Roxanne Partridge
Depth Psychologist • Clinical Hypnotherapist • 4D Wheel Practitioner • Creatrix of embodyperiod
Some people change your life by showing you what a life can look like. Roxanne Partridge did that for me before we had even met.
As my divorce court date approached, I went looking for a retreat. I wanted somewhere to go afterward, somewhere I might begin to feel lovable again. I found Roxanne’s website and stayed there for a while.
There was her doctorate in Depth Psychology. There was the name of her work, embodyperiod. There were images of women holding one another, golden snakes, and flickering candles. And there was Roxanne herself, speaking openly as a scholar, healer, and witch.
I had begun embracing my identity as a witch, too. I believed in the work I was making, but I had not yet found much evidence that I could build a life around it. Looking at Roxanne’s world, I felt a jolt of recognition: Oh. A woman can be all of these things at once. She can let people see her. She can make this her work.
Roxanne’s beauty caught my attention, but what stayed with me was how completely she seemed to inhabit herself. Her intellect, sensuality, spiritual practice, compassion, and creative ambition were all present. None appeared to have been tucked away to make the others more acceptable.
I wanted to know what it felt like to be in a room she held.
The retreat that followed had its own colorful adventures, initiations, and—let us say—purges. But what has lasted most vividly is Roxanne’s presence and the care with which she built a place for us to meet ourselves.
She guided us through a journey shaped by the story of Inanna’s descent into the underworld. Before we arrived, she had given us texts to read. During the weekend, there was a guidebook for writing and drawing, music I still return to, guided meditations, dancing, masks, and moments of vulnerability in which the women around me became witnesses and companions.
There was a design to the experience, but I never felt pushed toward a predetermined revelation. Roxanne knew where the path went. She left each of us free to notice what happened while walking it.
At the center of the room lay the 4D Wheel. It was an orange tapestry covered in flowers and boughs, divided into four realms. A sword marked air and the mind. A pentacle marked earth and the body. A goblet marked water and the heart. A winged woman marked fire and spirit. To me, it looked like the minor arcana of the tarot brought to life.
At the beginning of the weekend, Roxanne invited us to place two objects on the wheel—objects we had brought to represent something we were exploring or unwinding within ourselves. As the retreat unfolded, she asked us to check in again. Did the objects still belong where we had placed them? Had something shifted? If so, we could move them.
It was such a simple, brilliant invitation. An insight did not have to remain an idea in my head. I could feel it, consider it, and then reach down and move something with my hands. The change became visible in the room.
Roxanne describes wheelwork as a way of attending to mind, body, heart, and spirit together. She also speaks about movement, artmaking, and symbolic objects as ways to give inner change a form in the material world. I knew none of that language when I first walked in. I knew only that the wheel helped me see where I was—and that I was allowed to move.
That permission ran through the whole weekend. Roxanne invited us into deep work with a steady hand. She could hold silence, make room for tears, and let a moment of laughter or dancing belong there too. Her preparation made it possible for the group to venture somewhere tender; her attention helped us remain with one another as we did.
More than a year later, I am still discovering things that began to surface during that retreat. Some became clear at once. Others took time. Every so often, I recognize a small green shoot growing and think, Oh. That began there.
When I returned home, I rebranded my business under my maiden name. I am only slightly embarrassed to admit that its first maroon-and-gold palette was inspired by Roxanne’s website. I was borrowing color while I searched for my own. That feels tender to me now. Roxanne had shown me a woman whose work was intellectually rigorous, beautiful, embodied, spiritual, and unmistakably her own. I could not borrow her life, nor did I want to. But for a little while, her example gave me something to look toward as I asked what I might make of mine.
Roxanne’s website speaks of guiding people toward their own embodied wisdom, agency, pleasure, and self-knowledge. Those words describe her work; they also describe something she modeled for me simply by being so visibly herself.
I went to her retreat hoping to feel lovable again. I left with a more generative question: What kind of life might I create if I stopped hiding the parts of myself I loved?
I am still answering it.
Roxanne helped introduce me to the woman who could ask.
If something in you is asking for room to become, I invite you to explore Roxanne’s individual embodied soulwork sessions and group retreats and workshops. Go see what becomes possible in a space she holds.