Connecting the Dots: From Ad Exec to Energy Practitioner—A Memoir and Guidebook

By Heather McCutcheon

How much do we really know about the world that exists beyond the reach of our five senses? In the voice of an easy-going road-trip companion, Heather McCutcheon guides us through the intersection of science and spirituality via her own experiences. McCutcheon left corporate America in 1998 to study massage therapy in search of a greater sense of purpose. Her story begins with an insecure, naive girl and ends with a confident woman challenging established social institutions by combining ancient healing modalities and modern communication technologies. McCutcheon takes us through her transformation step-by-step, effortlessly moving from moments of bewilderment and epiphany to cracking jokes at her own expense. Walk with her as she bumbles through encounter after encounter, then adeptly connects the dots between chakras, energy healing, quantum physics, mediumship, reincarnation, and a simple, action-based plan to improve quality of life for us all.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Hillcrest Media Group
• Release date: Sep 29, 2015
• ISBN: 9781634136877

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Chapter 1

Tuesday at the Office

We have been all wrong! What we have called matter is energy whose vibration has been lowered as to be perceptible to the senses.

—Albert Einstein

It turns out everything is made of energy, including us. The implications of this have been scientifically explored in many ways, though not extensively in the ways that might do us the most good—in relation to our wellbeing. See, we store trauma energetically in our bodies, and this stored trauma can compromise everything from our health to our behavior. It’s at the root of most of our individual and collective problems. By clearing, balancing, and fortifying bioenergetic fields, we can help to heal a person, a community, a nation, and the world, and this is the story of how I know for sure.

The years I spent in advertising were exciting and lucrative, but they do not compare to the joy and quiet thrill of my life as an energy practitioner. The path from there to here was not a well-paved straight line. It was a curving, circuitous route with many obstacles, down which I’ve alternately run and stumbled, and even abandoned altogether. I am far from perfect, as you will see, but I can help people in incredible ways. And if I can do it, there’s a really good chance you can, too.

With your permission, I hope to guide you down an easier, more direct path than my own. The chapters in this book cover a wide range of topics along the metaphysical spectrum. I will share my own background and experiences along the way—the triumphant, the painful, and the amusing—in hopes that you can see yourself in these pages. Throughout, I will teach you what I’ve learned and urge you to experience some of what I’ve experienced, to explore your own life and your own highest potential, to connect the dots.

It may be useful to start with a brief glimpse into what lies ahead, into the work-life of an energy practitioner. This happened in my office on a cold Tuesday evening:

Renée

Let’s just do massage this time, Renée said.

She had recently been overdoing it on the soccer field and wanted me to help alleviate the achiness in her tight leg muscles. I was happy to comply. After she pointed out an area on her left calf and another on her right thigh, the places she was experiencing the most discomfort, I left the small room so she could undress and get settled under the sheet on my table.

When I came back in, I began the massage treatment with a few brief techniques to loosen up her shoulders and traction her low back before moving down to address the issues she had mentioned. She was breathing very deeply and loudly. I frequently ask people working through pain to breathe into it and center themselves. As a long-time client, Renée knew to do this unprompted, but I wasn’t anywhere near her sore legs yet.

Halfway through the session I invited her to flip over so I could work on her quads and hip flexors, and then I headed up to her neck and head for a relaxing finale. On my way there, I noticed her hands had taken on a strained, grasping shape, as if she were holding tightly to two nonexistent softballs.

What’s happening here? I asked her, puzzled by this new development and mildly concerned.

She said she felt heaviness and tension in her arms. I suggested we switch to working with energy, despite our original treatment plan, and she agreed.

I put my hands at her left shoulder and lightly brushed downward with my fingertips, sweeping across the top of her hand, and then I did the same for the right arm. This helped, but her hands were still clutching invisible balls.

I slid my fingers under her head and held it gently in my hands, visualizing a strong connection between my feet and the ground, then mentally opened up the crown of my head. Renée’s arms lifted and began to wave in slow circles at her sides. Her breathing had been a bit dramatic for the duration, but it was getting louder as if she might hyperventilate. After several minutes, I moved my stool to her side from where I could place one hand under her head and the other under her low back, gently cradling her. Her arms began to make bigger circles, up over her head and back down to her sides. Her feet kicked intermittently. It looked like she was swimming the breast stroke, face up on my massage table.

I checked in with her to see how she was doing, and her response was calm, indicating no distress, just a lack of control of her arms.

I was calm, too. The first time this happened it had scared the crap out of me. Are you okay? I’d asked my client. Ultimately she ended up comforting me, which is not the dynamic you want in a client-practitioner relationship. I had been through enough of these sessions by this time to know that all was well. We continued like that, with my hands under her head and low back and her swimming, for about twenty minutes. I could feel the energy flowing through my head, heart, and arms and into her, but by the looks of it, nothing was changing. We would just have to be patient and ride it out. I realized I would not likely make it to the restaurant in time to have dinner with my family that night.

Finally a burst of warm, loving light came into my body from behind my left shoulder. It was dark outside and I was sitting in the middle of a dimly lit room, but healing energy can find a way in when it’s summoned. It felt like a wave passing through me, down my arms and into Renée. Feeling it come in from behind me was a novel sensation, but I accepted this new development gladly.

That should help, I said, and Renée smiled. She’d felt it, too. Moments later, her waving and kicking stopped, and we agreed we’d reached a good ending point.

I was reluctant to leave her alone to get dressed as she might become increasingly uncomfortable with what had just happened, but we couldn’t very well sit there all night. I told her I’d go wash my hands and then wait outside the door for her to let me back in, just as I always did. Then we talked about the session and the wave of light.

You’ll probably want to drink lots of water to help the energy process, and you might not feel like doing much of anything else tonight. Be careful driving home.

Though it was only 8:30 when I arrived home, I passed out almost immediately, sleeping four hours past my 6:00 wakeup the next day. It was a thirteen-hour night’s sleep. Powerful sessions sometimes knocked me out, and that one had been a doozy.

Later that afternoon I emailed Renée just to check in. She was feeling unstuck on a number of levels, very tired, and grateful. We had moved a lot of energy through her chakras and it isn’t unusual for recipients to be tired as their energy fields clear and shift into greater coherence.

Chakras are energy centers that govern an individual’s health and wellbeing on physical, emotional, psychological, and spiritual levels. While it took me about six months of practice to say chakra with a straight face, now chakras are one of the most important facets of my work. By the end of this book, you’ll have a much greater understanding of chakras, including your own. But first let’s back up a bit so you understand where I began this incredible journey, which may be very like where you began yours, or how yours may be evolving someday soon.

What follows is an account of some of my most compelling experiences as I have come into a much better understanding of how our world works. I have grouped these events into categories for ease of comprehension, so they may not have occurred in the order in which you read them.

Chapter 2

Here’s the Rub

Your purpose in life is to find your purpose

and give your whole heart and soul to it.

—Gautama Buddha

I graduated from the University of Iowa with a BA in English after majoring in biology for the first three years. I knew writing came easily to me and organic chemistry did not, but erroneously assumed it was the same for everyone. Writing is easy. Chemistry is hard. It took me three long years to clue into the fact that folks breezing through organic chem were having trouble writing papers because language skills and creativity live on the opposite side of the brain from analytical subjects such as math. It was only then I realized I had an ability that could be of some value. Unfortunately, the only practical application I could envision for my skill set was to go into advertising. So I did.

Well, not right away. The job market was tough in the early ‘90s and all the newspaper ads included the phrase, Experience required. My dad told me to apply anyway. It’s so hard to find good people. Just go—they’ll love you. Because I thought dads were obligated to offer moral support to their children, I didn’t believe him. Instead I took a job at a small suburban company where a friend worked and experience was not a prerequisite. We worked for inner city hospitals and our job was to get people without insurance onto public aid to save our clients from having to eat the cost of their emergency room visits. I’ve been there four years and I love it! You’ll really get to help people, my friend had promised.

For the next six months I worked very hard to ensure that our tax dollars went to help gang bangers, drug dealers, and, all-too-rarely, sick kids. I saw two grandmothers with knees shot out because their grandsons had offended the wrong guys and one developmentally challenged girl of fourteen giving birth to a relative’s child. It was rough, and I was not up for it.

One of the highlights of this period was a Friday-the-thirteenth party thrown by a coworker who arranged for a psychic to offer readings to her guests. There were about twenty people in the main room at the party, laughing, snacking, and drinking cheap wine. One-by-one we filed into a side room to see what this mystery woman had to say. I absolutely believed there were people out there who had access to extrasensory information. People I trusted—and people they trusted—had met them, and spoke of these encounters enthusiastically. But I also knew that for every psychic with impressive success rates, there were dozens, if not hundreds, of fakes.

As my coworkers emerged from their readings, they reported highlights and assessed accuracy. I waited and listened to gauge my expectations accordingly. The reactions ran the gamut. A few people were amazed at the woman’s accuracy. Several said she got many things correct, but others wrong, and a few felt she wasn’t the real deal.

I got the impression that an intuitive’s connection with her subject can be hit or miss, and hoped she would be able to read me. Cathy Barrett, one of my coworkers, was very suspicious of the whole operation and insisted she wasn’t going for a reading. It scares me! she kept saying, even after enthusiastic reports from her friends.

When it was finally my turn, I walked into the room and was met by a Native American woman who looked respectful of her heritage without being commercial about it. She had long dark hair and was wearing a pale tunic with a richly colored tribal weave on the front. The table had a small cloth bag on it and some feathers. It was all very unassuming and I found it fascinating. There were several phases to the reading. At one point she spread some stones out on the table and talked about their significance and the impression they gave her about my spirit. It sure sounded like me. Later she asked to hold my hands and said, This is where I prove to you that what I’m saying is real. She took my hands in hers and said, You have moved around a lot, from place to place. You have always felt like an outsider and had trouble fitting into groups. One person who has been a constant in your life is named Ruth.

We had moved around a lot after my parents divorced when I was two. Throughout my childhood, while I was the perpetual new kid, my mother held a string of office jobs and dated a variety of men. She married my least favorite when I was four. He was an old man with sons my mom’s age. He was fond of saying, Nobody’s perfect—almost, but not quite! He was referring to himself, implying that he was almost perfect. He also said he was psychic and could dissolve clouds with his mind. I usually got bored while he was grimacing and breaking a sweat, so I never actually witnessed the outcome, but my mom seemed to think he could do it.

When it was his turn to tuck me in, my stepfather would use his tongue to kiss me good night. It was slimy and lingered in a way I’d never experienced before. When it was not his turn to tuck me in, and I was to hug him good night, he pushed his pelvis into me for maximum contact. I knew I didn’t like him, but young children don’t have language to explain their feelings or understand why they should. They don’t know how to level charges against adults. At least I didn’t.

I’d cried throughout their wedding. A friend of my mother’s chastised me sternly and said I was acting like a baby. Here’s a tip: If you see a child get very uncomfortable around an adult in their lives, take note. They know much more than you think they do—often more than you do. Mercifully, we left him and moved out of state when I was eight.

And so it was, moving every few years, leaving friends, neighbors, teachers, and anything that felt safe and familiar behind. It seemed I was constantly trying to get acclimated and there were always bullies around to make that process more difficult than it should be. But that’s not so unusual. That could be anyone’s story. As far as this Native American psychic was concerned, that could be a lucky guess.

But here’s the thing: my mother’s name is Miriam Ruth, after her mother, Ruth. Ruth isn’t common like Mary or Sarah. This woman had my attention. She went on and on saying things I knew to be true, and then asked me what I did for a living. Between me and my coworkers we’d agreed not to discuss this, because then she’d have information for all subsequent readings, but since I was a short-timer at this agency, inevitably headed to my true calling in the fast-paced world of advertising, I felt it was safe to say, Advertising. She thought for a moment, then her eyes got wide and she shook her head, No. No, you’re going to be a healer and a teacher, like Christ.

It made me very uncomfortable and I scoffed it off saying, No, I’m going into advertising. She couldn’t have been further off the mark. I’d never been a churchgoer. In fact, I’d written a paper on the existence of God for a philosophy class in the sixth grade, and spelled Jesus with an a, as in Jeasus. My teacher handed my horrified mom the paper at a parent-teacher conference. As the daughter of a Methodist minister, my mother interpreted this misspelling as evidence of flawed parenting on her part and a guilt-ridden discussion ensued. Also, I wasn’t entirely clear on the rules, but I was pretty sure it was sacrilege or blasphemy to compare people to Christ.

The Indian woman let it go, and we moved on to my broken heart. I’d just been dumped by a guy I’d moved to Illinois with after dating him for three years. When we were in school and I was busy working to pay tuition and making the dean’s list, he’d been a doting, loving boyfriend. Once we got to his home turf, everything changed. On my twenty-fourth birthday, he’d said to me, I’m going to be an attorney, and you’re not pretty enough, smart enough, or stylish enough to be my wife. The injury was still fairly fresh and I didn’t want to dwell on it and become upset. After all, I had to go back into a room full of partying coworkers, but she wouldn’t let up. Finally I tried to put a positive spin on it by asking when I’d be meeting someone new, so I could keep an eye out. She shook her head sympathetically and said, "There is someone for you, but it’s not going to be for a very long time." The way she said it sounded like a prison sentence. I couldn’t contain my tears any longer and began to cry. Crap. The reading was over and I was in no condition to go back and join the wine sipping and spinach-dip noshing, knowing that everyone would crowd around me to hear how it went.

I retreated into a back hallway, hoping to compose myself before facing the gang. When I didn’t emerge from my reading, the hostess came looking for me. I was outed. I had to go back into the main room with my eyes red and puffy. Cathy Barrett, who had been afraid to get a reading, was the first to race up and demand to know what I’d been subjected to. Trying to lighten the mood, I blurted out, She said one of my friends was going to be hit by a truck! Someone with the initials of C.B. She froze for a second before she detected my smile. Everyone laughed and I was able to extricate myself and go home, where I could review every second of the reading. That woman knew me. Except for the part about my career, it sure seemed like she got everything right. Oh well, no one’s perfect.

Before long I landed a job at a small, full-service ad agency and threw myself into my new career as junior copywriter, then moved up to senior copywriter within six months. I loved my bosses, a dynamic husband-and-wife team, and I learned a lot, for which I am eternally grateful. I wrote copy for print ads and TV commercials. After a while they let me dabble in media buying, choosing voice talent, and producing the commercials. I liked the variety, the camaraderie, the opportunity to use my imagination, and the sense of contributing to a team. But I didn’t like the purposelessness of it all. We pushed cable services such as Pay-Per-View events, namely boxing. I was especially disheartened after Mike Tyson bit off a piece of Evander Holyfield’s ear during a fight and everyone in my circle began calling Pay-Per-View Pay-Per-Chew. It just didn’t seem like we were making the world a better place.

Regardless of how we made our money or what ultimately came to pass, I will never forget how supportive my bosses were when my father got sick. Despite the fact that I didn’t spend much time with him when I was growing up—or perhaps because of it—my dad was my favorite person in the world. He was brilliant, funny, practical, and loved his kids more than anything. He toiled for hours in the kitchen to make us our favorite foods and supported us when life got tough. He seemed to be a bottomless fount of wisdom, so simply having a conversation with him could improve my outlook on any situation. He was also very respectful of our feelings and opinions, even though we were just kids. He gave us leeway to make our own decisions, and graciously helped us process the lessons when we made mistakes.

I learned about integrity from my dad. He left corporate America as a young professional to strike out on his own as a software developer, back before anyone knew what that was. At first he tried partnerships, acting as the brains and producer with a friend serving as the sales arm of the operation, but those situations ended badly. On one occasion he caught his business partner stealing from his client, and told the client. He looked over his shoulder for a while after that, and then decided it might be best to work on his own. Trouble was, he always sold himself short. He got a cherry position at Arthur Anderson managing some segment of their data, but when he optimized a complex system of processes into a simple protocol, he told them, I feel guilty taking your money. I could train one of your guys to do what I do and you could save a lot of money on my fees. And then he was broke for a while again. In light of the Enron debacle that came later, it seems Arthur Anderson could have used a few more guys like my dad making decisions for them.

I lived with Dad, his second wife, and their three daughters during my senior year of high school, a difficult time for any teenager-parent relationship. I’d lived with my mother since the divorce when I was two, so once we’d unloaded the last of my things from the moving truck, Dad sat me down and said, "We’ve never had a teenager before, so we’re not sure how to do this. Here are the house rules:

1) Do not drink and drive. I know you’re going to want to go to parties and have fun with your friends, and that’s fine as long as you’re safe. So if you’ve been drinking and you need to get home, call me and I’ll come get you.

2) Don’t get pregnant.

3) Here are the keys to the car you can drive.

It seemed too good to be true—could fun-loving, weekend dad survive 24/7 parenting?—but he wasn’t kidding. I only called him once to get home from a party. Someone’s parents were out of town and my friends and I were dancing and whooping it up around the deck of their pool ‘til the wee hours of the morning. Despite having to get up for work at 5:00 a.m., he answered the phone and said, I’ll be there in fifteen minutes. Fifteen minutes later he was walking through the party looking for me. A nervous hush fell over the crowd. Someone scooted past me and said under his breath, Your dad’s here . . . as if I was going to get dragged out by the hair. When we found each other he said, Looks like you guys had fun. Are you ready to go? and we walked out together. On the way home, rather than yelling at me for hauling him out of bed, he thanked me for the call.

My dad was the best.

So, years later, after I’d spent a long day at the agency, I was eager to catch up with him over dinner. We met up with the rest of the family at an Italian place we liked because it was equidistant from all our homes, me in downtown Chicago, my brother in the far north suburbs, my sisters in the northwest suburbs, and my dad and his wife in the western suburbs. Once hugs and greetings were exchanged and we were seated at a large round table, dad announced that he was going in for a procedure. Esophageal polyps, but there’s a ninety-seven percent chance of surviving the surgery. All surgery carries risk and ninety-seven is a high number. Still, the gravity of the presentation was disconcerting. So there I was, choking down bruschetta, trying to assess what had been said.

The next day I marched right into my boss’s office and told her. Her face went blank. "Be afraid. Be very afraid. Her dad had died of cancer just two years earlier. She said the most stressful part of the ordeal was making the decision to take him off life support. Apparently, there had been a family vote and it was decided to keep him on a bit longer. A day or so later he woke up and they had another opportunity to chat with him. He said, I’m glad you kept me around. I wasn’t quite ready. And then he faded in and out of consciousness for a while, at one point looking up to the ceiling, smiling, and saying, Hello! You must be