Are you a healer who has given everything to others until your body gave out? Do you wonder why healing never seems to stick? You might be walking the Heroine’s Journey.
In this special book launch episode, Dr. Alison DiBarto Goggin—functional medicine physician, shamanic practitioner, and author—shares the spiritual side of healing chronic illness through her new book “Goddess Medicine.”
What you’ll learn:
✨ Why women’s healing journeys are spiral, not linear (and what that means for your recovery)
✨ The red thread of Ariadne: how giving away your life force creates chronic depletion
✨ Angrboda’s three burnings: surviving betrayal by your body, relationships, and the medical system
✨ Mary Magdalene’s teaching: you cannot heal what you abandon
✨ The Egyptian Pylon Path: the full descent into darkness and the gifts waiting on the other side
✨ How to integrate all versions of yourself (the wounded child, the fierce protector, the sovereign woman)
PLUS: Join the FREE Goddess Medicine Circle course starting March 6th at 3pm (Facebook group, recorded sessions, guided meditations included).
This episode is for women with chronic illness, autoimmunity, medical trauma, MCAS, POTS, thyroid issues, digestive disorders, or anyone recovering from surgery who knows there’s more to healing than protocols alone.
Available now on Kindle, Kindle Unlimited, and paperback at a.co/d/0di0l0Ar
And come join us in the Goddess Medicine Circle on Facebook for the free guided book course starting March 6th. http://www.facebook.com/groups/goddessmedicinecircle
And a chance to win a private shamanic reiki session with me: bit.ly/4bUEisV
#ChronicIllnessWarrior #AutoimmuneHealing #WomensHealth #SpiritualHealing #TraumaRecovery #GoddessWisdom #FunctionalMedicine #ShamanicHealing
Listen Here:
Transcript:
Welcome back to Functional Wellness with Dr. Allison. I’m so glad that you’re here today. This past weekend, we officially launched Goddess Medicine, A Heroine’s Journey Through Chronic Illness, Trauma, and Reclaiming Your Power. And I’m still processing the enormity of what this means. It is a book that I wrote from my heart and soul, and I’m so proud to be able to share this with you.
The book is available right now on Amazon. It’s on Kindle, Kindle Unlimited, and paperback as well. So thank you, thank you, thank you to everyone who’s already grabbed a copy, shared about it, or reached out with your story. Your support means so much to me. And I have something special to offer you with this course as well. Whether you grab the book or not, I’m offering a free online course starting Friday, March 6th around 3 p.m. Central, where we’ll go through each chapter together.
do a chapter a day. It’ll be live in our Facebook group. The link will be in the description here and every session is going to be recorded, every meditation, every discussion. There will be space to chat and talk and process together because this is not just about reading a book, it’s about walking the journey together. So let me tell you a little bit about how this book came to be because I’ve been wanting to write something ever since I was officially diagnosed in 2020 and survived sepsis, but I wasn’t sure what that looked like. And last year in 2025, during my surgery recovery, I was watching dark on Netflix. And if you haven’t seen it, it’s this German series about time travel and fate and cycles and people getting lost in these caves and tunnels. And there I was recovering from a major surgery, watching these characters navigate this labyrinth and they’re feeling totally alone and terrified in the dark. And that’s how I felt in that moment as well. I felt like I was in that labyrinth. I felt lost, scared, alone. I didn’t know if there was a way out, if there was a possibility of healing and all of the complications that happened to me during the surgery and what it meant for my future.
And so that’s when I really latched on to Ariadne and her mythology in dark as well. Read more about her story, the red thread that tied her fates as well. I thought this is it. This is the book. I’m going to write it as her story from beginning to end this mythic retelling of giving away your life force to save others and being abandoned for it. But as I started writing and I meditated and I journeyed and I continued my own experience, I realized that One story wasn’t enough. wasn’t the big picture. Now her story is enough and she is enough as this goddess, as this character, as this ability to tell her story. But chronic illness isn’t just one story, right? It’s layers upon layers. It’s not only childhood wounds, but it’s the relationships and trauma and initiations that we experience when we’re young adults into adulthood all woven together.
And you know, one goddess couldn’t hold all of that. And each goddess has her own legacy to share in this journey. So this is not another functional medicine protocol book. We’ve written that I have Healing the Woman Within. I have Hormone Healing Guide for that work as well. Those books are where we’re talking about food and supplements and practical physiological support. Where this book is different. This is the spiritual side of healing. These are the lessons that we learn as we continue our journey.
the parts of ourselves that we reclaim, and this is about the soul’s journey through illness, not just the bodies as well. So I was deeply inspired by Maureen Murdoch’s The Heroine’s Journey, which she wrote in direct response to Joseph Campbell’s The Hero’s Journey. And the thing that breaks my heart, but also fuels my fire, just like Murdoch, Campbell told her that women don’t really have a journey.
that they’re simply like props for storytelling, where the distractions or the guides or the goal, the reward, but the journey itself, that’s for men. And they get called to the adventure. They meet a guide, they find their way through. They usually win, right? They return home with rewards, maybe face a final test. And then there’s a celebration, linear, complete, finished, kind of simple, but they’re still winning and…
really women aren’t involved or even invited to be part of this. And Maureen said no, she gave us a deeper, more thoughtful approach to the heroine’s journey, the feminine’s journey. And it’s not linear at all. And it is more about the identification of self with the society and world and structures around us. So how do we experience the heroine’s journey through the lens of chronic illness? To me,
It felt like sitting in a therapist office starting in the middle, right? You’re sick. You want to know how to best support your body, your mental health, your spiritual health. You want to understand what happened along the way that harmed you, that hurt you, that drained you. And that’s where Ariadne stood out to me first. The red cord that she gave to Theseus to navigate the labyrinth and save everyone. That wasn’t just an object. It wasn’t just a thing.
that she did. This was her blood, her power, her energy, her love. She gave it away so everyone around her would be safe. But that core, that energy, that life force was never returned to her. And as she grew up, she learned that giving away her life force was the way she felt love and felt safe. And as we know, what happens when we continually give away our power and our life, we have nothing left for our own healing.
And this is where so many of us start, where the healers for everyone accept ourselves. We’re the ones who hold everyone’s pain. We give until we’re empty thinking, well, if I keep giving, someone’s going to return something to me. We’re going to get some love back, but it just creates this exhaustion where we’re never able to receive back because either we don’t think we’re deserving or people around us just continue to take. And Ariadne represents those first cuts, the first
literal blood cords, red cords that were pulled from us before we even knew we had the right to say no. So those childhood patterns of people pleasing, being the little mother, the one that everyone turned to. And I talk a little bit about adverse childhood experiences that directly correlate to chronic illness. They might be considered your ACE scores, ACE. They’re related to autoimmunity, chronic illness, heart disease, and exposure to
environmental issues as well. And we recognize those emotional threads that have bound us from our youth. We can start to process our experiences and understand how they affect our health today. And in the end, this comes full circle so we can reclaim our power. We can learn to stop giving away, can learn to stop hurting ourselves by sharing so much of our energy and our power. And we can do it thoughtfully and intentionally.
And then we move into Angravoda for our second chapter, our Norse goddess who was burned three times for not sharing her secrets. This is what I felt like was the young woman phase, still aligned with the masculine, still aligned with structure, still looking for approval. And what happens when that alignment harms us. Maybe it’s a career where you’re navigating corporate life or domineering bosses or abusive relationships, or even an illness beginning.
So this is where the world turns on us for not conforming, for being too much, for speaking our truth, for asking for more. And this is a crucial part of the heroine’s journey is where we look back and think, my God, if I could just change that part of my life and not done that or not gone to that school, not started that job, not been in that relationship where I would have left earlier if I had just known everything would have been okay. And this is a really big hook.
in our energy because it isn’t true. And that isn’t what’s needed for our growth. And listen, I don’t believe this is a issue that you manifested your disease, or you have to suffer karmically to grow. And we really get stuck in this trap of, maybe I deserve this. What did I do? Right? And I want you to know that your illness is not a morality issue. It’s not
a thing where you were good or bad, so you were punished or, you know, supported because of something you did. This is just part of the human experience. We all make mistakes in our lives. We’re all blinded by love that hurts us deeply. We’re all able to take jobs that we wish we hadn’t, but we learned some things. And it’s not a morality issue. It’s just part of being human. And Angraboddha’s escape to the Ironwood
her isolated healing, you know, learning to offer her medicine from overflow rather than depletion, learning how to have relationships, how to be a mother to children and do it alone as well. What does that look like? How do we really have that independence? I bring in Mary Magdalene as coming home to the body and living with bodies that they trade us or
the need to dissociate or numb or seek transcendence. A lot of women say, Allison, how do I get out of my body? I want to get out of my body and astral project. And I want to know all the codes and know all the light languages. And I need to do better. And if I could just get out of my body and be this energy ball of perfection, everything would work out for me. And I’m begging you in this section to come back to your body because leaving your body.
Whether it’s a simple dissociation or numbing out maybe is drugs and alcohol. Maybe there’s something else going on there. You know, if you feel like your body is a prison and you need to escape it, you’re not going to be able to heal the way you need to. And this is part of the journey. It’s as part of the lessons and we need to bring that present consciousness into our body. We need to feel, we need to
feel what our body is telling us and not judge it either.
And then as we continue our journey, we go into the pylon path. This is my very personal journey, shamanic journey that I share in the book. It will probably be expanded into his own full book, but this is the true descent of the heroine’s journey where you’re going down into the goddess. There’s no more escaping. There’s no more trying to stay positive. We have to go through the gates to vice what we’ve avoided. And I shared the 21.
highlands that I went through and my experiences and what I learned there. From there, in the heroine’s journey, we need that tenderness. We need to come back to the feminine, to integrating the mother side, the mother daughter split. We need to learn to integrate the masculine as well. And this is where Kwan Yin comes in, where Kaliak and the mothers come in as well, where
The ending is the full integration of all of our parts. So we look at the goddesses and everything that happened to us through the lens of things like internal family systems and parts work, but there’s just slightly different language around it, right? And at the end is where the full integration is, where you know that the cycles of life do not define you. The cycles happen, just like the seasons, just like the weather changes. Things will be good. Things will be hard. Things will be healthy.
Things will need attention. And with this growth, you have the strength to come through them now. The knowledge, the support, you know how to take care of you. You know where you’re leaking power and sharing your power unconsciously, or you’re back to being that little mother and taking care of everybody and not taking care of you. And at the end, you have the power to choose when and with whom and how you share this energy from overflow.
after taking care of you, not putting everybody in front of you. So this book is kind of my love letter to, think myself, as much as you as well. If you feel like you are on this journey of healing and there’s so much on the physical side, but you’re looking for the mental health, the spiritual aspect of it. You’re looking to connect more deeply with
your personal history and understanding it and integrating it, not going, oh my gosh, yeah, this happened when I was 24 and I need to just let it go. I need to forget it happened. I need to push it away. Right. There’s so many teachings that are like, oh, you’ve experienced this bad thing. So you need to get over it and move on so you can heal. And that does not work. What we need to do is see those parts, witness them.
Allow them to share their emotions allow those parts to be full of grief and anger and hate and fear and loneliness and all of those negative emotions Because the more you stuff them down and ignore them or go I just got to let go of it the louder and stronger They’re going to hold on the more they’re going to work to protect you So you don’t have to feel that again. You don’t have to go through that trauma and shame again, but hang on to that
doesn’t allow room for healing. So when we see those parts and we witness them and we integrate them and we say, yes, you belong here. Thank you for your protection. Thank you for holding this part of me because you’ve carried so much and I’m here to witness you, see you. You don’t have to change that part. You don’t have to kick them out, but you can allow them to exist without causing you pain anymore. And this is the lessons.
This is the lessons of the book, the lessons of the goddess and integrating our experiences in ourselves without guilt, without shame, but with gratitude and love. So this is not an easy answer book. It’s not a protocol book, but it offers, I think something very valuable, the companionship on the journey, the wisdom from those who have walked this path before.
reminder that you are not what happened to you. You are being forged into something unbreakable. And I’m so excited for this book and this journey. I hope that you see parts of yourself in here, experience some healing, meditate and journey and bring this to your therapist’s office and share what you’re learning about yourself so you can navigate the heroine’s journey.
in a full circle integrated healing way and this is a spiral. We keep going through this journey right on a deeper and deeper level with more and more awareness and our journey is never done. So give yourself a lot of grace and love and compassion right now as you navigate every stage of your healing journey and get the support that you need. So right now this book is available on Amazon in all the formats. Please join us in the Goddess Medicine Circle Facebook group for a free chapter by chapter course starting on March 6. Bring your journal, bring your heart, bring whatever version of yourself shows up that day. So you’re right where you are meant to be. Thank you for being here. Thank you for walking this path with me. Thanks for tuning in and we’ll see you next week.