Hayley Evans
About
A guide for women crossing into who they're becoming
Origin story
I grew up in Zimbabwe, living for the expectations of what looked proper, learning early that being different wasn't safe, and that being invisible was. I wanted to escape!
The escape looked like going to college in Texas where I immediately found my way into finance. Over nineteen years, I worked my way through Dallas and Fort Worth and eventually to New York, ending as a Vice President at HSBC, leading regulatory and strategic programs across global investment banking. I succeeded at a life that felt like freedom without ever considering the true definition of freedom. Rather than escaping, I had just fallen in line.
The first choice I made for the freedom I craved was the move to New York. I didn't know it at the time, but that was the call.
New York was where I met my first real teachers. They were the first people who honored my desire for knowledge without asking me to choose one tradition over another. Buddhism, then Islam, then Kabbalah complimented growing up Christian. Meditation became a daily practice — one I've kept for more than eighteen years.
But hearing a call and answering it are two different things.
For eight years, I lived a double life — the finance version of me showing up for the world, the practicing version of me showing up only in private. I kept choosing what looked correct instead of what was true. Not because I didn't know better. Because knowing better meant losing everything the I had built.
In 2014, I got Lyme disease. Looking back, it was the first real attempt of my body to force what my mind refused. It didn't work — not fully. But it planted something.
Two years later, everything I had built came down anyway. My marriage ended and I walked out of my career — two thresholds in four months. I left a great deal of money on the table, and I honored the quiet voice inside me that said I was built for different things — even though I didn't yet know what those things were.
The years that followed were the hardest of my life.
From 2017 to 2019, I moved through what I can only call the dark nights of the soul. There was illness that took years to diagnose — autoimmune conditions that are still with me. There were doctors and therapists and a body that would not stop speaking. In 2018, I survived a second near-death experience — twenty-four years after my first, which I'd carried without fully understanding until the years leading up to it forced me to remember.
That was also the year I separated from my family and my family separated from me — the completion of a rupture that had begun the day I first chose myself, ten years earlier in New York.
Somehow, I survived all of it.
In 2020, when COVID closed most of the world, Mexico stayed open. I went first to Mérida, and it was there, in the strange stillness of the pandemic, that I began to bloom. Brian McNaught and I began the conversations that became our collaboration. In 2022, I moved to San Cristóbal de las Casas — where I live and work now, and where the freedom I'd been reaching for my whole life finally began to feel like home.
Somewhere across all of this, I stopped trying to organize myself into tidy silos — the finance woman, the spiritual woman, the sick woman, the writer, the guide. What I'm learning to do now, and what I try to help other women do, is hold all of it at once. To let every part be present, without needing to choose which part is allowed in which room.
That's the work. That's the crossing. That's where my clients find me.
What I do
I've been called a Seer, a Healer, a Guide.
I meet women at the thresholds — grief, transition, unraveling — where the old life has ended and the truer one waits. My work is to hold the space of the crossing until you've made it home.
I'm not a therapist. I don't diagnose, and I don't treat pathology. What I do is something older, and something more direct.
I see. I translate energy into words. I offer the map I built from my own crossings, refined by the women I've walked with since. I sit with the unimaginable without being destabilized by it — and I trust that you can do the same, because you already are.
Sessions are not what most people expect. They're easy, conversational, warm. About sixty minutes of full presence. What emerges from those conversations is often unexpected — the answer to a question you didn't know you were carrying, a permission you didn't know you needed, a piece of yourself you'd forgotten was yours.
A voice from the work
Here's how one of the women I've worked with described it, in her own words:
"Shortly after Charlie passed, feeling very heavy, sad and confused, I was seeking inner alignment, clarity, guidance to understand the murkiness and get through the heaviness that was encompassing me. […] [Hayley] is a spiritual guide, mentor, friend, wisdom keeper, truth seeker — someone who is able to mirror the truth that we have within ourselves and act as a mirror and a guide to come back to ourselves and learn to trust our inner compass and forge that relationship with the Divine within. Although you are not a therapist, you do encompass that and many more modalities/roles into one person because you see and share the wisdom to work through it, understand it and move past it vs ruminating on it. […] You are a channel of the divine that can give insight on things that we are seeking clarity on and on things that we don't know we are seeking clarity on. […] You've helped me forge this unbreakable bond that I already had within me and it will carry me through the rest of my life."
— Alli S.
Who this work is for
The women who find their way to me are usually at a threshold.
Some have lost someone — a partner, a parent, a friend, a version of themselves — and the ordinary tools of grief aren't holding them.
Some are in a transition that looks manageable from the outside but feels seismic from the inside — a child leaving home, a career ending, a marriage shifting, a body changing.
Some are successful on the outside, between worlds on the inside — leading companies, raising families, holding it all together, and quietly asking themselves what any of it is for.
Some have finally admitted, quietly, that the life they've built isn't the one they want. And they don't yet know what to do with that.
Most of them share something: they're women who have already tried the usual things. Therapy, sometimes. Books. Retreats. Podcasts. Practices they picked up along the way. Those things helped, and they weren't quite enough. What they were reaching for is something older than advice — a presence that can meet them in the crossing, and walk with them until they've made it through.
If that's you, we're probably already halfway to knowing each other.
Training & lineage
Beyond the traditions I named earlier, I've studied energy medicine, shamanism, reiki, tuning forks, and metaphysics.
I hold a bachelor's degree from the University of North Texas. Before this work, I spent nearly two decades in finance. That world shapes how I sit with women navigating career, money, and the courage to build something truer.
If you're here
If you're reading this, something in you is already listening.
You don't have to know what you need. You don't have to have the right words yet. You don't have to be ready.
You just have to be curious enough to reach out.