view.

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