Hello, and welcome...I'm Sandra.

I'm a mother, integrative therapist, therapeutic coach, writer, guide, and circle holder for the awakening and nurturing of the conscious feminine.

I bring over 30 years of experience to our encounters: as a filmmaker, lawyer, group facilitator, organisational consultant, leadership coach, and psychotherapist. My first degree was Russian and I lived in Russia for ten years, where I was initiated as a young adult, wife, and mother.

I trained as an integrative psychotherapist at The Minster Centre and qualified as a coach more than 20 years ago. My work is inspired by many different teachers and I especially weave the influence of Jungian analysts Dr Clarissa Pinkola Estés and Marion Woodman into my practice, alongside relational and psychoanalytic thinkers.

"The psychological rule says that when an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside, as fate."

Carl Jung's insight that: "...when an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside, as fate" came to life for me when an external crisis forced me off the career trajectory I had set. This led me back to work that I loved and training as a psychotherapist. A retreat with Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés in 2018 deepened my learning, allowing me to work with dreams, symbols, archetypes, fairytales, and the stories we carry with us.

I had been working with clients in an embodied way for a while and had a regular yoga practice. I felt drawn to play more with embodied practices - singing, movement, dance, writing and art. Joining a Jungian Women course with Marlene Schiwy introduced me to figures like Emma Jung, Marion Woodman, Helen Luke and Toni Wolff, among others - sparking a deeper interest. Serendipitously, this led me to my own Jungian coach, Sil Read, who trained for over twenty years with Jungian analyst, Marion Woodman, and is steeped in her lineage. She is a tender of the soul, and a profound influence and catalyst for my recent work. Sil is a true teacher and elder guiding me through life's initiations, helping me decipher my dreams and trust my own imagination and embodied wisdom.

Sandra Hilton portrait with fir cones around her face

I work alongside Sil in her facilitation of Marion Woodman inspired retreats held twice a year in Rhode Island, focused on reclaiming lost parts of ourselves through a collective soul journey. We also co-facilitate an online Marion Woodman-inspired school for alumni of the retreat program, going deeper into her teachings and exploring the dreams emerging from the work. This apprenticeship is deeply transformative, and I am weaving some of the threads into my own women's group which gathers once a month in London.

Another teacher who has accompanied me since the beginning of my therapy journey is my supervisor, Robert Downes. He is my therapeutic, spiritual and political guide and a key catalyst for opening worlds within and for me.

I have trained with Women Weaving Change (Medicine Woman Christa Mackinnon and energy healer Vanessa Tucker), and hold a Modern Medicine Woman Practitioner accreditation (I.H.P.M.), integrating spiritual and ceremonial aspects into my practice.

Sil Read's Exquisite Tenderness facilitators

In what Dr Estés would call "this handcrafted life", I combine the groundedness of the therapeutic, the worldliness of coaching and the magic of the shamanic. All of this means that I continue to be on my own journey to wholeness, as I support others in their journey. I am devoted to learning to trust and honour the feminine with my body, heart, and soul, and cherish the company of other women who are curious and hungry and longing to come home to what Marion Woodman called the "throne of our own hearts".

WORK WITH ME

The first thirty-something years of my life were devoted to living a life mapped out by others. Despite feeling an internal pull toward something different, I sought out more secure options, changing a career in film to law. After having my daughter, I found the courage to lean into my own longings and set up my first coaching business 20 years ago. However, the call to security increased with a little one to look after and a broken marriage to survive, and so I leaned back into a more corporate life for several years. Unable to hold the tension of what I loved and what I felt obliged to do, I collapsed back into the obligation and a familiar pattern of workaholism, abandoning myself physically and emotionally for another few years.