Devon, UK, and Brittany, France.

Roselle on YouTube
On this link, you should be able to listen to an interview with me, one of the few in which my own voice and its contents don’t make me cringe, in which creative writing lecturer Lania Knight asks me about my site-specific work, my relationship to place, and to the other-than-human.

I’m Roselle Angwin, a Cornish poet, non-fiction and fiction author, mythologian, psychotherapist and indoor/outdoor workshop facilitator, retreat leader and mentor. I’m also a hedgerow medicine woman, a gardener, an animal-and-bird lover, a dancer, a mother, a partner, and an occasional painter. I have a name, it seems, for being a catalyst for deep change.

I find huge joy in the work I’ve been doing with groups and individuals for 30 years now (2021). This work goes hand-in-hand with my own writing. Together we track poetry, myth and story, revelation, visions, enchantments and deeper understanding along soul-paths in outer and inner landscapes. Then we write. Along the way transformation seems to happen, and the focus can shift from the personal to the service of transpersonal or collective values in relation to living harmoniously with all the other beings on on this earth, and with the land herself – together we can change the world!

So ultimately my work is about waking up, and how we live, and of course this means an integration of our inner world with how we relate to the outer.

I’ve dedicated my life to bringing together psyche and anima mundi, ‘world soul’, through a conversation between experience of wild nature, and the imagination. My core emphasis, both in my life and in all my work, is the integration of all the aspects of being: intellectual, emotional, physical, spiritual, intuitive; and the nature of our relationship to what we see as ‘other’, whether human or otherwise.

By developing and nurturing our sense of connection with the earth, other species and other humans who share this planet through felt experience, simultaneously with deepening our relationship to our soul-life, I believe we can create a culture of sustainability.

My work is based in my psychotherapy training in Transpersonal Psychology coupled with spiritual practice in my native pre-Christian Celtic/Druidic tradition, story, myth and poetry, and mindfulness from my 40+ years of Zen meditation practice, 5 Rhythms dance (rarely used in courses but sometimes available as an optional extra), and the use of symbolic systems such as Jungian archetypes, tarot or astrology.

It feels important to mention here that I have a counselling qualification (NB not to be confused with a psychology degree, which does not offer the therapeutic training). Because groupwork of any depth will sometimes stir stuff up, I want to reassure you that I create and hold a safe, nurturing and confidential space. I continue my own study and practise within the fields of meditation, depth psychology and deep ecology.

I read Anglo-Saxon, Norse & Celtic at Cambridge as an undergraduate, which included studying our native tales such as the Mabinogion in Middle Welsh, and the Grail romances in Mediaeval French so, having also been brought up with this mythology I’m well-steeped in the Celtic brew. I furthered all this academically and practically in my psychotherapy training (rooted in the archetypal psychology of C G Jung and the post-Jungians), where the continuing relevance of such myths, and a form of narrative therapy which arises from such work, was my specialist study.

All my work, like my life, is firmly rooted in my lifelong passionate relationship with the land, animals, birds, plants, seasons and elements (I have always spent a large part of my life outdoors on the Westcountry moors and coasts, in all weathers, moving on foot, on horseback or in a kayak; and also being still), as well as with the arts. I’ve also led wilderness visionquest rites of passage work, and this sits as another strand of the web. At home, we tend in a fairly hands-off way two wild acres of orchard, meadow, woodland and an extensive organic vegetable garden with herbs and bee-flowers, and are lucky enough as to live where there is little agricultural or other pollution and a great many wild species.

For many years, at each solstice and equinox, I led ‘Ground of Being’ outdoor day workshops involving deep immersion in Dartmoor’s sacred sites. From time to time I offer such a day, along with other similar workshops. Mostly, though, my work finds its home in longer retreats where we spend time outdoors; and in my writings. You can read about the former under the ‘What’s on’ section of this site, along with other related courses here.

My whole life has been lived deeply within a rural culture, and its cycles, seasons and other inhabitants nourish me. In my early twenties, I made my living designing and making one-off garments from my own handspun and plant-dyed wool. (For 14 years after that, I was a shoemaker, sending custom-made footwear all over the world.)

The plant world has shared itself with me since I was a teenager, from the herbal medicines with which I’ve always treated my human and animal family, to the plant dyes I collected, to the herbs I’ve grown, to the ceremonial incenses I’ve made, to the face creams I’ve also always made. No surprise, then, that my programme now includes working with plant or tree spirit medicine as well as with the gifts of the physical plants/trees.

The land is an active collaborator in much of this work, and you need to expect to spend time outdoors in all weathers if you work with me. I’m passionate about bringing the inner and outer aspects of our lives together, and finding ways to really appreciate that we are not, in fact, separate.

Working with images and the imagination enables a process of re-visioning our relationships, and a tool for recording and integrating our experience. (I’m also a painter so that feeds in to my work too.) Our main medium of expression within the project is creative, reflective and therapeutic writing (no previous experience needed; and I make little distinction between these categories), though I also use other arts-based practices. (All this figures on all my courses, but if you want a workshop that focuses on a specific aspect of writing in depth – and maybe more indoors! – see my other website: www.fire-in-the-head.co.uk)

The Wild Ways (incorporating ‘Ground of Being’) is very much intended to be eco- and soulcentric rather than anthropocentric, but along the way people heal and change. For many years I’ve offered single day and longer outdoor workshops and retreats on Dartmoor, Exmoor and the Westcountry coasts, in the Hebrides, and in France, with groups or individuals (and mentoring, soul-work and ecotherapy by email, Skype or in person). In 2015, I included my lifelong friendship with horses in the mix. Other species have their own unique input in their own ways.

NB that in 2020/2021 I’m focusing on 3 aspects only of my work: the distance learning Tongues in Trees course, new online courses, and my forthcoming book on trees and its companion book on the Lost Feminine (currently on hold while I complete a vegan cookbook based on seasonal vegetables from our garden and orchard).

I’m a lifelong student of wisdom traditions, especially the native British Mystery Tradition and a bardic path, and the Grail corpus, tarot, astrology and alchemy, depth psychology and the work that takes place at the psychospiritual threshold. Zen and Taoism have shaped the way I’ve lived my life since I was 16 (waking up: the practise of a commitment to an awareness of interconnectedness, simplicity, an intention to do no harm, attention to the rest of the natural world, attention to the moment, compassion, and a non-attachment to fixed ideologies are key ideas in both Zen and Taoism).

I’ve been leading workshops and writing professionally since 1991. I’m the author of a number of books of poetry, non-fiction and fiction. My first book was commissioned in 1993, and it’s relevant to the inner work I offer on these courses in terms of personal story and transformation (also known as ‘narrative therapy’): Riding the Dragon – myth & the inner journey (Element 1994). This in turn grew out of some workshops I developed in 1991 under the umbrella of Personal Mythology: ‘Myth as Metaphor’, in which we use myth and archetype to better understand the stories of our lives and their deeper patterns, and our place in the web of our culture and the natural world.

There’s more on my professional literary profile on http://roselle-angwin.co.uk/about; and should you wish to see my ‘credentials’, have a look at the ‘what they say‘ page.

For more, http://roselle-angwin.co.uk, and http://roselle-angwin.blogspot.com

I was the model, some years ago now, for this image, above, of a druid priestess by my friend Stuart Littlejohn.

2016: As a 40+-year-long-veggie-now-going-vegan, my commitment is to reduce animal suffering. This year I’m taking it a step further, and have begun to create a website/blog on going vegan. (A cookbook is in the making.) If this is something that might interest you, it’s here. NB: my courses are usually vegetarian but I’m not preachy about it, and I can promise you’ll never feel deprived!

Top photo Francis Jones, Brittany 2015

‘…ultimately my work is about waking up, and how we live, and of course this means an integration of our inner world with how we relate to the outer.’