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
Cara Cutro wasn’t trying to build a wellness destination when she started. She was trying to get better. What she built along the way turned out to be exactly what her community needed too.
A Different Kind of Childhood Education
Cara Cutro’s education in the healing arts began long before she set foot in a massage school.
Her father was deeply drawn to psychology and divination, a self-taught amateur astrologer who used birth charts in his janitorial business to pair employees for compatibility before sending them out on jobs together. He introduced a young Cara to the I Ching, to Jungian psychology, to color-based reflection tools that could tell you, with surprising accuracy, where you were at emotionally on any given day. “I was always really into that kind of deep, inner reflection,” she says, “and doing it with friends and family.”
Then there were the parents of her childhood friends — a completely different world. Bohemian households filled with art, elaborate meals drawn from cultures around the world, homemade herbal remedies, bodywork, crystals, and a general reverence for the natural and the intuitive. Her own home was more conventional by comparison, which made these other households feel like adventures into a different dimension. “It was hugely inspiring,” she recalls. “Like this adventure, because it was so different from your own upbringing.”
Those two early streams, her father’s philosophical curiosity and her friends’ families’ embodied, earthy approach to wellness, ran quietly through Cara’s early life and gradually merged into something she couldn’t ignore. By the time her own health challenges arrived, she already knew where to look for answers.
Healing Herself First
Cara is candid about the fact 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.” She was drawn, by both circumstance and instinct, toward holistic and natural approaches — bodywork, herbs, energy medicine. The search for her own healing became the foundation of everything she would eventually offer others.
A friend suggested massage school. The idea resonated immediately, not just as a modality but as a platform. “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 got her license, named her new business Abracadabra, and started offering mobile services, going to people’s homes, working in inns and bed and breakfasts across rural Rappahannock County.
Simultaneously, she was deep in herb school, a decade-long intensive study of herbal medicine that would eventually become one of the defining pillars of her practice. Acupuncture was transforming her own health in ways few other things had. Reiki entered her life and became, as she describes it, not just a technique but a spiritual path. Tarot became a tool for reflection and then a subject she would teach. Each thread was distinct, and yet they were all woven from the same 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 That Has a Life of Its Own
Abracadabra existed as a side business for years, Cara always had other jobs alongside it, offering massage on a part-time basis while she worked for a natural skincare company, did landscape gardening, and kept building her herbal knowledge. The business was real and growing, but it was not yet the center of her professional life.
Then 2020 arrived.
Where the pandemic devastated many businesses in the wellness and spa space, it quietly redirected energy toward Abracadabra. Located in the rural mountains of Sperryville, Virginia, the practice became a haven, safe, spacious, and deeply needed, for people retreating from the anxiety and confinement of pandemic life. And a piece of remarkable timing changed the physical shape of the business entirely.
The residential apartment directly upstairs from Cara’s office became available, the tenant, a teacher, had lost his job to COVID and had to move, and the unit sat empty in a market where no one was looking to rent. Cara took it. She moved her apothecary from her home into the new space. She expanded. “Abracadabra just boomed,” she says, still sounding a little surprised by it. “I didn’t anticipate that.”
She had been planning to move into online teaching — converting her existing workshops and tarot classes into digital programs. That pivot got paused, then shelved, as the in-person business grew faster than she could manage. “Abracadabra has a life of its own,” she says. “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 an educational offering that ranges from tarot workshops to Reiki training. It is also, increasingly, a destination, the kind of place people drive an hour or more to reach, their nervous systems already beginning to settle somewhere around the point when the mountains come into view.
The Refuge in the Mountains
Being located in rural Rappahannock County presents real challenges, staffing, primarily, since qualified practitioners don’t always want to commute away from the city rather than toward it. But it also creates something difficult to manufacture: a sense of arrival.
“If you drive out to where we are, the drive itself is an experience,” Cara says. “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.” People come from surrounding towns and counties, from the broader Northern Virginia region, and as part of a weekend in the mountains that might also include hiking, art galleries, wineries, and the particular kind of quiet that only rural Virginia knows how to 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.”
That setting informs how she thinks about what Abracadabra is, at its core. She describes it as a refuge: a place where people can come at any level of need, from simply wanting an hour of quiet to actively 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 a decade 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 herbal medicines than she knew what to do with. She had learned to formulate personalized remedies for clients, to wild-harvest plants, to prepare extracts, to pull from a rich 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 carries a line of in-house body care products, body oils, perfume oils, salves, candles, all handcrafted with the same intentionality Cara brings to everything else. It is a natural extension of a spa rooted in whole-person care, and the fact that the products are made in-house is not incidental. It’s part of the integrity of the place.
Running alongside and slightly apart from Abracadabra is The Tattooed Herbalist. Cara’s alter ego and her vehicle for formulating internal herbal medicines: tinctures and targeted formulas for different ailments. Currently available at the spa, The Tattooed Herbalist is in the process of being formally launched into the online space, a development Cara is working toward carefully and methodically. “We’re getting that all legitimized before launching online, which is a whole big thing you have to do.”
It is one of several branches growing from the same root, and managing that complexity, keeping multiple creative identities coherent under a single roof while also keeping the business viable — is something Cara approaches with the honesty of someone who has learned it the hard way. “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 alive parts of Cara’s professional world — and she’s refreshingly candid about her motivation.
“I love learning,” she says. “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 is something delightfully circular about this logic, and it works. Standing in front of students forces a different kind of mastery. One that can hold questions, respond to unexpected observations, and find language for things that are primarily felt or intuited.
She began teaching tarot after a friend invited her to offer a class at her business. Reiki followed, she earned her master level with the intention of teaching it, feeling that passing the knowledge on was part of the agreement she had made by receiving it. “It was like part of the duty and responsibility of that, that you must teach.”
What she has discovered in the classroom is something that consistently humbles her. A student with no prior knowledge of tarot will look at a card and offer an insight so fresh, so unencumbered 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.” It is, she says, one of the best arguments for why teaching is not a one-way transmission.
Her ultimate goal is to expand this work into the online space. To reach people beyond the mountains, to make her knowledge of tarot, herbal medicine, Reiki, and sound healing accessible to anyone who is drawn to it. It is, she acknowledges, the next big step she hasn’t quite taken yet. “I’m getting there because I’ve gotta have the space to do it.”
Crossing the Threshold: A Fall Retreat
This autumn, Cara and her colleague/collaborator Karen Loving are hosting their second retreat together at Seven Oaks in Madison, Virginia, and the timing could not be more intentional.
The retreat is called Crossing the Threshold. It is designed around the themes of fall: letting go, acceptance, transition, and the particular kind of wisdom that comes from sitting with endings. Sound healing, tarot exercises, somatic body awareness work through the Alexander Technique, a fire ceremony, a tea meditation. “We are gonna touch on themes around death some,” Cara says, not morbidly, but honestly, in the way that fall always invites.
What she is equally proud of is what the retreat is not: relentlessly packed. “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 built with spaciousness deliberately woven in — room to rest, to wander, to let things settle. The setting supports all of it: Seven Oaks is set in the natural landscape of Madison, Virginia, on land that has been carefully and 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 in a way that completes the sentence better than words could.
What can happen when people give themselves several days of that kind of intentional space? Cara answers without hesitation. “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, the rest alone is enough. “Even just to get some real rest can be, like, life-changing.”
Listening as the Foundation of Everything
Through the massage, the herbs, the Reiki, the tarot, the apothecary, and the retreats. The thing that runs through all of it, the practice Cara returns to again and again as the foundation of genuine care, is listening.
“One of the biggest problems, maybe in any arena, but especially in health and wellness environments, is people aren’t listening,” she says. “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 experienced this enough, as both a patient and a practitioner, that it has become a core value she actively instills in everyone on her team.
Listening means hearing what someone is asking for. It also means recognizing when you can’t serve them well and saying so. Even when the business pressure to say yes is real. “If we can’t help them, we tell them that we can’t, and refer them to someone we think can.” That kind of honesty, she knows, is not always easy. But it is always right.
And when it comes to hiring, a process she has refined significantly through what she calls “lots of mistakes”. She has learned that systems matter, instincts matter, and actually receiving a massage from a prospective therapist before hiring them is non-negotiable common sense that, in the busy chaos of running a growing business, is surprisingly easy to skip. “I should’ve — 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.
A Refuge, Evolving
Cara Cutro is not done building. The online teaching platform is coming. The Tattooed Herbalist is expanding. The retreats will continue. Abracadabra Massage & Wellness will keep growing, guided by a woman who approaches her own business the same way she approaches a client in her treatment room: with deep curiosity, genuine presence, and a willingness to follow where the work leads.
“I love Abracadabra,” she says. “I love what it is and I love what we’ve been able to build as a team.”
For anyone who needs a refuge, whether that means a massage, an herbal remedy, a tarot reading, a Reiki session, a retreat in the mountains, or simply a space where someone will actually listen, Abracadabra is waiting. And the drive out there, through the mountains of Virginia, is already part of the experience.
Connect with Abracadabra Massage & Wellness
Website: caracadabra.com
Instagram: caracadabra
Text or email: (540) 878-7085 or [email protected]
For retreat inquiries, herbal consultations, or to explore the full menu of services at the spa, start at the website.
Reach Cara Cutro Below
Website:
Abracadabra Massage & Wellness
Listen on the Podcast: Podcast Episode
Read the Comments +