Rubeena Sandhu is a counsellor, educator, and researcher whose work explores how emotional experience shapes human development across the lifespan.

She holds a Master of Education in Counselling and has been working in education and human development since 2007. She also holds a degree in the arts, and her work has long explored how artistic processes can open pathways to deeper emotional and psychological experience.

Her clinical work is grounded in experiential therapy and contemporary research on emotional processing and memory reconsolidation. Drawing from approaches such as AEDP and Coherence Therapy, she works directly with the emotional patterns that organize behaviour, relationships, and identity. Much of her research focuses on how formative and traumatic experiences become embedded in emotional memory and how these patterns can be transformed when emotional experience is fully engaged.

Rubeena has a particular interest in the relationship between imagination, symbol, and emotional life. Through both her artistic training and therapeutic work, she has explored how images, creative processes, and symbolic experience can provide access to layers of the psyche that are often difficult to reach through language alone.

Alongside her clinical work, she has spent many years studying human development from birth through the later stages of life, with a particular interest in how emotional, relational, and imaginative processes shape learning, identity, and psychological growth.

She is the founder of the New Adult Learning Institute, where she develops programs that bring together philosophy, neuroscience, education, artistic practice, and contemplative inquiry in support of adult learning and intentional self-development.

Her work is guided by a simple premise: meaningful change becomes possible when emotional experience is engaged directly within a thoughtful and supportive relationship.

Outside of her professional work, she enjoys tending her garden, working with herbs, reading, playing piano, and spending time in the forests of the Cowichan Valley, where Havenwood is located.