Honoured as an ATMS Legend: Reflections on 30 Years of Bridging Science and Soul✨
Issue: Natural medicine has long been divided, with the clinical practitioners on one side and the intuitive and shamanic healers on the other. Many practitioners feel they must choose between scientific credibility and their deeper gifts.
Problem: When we separate science from spirit in healing practice, we can only address part of the picture. The clients who need the most help, the exhausted, the depleted, the sensitive souls whose symptoms don’t respond to conventional protocols, need both.
Solution: After 30 years of bridging ancestral wisdom, naturopathy, energy medicine and shamanic healing, the Alkymia Method™ was born from lived experience, clinical results, and the courage to stay true to a path others didn’t always understand.
Key insight: Integrity is the best marketing. When you treat the whole person, body, energy field, and soul, the results speak for themselves.
What it means to be named a Legend
In early 2026, I received an invitation that stopped me in my tracks.
The Australian Traditional Medicine Society, of which I have been a member since 2002, asked me to be part of their Legends Series. A special edition of the Let’s Talk Natural Medicine podcast, hosted by CEO Annie Gibbins, where practitioners with 20 or more years of membership sit down to share the stories, milestones and personal reflections that have shaped the profession.
I cried when I read it.
Not from surprise exactly, more from recognition. The feeling of a journey that had been walked mostly in the quiet, mostly without fanfare, suddenly being witnessed. Of a life spent bridging worlds that were not always ready to be bridged, finally being acknowledged by the professional body I had served faithfully for over two decades.
Being named a Legend has helped me do something I had not fully done before: acknowledge my own journey. Reflect on my learning. Record my own growth and evolution. And bring forward more of my gifts to serve the clients who need them most.
This post is a reflection and an invitation into the conversation if you want to hear the full story.
Where it began: Chilean roots and a grandmother’s kitchen
I did not come to natural medicine through a textbook. I came through the kitchen.
Growing up, herbal teas were simply how things worked. From my Chilean roots, plants were medicine before medicine had a name. My grandmother knew which herb to reach for, which preparation to make, which tradition to follow. It was not an alternative; it was daily life. The rhythm of the home. Biology as sovereignty, long before I had language for it.
From my father’s side, there was always a vegetable patch. Fresh, home-grown produce. The understanding that nourishment comes from the earth and that food is not fuel, it is a relationship. These early lessons became the foundation of everything I would later practice clinically.
When I returned to Chile in 2007, something that had been quietly alive in me was reawakened. I reconnected with my ancestry. The use of herbs in both Chile and Peru, and the wisdom of the Mapuche, the indigenous people of Chile, who use flower essences and vibrational healing as part of their shamanic practice. That visit answered a question I had been holding for years: Can I weave my intuitive healing and shamanic principles together with naturopathy?
The answer, I discovered, was not only yes, but it was also the whole point.
The journey through practice, what 30 years actually looks like
I began formal practice in the early 1990s. For the first years, I practised as a naturopath in the clinical sense, herbal medicine, nutritional protocols, gut-brain healing, and functional assessment. I taught iridology at a naturopathic college for a year, which became one of the most formative experiences of my training. Iridology taught me to see the blueprint within the eye, to understand that the nervous system records its entire history, and that what we were reading was not just tissue but bio-energetic patterning.
It was my first window into the deeper layers of healing.
In 2019, the Australian Government removed naturopathy from private health insurance rebates, a decision that deeply affected many of my peers. For me, because I had always offered a multidimensional approach, my practice was not disrupted as it was for others. I chose instead to pivot, to run more workshops and classes, to lean further into my shamanic and energy medicine gifts, to trust that the path I had been walking quietly was the right one.
That trust had always been my anchor, even when it was not always understood by those around me. I built my practice almost entirely on word-of-mouth referrals. Not through marketing campaigns or credentials alone, but through results. Through clients whose bodies, nervous systems, and ancestral lineages responded to a form of care that addressed every layer rather than one.
Integrity, I have learned, is the most powerful practice-builder there is.
The evolution into the Alkymia Method™
After 30 years, I formalised what I had been developing intuitively into the Alkymia Method™, a sacred fusion of naturopathy, energy medicine, and shamanic healing.
It was not a departure from naturopathy. It was naturopathy finally complete.
The clients who transformed most deeply over those three decades were not those who followed only the clinical protocols. They were the ones who did the biological work, the gut healing, the nervous system restoration, the cellular renewal, AND cleared what was blocking them energetically and ancestrally.
You can heal someone’s gut inflammation, but if the solar plexus is still contracted from years of absorbed emotions, the inflammation returns. You can restore nervous system regulation, but if ancestral survival patterns are still running in the background, the body will dysregulate again. You can balance hormones, but if the energetic blueprint still holds the template of depletion, the body will recreate it.
This is why I could not remain only a naturopath, not because the naturopathy stopped working, but because the clients who healed completely were doing all the layers. The Alkymia Method™ is the container for all of them: naturopathy, energy alchemy, and shamanic healing working together as one integrated approach.
Not science or spirit. Science and spirit. Not naturopathy or energy medicine. The sacred fusion of both.
What I shared in the ATMS Legends interview
When Annie Gibbins sat down with me for the Legends Series, our conversation covered the full arc. From the Chilean grandmother’s kitchen to the Alkymia Method™, from iridology to ancestral healing, from the years of walking a path not everyone understood to the clarity and sovereignty that came from staying true to it.
I spoke about what I want the next generation of practitioners to know: that they are the medicine. The job of a healer is to bridge the gap between the body’s intelligence and its capacity to express it. That integrating the intuitive with the clinical is not a departure from professional excellence, it is its fullest expression.
I spoke about the clients who changed everything. The sensitive souls told there was nothing wrong with them, the mothers whose children did not respond to conventional approaches, the healers on the edge of burnout who had forgotten what their gifts were for. These are the people who showed me what was possible when we stopped managing symptoms and started restoring foundations.
And I spoke about what it means, after 30 years, to still be more passionate about this work than ever.
“Don’t be afraid to evolve beyond what you were taught. The protocols matter, science matters, evidence matters, but so does your intuition.
So does your ability to see what’s happening beneath the symptoms. So does your willingness to work with dimensions of healing that can’t always be measured in blood tests.
The practitioners who serve most powerfully are the ones who integrate it all.” Mariangela Parodi
You can listen to the full conversation here:
Why natural medicine matters and what has changed
Natural medicine has evolved dramatically over the three decades I have been practising. When I began, we were considered alternative, fringe, unproven, and viewed with suspicion by the mainstream. Functional pathology was rare and expensive. Most people came to us as a last resort after conventional medicine had run out of answers. Energy medicine was rarely discussed in professional circles.
Now, natural medicine is increasingly mainstream and evidence-based. Functional testing is accessible and sophisticated. People seek us first, not as a last resort. The integration of energy medicine is becoming accepted. And as of 2025, naturopathy has been reinstated to private health insurance rebates in Australia after being removed in 2019.
The reinstatement of naturopathy is not simply a policy change. It is an official acknowledgement by the Australian Government’s own Chief Medical Officer that natural medicine works. Following a comprehensive review led by Professor Michael Kidd AO and supported by the National Health and Medical Research Council, the Government concluded there is now sufficient evidence to support the clinical benefits of naturopathy, Western herbal medicine, yoga, Pilates, Tai Chi, Shiatsu and the Alexander Technique.
As of 1 July 2025, all seven therapies are once again eligible for private health insurance rebates. For those of us who have dedicated our lives to this work, it is a moment of profound professional vindication. Source: Australian Traditional Medicine Society, atms.com.au, April 2025.
But here is what has not changed: people still need practitioners who see them as whole beings. Those who do not separate physical symptoms from emotional reality. Who do not dismiss the spiritual dimension of healing. And who understands that transformation requires addressing all the layers.
This is why natural medicine matters. Not because it is alternative. But because it treats people as complete human beings with bodies, nervous systems, energy fields, ancestral lineages, and souls.
The numbers speak for themselves. More than 63% of Australians use some form of complementary medicine, and visits to natural medicine practitioners are now comparable in volume to visits to GPs. This is not a fringe movement. This is Australians voting with their health, choosing practitioners who see them as whole beings rather than collections of symptoms to be managed.
Complementary Medicines Australia (CMA) highlights that 74% of Australians actively use complementary medicines and natural therapies.
According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), the Global Traditional Medicine Centre estimates that between 60% of the population utilise traditional and complementary medicine.
General practice data published by the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners (RACGP) indicates that two-thirds of patients had used some form of complementary and alternative medicine in the preceding 12 months, with 60% explicitly stating it improved their wellbeing.
If you have been searching:
If you have been searching for a practitioner who sees all of you? Who integrates science and spirit, who addresses each layer of your healing rather than managing symptoms in isolation, I am here.
After 30 years of practice, this is the work I was born to do. The Alkymia Method™ exists because I have witnessed, again and again, what becomes possible when nothing is left out.
You can explore how I work and what a session involves by reading the FAQ, or book directly below.
Continue reading:
- When Your Body Says No — the turning point that changed everything
- Women Inspiring Women — on what it means to lead from lived experience
- The Mystic Woman’s Compass #1 Bestseller — the book that carries this medicine forward
With radiant love and steady presence,
Rewrite your cellular and soul blueprint, gifts, health & biz
Rise, Remember, Radiate ❤️
Mariangela Parodi BAppSc, ND
Mariangela Parodi BAppSc, ND is a Naturopath & Energy Healer based in Hobart, Tasmania. Specialising in nervous system recovery for women when exhaustion, overwhelm, or depletion no longer responds to rest. With over 30 years of experience in biomedical science, naturopathy, energy medicine, and shamanic healing. She bridges science and spirit to restore the body’s innate intelligence and rewrite the cellular blueprint.
The creator of the Alkymia Method™, a sacred fusion of naturopathy, energy medicine, and shamanic healing. #1 international bestselling author of The Mystic Woman’s Compass. Mariangela guides heart-centred healers and conscious leaders to transmute exhaustion, illness, and spiritual disconnection into sovereignty, vitality, and luminous purpose.
ATMS Fellow | Spiritual Biz Award Recipient | Featured in Aspire Magazine, Canvas Rebel, Hobart Magazine & Spiritual Biz Magazine | The Legends Series Podcast. Hobart & Online | alkymia.com.au
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