102 Year-Old Doctor Reveals Secrets To A Successful Life w/ Dr. Gladys McGarey

0:04This is the Ed Milet Show. Okay, welcome back to the show, everybody. Today's an honor for me. Today's all going to be about really wisdom. And my guest today has 102 years worth of that wisdom. Yep, my guest today has lived 102 years on this earth. She's a remarkable woman. She's a mother, I believe, of six children. Uh-huh. She is also a doctor. She also met Gandhi, and she has a book out that is just extraordinary called The Well-Lived Life, 102-Year-Old Doctor's Six Secrets to Health and Happiness at Every Age. So, Dr. Gladys McGarry, welcome finally to my show. I'm so happy to be here. It's my absolute honor to do this today with you.

0:58So, I have so many things I want to ask you, so let's just get right into it. All right, let's do it. 102 years worth of stuff to get out in an hour. So here we go. You said something. You said, if I could distill my life's work, and you nailed it down here, you said, to be truly alive, we must find the life force within ourselves and direct our energy towards it. That sounds like an awful new age thing to say. And I'm wondering what you meant by that when you said it. I mean that we all have it. so it's something that we just have not introduced ourselves to because we've been so busy looking outside for our fix-its and the things that make us happy or whatever we think has to be outside of ourselves and don't realize that inside the very core of our being is what keeps us happy as a matter of fact, I just learned a while back that the Welsh, when they get up in the morning and meet somebody, they don't say good morning.

2:01They say, how's your weird? Really? Because the weird that they're talking about is this inner core of our being that is the thing that really keeps us going, our life force. I call it the physician within, And but it's that life force that really is the engine that keeps the thing going. Is that what you mean about the juice of life? Because you also by the way, it's amazing. I've not really heard anybody else use that term. I've been using the term about getting the juice out of something or the juice of life now for probably 30 years. Is that what you mean by that? I have as I was fascinated when I was reading your work.

2:42I'm like, oh, my gosh, the juice of life. So is that connected to the life force or is it something more specific? No, it's definitely connected to the life force, because it's what juices are a lot. You know, if we don't have any juice, we're just kind of, you know, it's very sad. Well, I think most people, maybe you would agree. I shouldn't say most, because that's a judgment. But you say that the juice has two main parts, our individual essence, and then how we fit into the whole. And if I think about our culture today, I wonder how many people listening to this right now go, you know, I haven't tapped into my life force and I don't get a lot of the juice out of life.

3:25So could you elaborate on that? Our individual essence, what a beautiful way to say it, and how we fit into the whole. If we start paying attention to some of the things that make us happy, that make us want to dance and sing, that sometimes just make you want to yell. Something has happened and you really don't like it very well, it's okay to go about yourself and just holler sometimes. Sometimes we need to express ourselves in a way that we can understand it, where we can understand what it is that I'm trying to say to myself. You know, this either is really it's so good, I like it so well, or it really makes me sad.

4:13Or however it's acting us, however we're reacting, whatever it is, is our way of responding to life. Does that mean that you think that, you know, the full expression of your emotions matters? meaning like I've had this theory for a while that I don't even know that there are positive or negative emotions. There just are emotions. Yeah, it's energy. Energy is energy. And sometimes it just doesn't feel very good. And sometimes it feels great. But whatever it is, if we can begin to say, oh, yes, or no, no, no, and we back away from it. It's something that guides us from within ourselves that allows us to know what we're responding to and how we're responding to it.

5:10How do you figure that out, Gladys? How do you figure that out? How do you know why you're, you know, I'm a big believer in self-awareness. Some of that just comes, I think, maybe with age because you've been around yourself a little bit longer. You know, I know more about myself at 52 right now than I certainly did at 22. Yeah, you've been paying attention to it. And a lot of times at 100, haven't been paying attention to it and still don't feel it. How do you do that? How do you pay more attention? Is it a little bit, is it a little quiet time? Is it starting to take note of how you behave and what your patterns are?

5:47How does one begin to do that? I think it's an individual thing, so it's hard to say blanket crowd. But when you begin to pay attention to what makes you respond to something, even a person or a poem or a song or a flower, you know, sometimes a rose will just say, oh, you know, ooh, that's great. You know, it's the awareness of how we respond to the inside and outside of ourselves. Then we become part of a community. I think so many people, and by the way, I have for many years, and sometimes I regress, but I kind of like an autopilot human being. And so the same things generate the same responses from me.

6:43no matter what the conditions of my life are, sometimes I feel like I still find a way to get those same emotions. And in the book, you teach a way to do this and you label it with five L's. It's just sort of like a way to look at your life, right? Like these five L's. I never even heard any of this before. And I've read a lot of books and had hundreds of podcasts. So this is really important, everybody, what she's about to say, because it's kind of a way to actually measure or look at your life. So what are the foundational L's? What are those? I like to use the word foundation because they kind of, for me, when I came across them, I don't know how I came across, when I came across them, they kind of gave me some foundation from which I could begin to talk about some of the things that I wanted to express either to myself or outside.

7:39The five L's all start with life. The first one is life. Life by itself has, it can't do anything. It's like a seed in a pyramid that's been there for 5 ,000 years. It's got all the energy of the universe within it, but it can't do anything until love, which would be in the form of water or sunlight or something. Love activates it, cracks a shell, and the energy comes out, and the two become one. It's like a sperm and an ovum. A sperm by itself and an ovum by itself can't do anything. But when they connect, life comes forth. That's what happens. And when life comes forth, then we begin to involve ourselves.

8:39We involve ourselves with life. And as we do that, then we go up to the third L, which is laughter. Laughter by itself is cruel. It's mean. It can be hard and rough and rude. But laughter with love is joy and happiness. And labor is the fourth one. Labor without love is, oh, man, there are too many diapers. I've got to go to work. It's just, you know, it's really hard. But labor with love is bliss. It's what makes you happy. It's what makes me happy. It's what makes a singer sing, what makes a painter paint. I mean, it's that inner core within us. Labor is there. I mean, you know it's there. But when you approach it with the whole force of love, it blooms.

9:42And the fifth one is listening. Listening without love is empty sound. the clanging gong, you know, it's empty sound, but listening with love is understanding. Oh my gosh. So as we use these as kind of the five, part of the foundation of what love is, what life is all about, it kind of allows us a place to put things where they belong in some kind of order. I have to tell you, that might be, I'm sorry, I get a little emotional with that one. That might be the most profound and beautiful thing ever said on my show. Ever. Ever. That's the foundation of life is love. That takes my breath away. I mean it.

10:40It's the foundation of life is love. And to add to that life, laughter, labor, and listening with love. My gosh, what a remarkable formula and how beautifully said. By the way, I use the word bliss all the time also. I feel like I have this long lost friend that I'm meeting today. Thank you for that gift. I'm curious if you went back, all the way back, and you could give the little girl some advice on her life. You go all the way back to, I don't know, the 12-year-old Gladys, and she's embarking upon this long life she's going to live. Would there be any specific advice you would give her now that you've lived 102 years that, I guess, through you giving it to her, you can give it to all of us?

11:25Was there something you would tell her that you would whisper to her about her life and her in particular that you would want her to know before she goes out into the world and lives this thing? Yeah, definitely. I tried to tell her that she's really kind of a nice person, and she's not a dumbbell. Well, until I started school, life was wonderful. We lived in tents out in the jungle, and my parents were doing the medical work. For me, life was just the way it was supposed to be. And then I started school, and I couldn't read or write. The letters were all over the place. The numbers were all over the place.

12:08I just absolutely could not read or write. Oh, my God. Are you dyslexic? Literally. Oh, my gosh. Wow. Are you? No, I am not. But I'm sitting here talking to the mother of holistic medicine. She becomes a medical doctor at a time where not very many women were doing that. She writes a book, and she's telling me she's dyslexic after she's lived this life. I'm just sitting here going, oh, my gosh. Well, you know, I was so severely dyslexic that I had to repeat first grade twice because a teacher labeled me the class dummy. Oh, my gosh. And so I was really, I was a good fighter. My second oldest brother taught me how I could punch people out.

12:56And so people, so it was, you know, it was, in fact, I remember being, I said 12 years old, being about that age, 10 or 12, waking up one morning and saying to myself, there's something wrong in this world. Gladys, you don't have a friend. And then I said to myself, and why don't you have a friend? And I said, well, you know, you punch people out if they say something. And that's not, I don't think it's working. And then I said, and who do you know that doesn't do that? And I realized it was my mother. My mother was the kind of person, if something happened and she didn't like it or something, She would deal with it either with humor or just let it go.

13:57And it was something that I, and she had friends all over the place. I mean, she, everybody loved my mother. She would, everybody knew that she accepted them and life was good. In fact, she was the kind of person I remember being as a 12-year-old again, sitting at our dining room table when my mother was going to have a tea party and her fancy ladies were coming to tea. This is in India, up in the Himalayas. Okay. So I hear my mother close the front door because I had my stuff all over the table and it was a mess. And my mother says to the ladies as they're coming through, don't look straight ahead.

14:41Don't look to the right. Don't look to the left. Go straight ahead. And they go marching through and into the parlor and they have a wonderful tea party. And I'm sitting there embarrassed because my mother did this. But what a wonderful thing that happened. But then something happened. You know, first and second grade were just terrible. But third grade was different. I had a teacher who saw something in me that the others had. And so she appointed me class governor. I couldn't read or write, but I could do other stuff. and she saw that in me and so I was class governor and then I had the opportunity to present stuff that our class did to the whole student body and so at one point we had a play the play was the

15:45what was it The frog jumped over the pond. And since I was the biggest one in the class, I had an extra ear here. I could jump over this pan of water that they had. And I was really confident about it. I knew I could do this. So I come marching out on the stage. And I look over into the audience. And my two older brothers are sitting there. and it just threw me off my steps enough that when I jumped over the pod, I landed in it, not over it. And my mother had made me this frog suit. She dyed it green and all this. So I'm standing there. The green is fading and I'm in tears and I can't move. And the audience is hysterical.

16:37Everybody's just laughing, laughing. and I can't move. So the teacher comes, takes me off the stage, and I go home totally humanly. And we're sitting at the dinner table. My brothers are telling my mother this just great thing. You know, it was just hysterical. Finally, my mother says to them, all right, boys, you've had your fun now. What are we as a family going to do to help Gladie? So if this ever happens to her again, people won't laugh at her they'll laugh with her and that has stayed with me throughout my life because there have been many you know this dyslexia keeps you off it's hard to keep right in the center of things you get off balance easily so I've stripped and fallen on stage and always been able to pick it up And I'd have the audience in my hand before I ever said a thing.

17:41And so it was one of these huge life learning experiences. And another thing that was really, really interesting, when we started the American Holistic Medical Association, first of all, it took us two years to decide how to spell it because we were looking for the word health, healing, and holy because what was missing in medicine at that point was the spirit. We had the mind and the body, but we didn't have the spirit. But we got it in two years, and we got it and so on. But one day, there were 10 of us who were part of this group that started sitting around a table, and six of us were severely dyslexic.

18:28You're kidding me. I'm not kidding. And so we said to each other, that's why we started this. It must be. because we, in order to read, I don't know how I learned to read. You know, I really don't. I have no idea. And they didn't, some of them had some ideas, which I didn't particularly agree with, but, you know, it was that kind of thing. But we decided that it was because we were looking for something beyond the reading, writing, arithmetic aspect of things. I have to say something to you. There's so much to unpack there. The first thing is when you go back to the 12-year-old you, a version of that advice is something I hope everybody in the audience gives themselves.

19:12Right. Which is first part of it is, hey, you're a pretty good person. And just that reminder, you're a pretty good person. Yeah. And then the second piece of it is kind of the second part was give yourself a break. Give yourself a break. You know what? You're a little bit better than you think you are. I gotta tell you if I could go back to the 12 year old me I would tell me I would say you know what you're a good man you care about people you're kind and you're giving and you know what you're not so bad man all these things that you know are so bad about you those are actually the things then the third lesson is that this woman becomes an MD at the time you know she's the mother of holistic medicine number one but she ends up doing this at a time where this is just not something that very many women were doing at the time and she does this now to know that you were severely dyslexic and now to know that when you founded this group that the people around the table also shared what most people would think is this deficiency which ends up to be a gift because it probably caused you to work harder be more diligent and think beyond as you know and those are all the things in life we all think our limitations or what we think are our limitations these are the things that steal the juice from our life to go back to the juice we think oh this limitation i have is why i'm not Most humans lose the juice of their life because they're so familiar with their deficiencies and not their possibilities.

20:36And you say something. She has in this book six profound principles for living. And the first one is, you don't always hear a doctor say this, but you said you are here for a reason. And I'm curious why that was the first thing you listed of the six. Because if you don't get that, where do you put the others? You know, if you don't realize that you really have a reason to be here. For me, it's kind of like a huge jigsaw puzzle. And we're each a piece in that jigsaw puzzle. And if you've ever had a thousand piece jigsaw puzzle and got it all done and you couldn't find that last piece, it drives you crazy.

21:29You know, we all are that important to the whole. The whole is not complete if we don't recognize ourselves as whole. My youngest son, who is an ophthalmologist in Flagstaff, came down. We were talking one time, and he says, you know, there's a guy up in Flagstaff. He doesn't like me. He says, I don't understand, but I like me.

22:03That means you did your job right. That's what that means. That's not true for most people. By the way, guys, I'll just give you a couple of the other ones. Two is all life needs to move. Third, love is medicine. And fourth, this is a big one, if you could speak to it, because I think so many people feel alone. And you said, four, you are never truly alone. Absolutely. Absolutely. If you just take the time to really look at that, you aren't. There's always some life moving around you. And it's the whole process of life. Even if, you know, during the pandemic and so on, people were feeling alone.

22:47One of the reasons they were feeling alone was because they had never had this experience before of being isolated like that. And for a lot of people, it was a soul awakening. Whereas prior to that, they may have felt like they didn't fit into a community or something, but the community was always there, you know. And they always had something that they could reach out to whether they wanted to or not. But one of the things that the pandemic did was to give people the awareness that they needed each other. Yes. Yes. And here's another great thing that I think is really interesting. I have a friend who's a visionary and a psychic in Virginia Beach, Rosalie.

23:40She and I were talking one time about manifesting something or other that we were trying to manifest. And she said, you know, I think that there's another word that we really need to use. she says that's femifesting what does that mean says we manifest things and we think that we have to manifest things but where is the feminine aspect of this we need to femifest so as we talked about it we realized that manifesting is like climbing jacob's ladder you you get into first grade and then you climb the ladder and you get up the...that's manifesting. But femifesting is like a spiral. You can be on the fifth level and you know what's going on down the second level.

24:35Women know that. You know you can have a baby in one arm trying to do dishes in another and take care of the one on the floor. The difference in the feminine energy and the masculine energy, which we need both. In fact, the reason we started talking about this is I had a dream. I had this dream where I woke up, there was a huge crash. And I woke up and I looked and I was in the high Himalayas in a valley. And on the one side, there was a young woman just lying there, almost dead, just barely breathing. And on the other side, the left side, there was a man in armor doing the same thing. And I heard the voice saying, this energy, these two have been doing this for eons.

25:35It's time they did this. By the way, if you were listening, she did her fist together and then put her hands together. Come together is what she said. And I realized when I began thinking about it, that the girl was on the right side, which is the masculine side, and the man was on the left side, all in armor and everything, and they were been for eons fighting. And so that's when we came up with this Femifest and Manifest. Well, it's about to go to millions of people right now, so now I can already see the hats and the t-shirts and all this stuff being printed out of the U.S. today. And you know what happens with a pregnancy?

26:19The egg and the sperm come together and life happens.

26:27The egg by itself, you know, what's it going to do? Sperm by itself, what it's going to do. But when they get together, life happens. So good. And that's manifestation. so pregnancies are fennefesting I have to tell you I'm sitting here just going I don't do very many shows like this where I go I want to listen to this one back right away I knew this would be good today but I didn't know it would be I knew your depth I didn't know you're this deep and after you've lived a little bit you have a tremendous appreciation for the things Gladys is talking about and you said something there I don't want to skip over you said I spend time with my dreams.

27:12What do you mean by that? I'm just curious. Is that something you've done all your life? Well, I didn't, yeah. You know, we used to talk about our dreams when we were kids and all that. And my mother didn't discourage us. But as I... Do you think they have meaning, Gladys? Oh, wow. Yes. In fact, guidance and all of that. In fact, I really didn't understand that I had a voice until I was 93. Now, that didn't mean that I wasn't using my voice, but I didn't really respect it until I was 93. I'm just so happy that this is true. Because I was dyslexic and I was a dummy. You don't realize how some of these ambiguous things happen to you when you're young.

28:09And you're the damaged one. I was forever asking somebody else to validate it until I had this dream. I was watching nine-year-old Gladys, okay? And we were in the tents in the jungles where we had grown up. And in our family, on Sunday mornings, we were not supposed to sing anything but hymns or bhajans. And as this nine-year-old smart aleck, I thought that was a stupid thing, and I wanted to sing whatever I wanted to sing. And so I saw myself pulling the tent flap back and looking out to see that my little brother wasn't there because he'd tattled on me. And then I'd have, you know, so I had to get out.

29:00And he wasn't there. So as fast as I could, I ran and I climbed up the mango tree that was out there. And I'm sitting up at the top and I'm singing. Oh, man, I'm singing the caterpillar song or any old thing that came into my head and just having the best time. And every so often I look over my right shoulder and Jesus is up in the tree with me. and Jesus is laughing and I look at him and I say Jesus loves little children right and he's laughing and he says yes and so I go back to my singing and then I get to doubting and I think you better check again so I look back and I say I'm still a little children right and he says yes so I go back to my singing and I wake up and I wake up singing and laughing and it was a Sunday morning here.

29:58Oh my gosh. So it tied all this in. And at that point, I said, Gladys, you have a voice. You have to start claiming it. Oh my gosh, Gladys. It's true. That's amazing. The idea that when we're little, these wounds stay with us till we're 93 or beyond is an absolute fact. The idea that you listen to your dreams, What a lesson for everybody here. And this idea that you find your voice at 93 is absolutely extraordinary. And by the way, thank God you did, because I wouldn't be with you here today if you didn't find that voice. Yeah, well, it was important to me. When I realized what I realized was that every time I deflected what I had said to somebody else, I was denying what I said.

30:48My gosh, Gladys, there's millions of people right now that are crying. I can promise you going, that's me. I need someone's validation. I need their approval. I need permission in my life. And not everybody, Gladys, is going to be as blessed and as fortunate as you to be here for the 93 years and to the 102 years. So they better figure it out right now, listening to your wisdom, that they don't need validation or permission and they have a voice because they may not get a chance to figure that out in the 93rd year. that's absolutely true you need to we are I am me, you are you and there isn't anybody else in between us except the whole world you know so we're there and we bump up with each other and find each other I couldn't begin to do this if my son didn't do the technical You know, we're totally dependent on each other.

31:51Let me tell you, my eldest son is a retired orthopedic surgeon. But when he finished his surgery, he came through Phoenix, and he was going down to Del Rio, Texas to start his practice. And he says, Mom, you know, I'm real worried. He said, I have all this training and everything. and I'm going out into the world, I'm going to have people's lives in my hands. I don't know if I can handle that. And I said, well, Carl, if you think that you're the one that does the healing, you have a right to be scared. But if you can understand that you have this amazing training with orthopedic surgery that you have gotten and you've spent all of this time doing, you need to keep that and keep doing it.

32:43and then turn the healing of it over to the physician within the patient. Because you can do everything that you do, but if the patient doesn't accept it and doesn't do what you are telling them or work with you with it, and you haven't even accepted the fact that they can do that, there's a gap. So in the whole process of healing, we all need, in the field of medicine, we all need to respect the physician within the patient as our colleague. I think, guys, I'm sitting here thinking, I wish I was giving a seminar and a speech with you, because I know what you mean, too. And it's not just it's the field of medicine, it's the field of life.

33:36Yes. There's this physician within us. Now, for me, that's God living within us. But whatever you're, and I know you believe that too, that that that that's the healer. That's the one where you can do everything you can and you just separate from the outcome and just let things happen the way that they're naturally supposed to happen in life. And too many people, I think sometimes it's actually an ego. Actually, even you might think there's humility involved. You think you control everything. There's got to be an element of your life where you do your part. and you actually say this, number five in the book is everything's your teacher.