Understanding your patterns. Giving expression to your experience. Finding your own direction.
Sometimes a question stays with us: Why does this keep happening? What am I being asked to change? What matters to me now?
Such questions may arise through a relationship, a loss, a change in work or the gradual feeling that the life we have built no longer reflects who we are becoming. They deserve time, attention and a way of exploring that honours their complexity and individuality.
My work brings together Vedic astrology and counselling with creative therapy, writing and embodied practice. These offer different ways of approaching the same human experience: understanding our deeper patterns, making room for difficult experiences, recognising our resources and finding a meaningful response to our circumstances.
Soul Mapping: from understanding to lived experience
In my approach to Jyotish, your birth chart forms the starting point for a conversation about your life. We explore the relationships between its symbols and your inner experience: what comes naturally to you, where tensions arise, what you repeatedly seek or struggle with, and how these themes unfold through different life phases.
I am particularly interested in the deeper symbolism of the planets, signs and nakshatras—their images, myths and underlying questions that mirror our unconscious patterns. These can offer a language for experiences you recognise but have not yet been able to articulate. Your own story remains central to the interpretation.
Understanding a pattern can open a door. Working with it often asks something further of us.
This is where counselling and creative therapy enter the process. A recurring relationship theme might be explored through dialogue, an image or a piece of writing. An inner conflict might become clearer through the characters of a myth. Movement can help you notice how you approach, withdraw, protect yourself or take up space.
Soul Mapping is my name for this process of bringing symbolic understanding into contact with your lived experience. The map develops through what you discover, express and choose.
Ways to work with me:
Vedic Astrology and Counselling
Creative Therapy & Soul Mapping
Retreats, Courses & Mentorship
A personal birth chart offers a rich symbolic language for exploring your life. Through Jyotish, we consider how your strengths, desires, inner conflicts and relationships connect, and how different themes come into focus through successive life phases.
My readings draw on the deeper symbolism of the planets, signs and nakshatras, including their mythology. We explore these in dialogue with your experience, giving attention to the questions you bring—whether about relationships, vocation, recurring patterns or a period of transition.
Vedic counselling offers space to develop this understanding over time. We may explore the tension between familiar habits and emerging needs, the beliefs influencing your choices, or how to respond to a challenging life phase with greater awareness and agency.
Where helpful, Ayurvedic lifestyle guidance, reflective writing and creative or embodied practices support the process. Together, we connect the insights of your chart with practical choices and personal exploration, allowing understanding to deepen through everyday experience.
Creative expression offers a way to explore experiences that are difficult to reach through conversation alone. An image, a piece of writing or a movement can give form to an inner conflict, an unspoken feeling or a possibility that is beginning to emerge.
Drawing on creative therapy and dance movement therapy, we work with writing, art, imagery, symbolism and embodied awareness. Myths and stories may accompany the process, offering perspectives on experiences such as belonging, separation, identity and renewal.
We explore what your expressions mean to you, attending to the feelings, associations and memories they evoke. A recurring image may reveal a tension; a gesture may help you recognise a boundary or experiment with a different response.
No artistic experience is needed. The creative process itself becomes a space for enquiry, expression and discovery. Creative Soul Mapping can be explored independently or alongside Vedic counselling, with time to reflect on what emerges and how it relates to your everyday life.
Shared learning and creative practice offer space to deepen an enquiry over time. Through a retreat, a focused workshop or a course, we can explore a theme from several perspectives—through study, conversation, creative expression and embodied experience.
My offerings bring together two strands of my work: creative processes for self-exploration, and the study of Vedic astrology and philosophy. Some experiences weave these together; others offer space to explore one approach in greater depth.
Retreats may take place in person or online, allowing you to enter a guided creative process from your own home. Writing, imagery, art and movement provide a thread to follow, with time for personal reflection and integration between shared sessions.
Workshops and courses offer more focused opportunities to explore particular themes or develop your understanding through structured learning.
For sustained individual support, Dare to Shine is a personal mentorship combining Vedic counselling, creative therapy and embodied practice to accompany you over an extended period of time.
ABOUT ME
I’m Sandra Hayes, a Vedic astrologer and psychological counsellor, creative therapist, dance movement therapist and yoga & ayurveda teacher.
My work brings together more than three decades of teaching, practice and study in Vedic wisdom with my training in holistic psychotherapy and creative therapeutic approaches.
I am particularly interested in how symbolism, personal stories and embodied experience can deepen our understanding of ourselves. Through Soul Mapping, I offer a thoughtful, individual process for exploring your questions, recognising your resources and finding your own direction.
“Sandra’s work enriched my life in many ways. Her ability to explain complex themes in an understandable and deeply interconnected way changed my worldview and strengthened the journey to my true self.
Through her guidance, I gained a deeper understanding of myself and my life direction, and felt renewed confidence in my future. I felt deeply seen and recognised in her work and can wholeheartedly recommend her.”
Sarah V.
Working together
Personal Jyotish readings and ongoing counselling are available online via Zoom. You are also welcome to enquire about Creative Soul Mapping, retreats, courses and mentorship.
If you are unsure where to begin, tell me a little about what brings you here, and we can consider which approach would suit you.