The 6 Secrets to Live Your Best Life: Practical Advice from the 102-Year-Old "Mother of Holistic Medicine" | Dr. Gladys McGarey

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1:24I can't believe I just spent the past hour speaking with a 102-year-old doctor. She's been practicing medicine for 80 years, and she gives her six secrets, her own personal secrets, plus so many stories from patients over the past 80 years, her secrets for health and happiness. She wrote a book, The Well-Lived Life, 102-year-old doctors, six secrets to health and happiness at every age. Her name is Gladys McGarry. She's an MD. She's still practicing. I think I want to hire her as a life coach, actually, and you'll see why after you listen to this episode. We learned so many things. I hope you enjoy it.

2:08This isn't your average business podcast, and he's not your average host. This is the James Altucher Show.

2:25First of all, I just want to say, Dr. Gladys McGarry, it is such an honor to be talking to you. I'm so happy you agreed to come on to the show. But now I have to hear, I understand you and Jay were discussing coconut time, and I need to know what that is. You want me to tell you? I very much want you to tell me. All right. My brother, we found out in Bali, there was a wedding that was going to be in three days. And nobody was doing anything. Everybody was doing just their own thing, sitting around. And my sister-in-law finally just got upset and said, why don't you start doing something, getting ready?

3:03They said, no, we're working on coconut time. And she said, what in the world is coconut time? They said, when the coconut is ripe, it'll drop. So the next day the wedding went off and there wasn't one hitch in the whole wedding. The whole wedding was so smooth that we've called it coconut time since. Can I ask you about that? Because that sort of implies a certain faith that things will just in general, not always, but in general work out. and it's hard sometimes to have that faith. Oh, sure it is. You have to work at it. You know, it's not something that automatically happens unless you think, oh, well, this fits into coconut time and you put it there.

3:49There are certain things that are, in my opinion, are divinely orchestrated because it goes so far beyond my extension of what I know. I mean, there are things that are so far out that you have no control over, even know that they exist. But in coconut time, there are all those things going on, and when they are right and when they happen, then they happen and everything's all right. So, I mean, it's a very comforting way. if you're long enough, it's a comforting way to get to that point. You know, it's so funny. So you've been practicing medicine, you've been a doctorate in the medical field for 80 years.

4:35And I have to admit, they initially told me that you were experienced as a doctor and a medical professional. So I was thinking maybe more like 90 years or a hundred years, but 80 years. Okay. You're mildly experienced and you know, a thing or two, But I like how you, so much of your practice and the stories in the book, The Well-Lived Life, so many of the stories involve stories like what you just told me about coconut time and how sometimes if people have, let's say, bronchitis or arthritis or a cold, that there's something else going on in their life that they're not either releasing some anger or they're not spending their energy wisely.

5:20And then when they talk about these things and they start to release these things or spend their energy more carefully or set boundaries or whatever, they start to feel better. And how did you come to this part of your medical practice? Like what was the triggers or were you always like thinking like this? Well, I had the privilege of living with parents who were both doctors in India and that, you know, you start out with people who are, their whole life is dedicated to helping other people. I mean, they were there in the jungles of North India, working with the people out there. They could have been here in the States and killing a fortune or whatever.

6:02That's not what they wish to do. And for me, that's the way life should have been. Where you start out, you do what you can with the people that you're working with and life gets very good. And so for me, it was a way of thinking and doing and living. And the thing that works for me, to answer your question, the reason we started the American Holistic Medical Association is because when I was in medical school, well, I started medical school in September of 1941 and graduated and left in, and the World War II started in December, okay? So my whole education was during the war. So everything that we learned was focused towards killing and getting rid of disease and pain.

6:58And after I got out into the practice, I realized that that was still what was happening. And actually, to this day, that's what conventional medicine is still focused on. It's great. It needs to be done. It's absolutely there. But there's a dimension. When a group of us physicians who were thinking this way got together, we realized we knew a lot about the body. We knew a lot about the mind. But where was the essence of what we were doing? Where was the spirit? Where was the reason for being physicians? And it wasn't there. And so we started the American Holistic Medical Association to bring the spirit back into the medicine.

7:48But then it took us two years to decide how to spell holistic because we finally realized that the root word we were talking about was healing and holy. So bringing that element back in to the whole field of medicine gave us stability to move forward in our thinking. And it's not that there's anything wrong with conventional medicine, except that it's just missing something. Do you think, and I don't want to be like conspiratorial, but a lot of people say that one of the reasons medicine has turned more towards diagnose and prescribe, diagnose and prescribe is because pharmaceutical companies essentially, again, I hate this kind of talk.

8:37I know where you're going and I agree. But like pharmaceutical companies, you know, wine and dine them and pay them and give them incentives to prescribe certain drugs. And then they see the next patient. So they're churning out, they make a lot of money that way. And I don't blame them. You have to take ownership as a patient, but then they'll make fun of you for saying something like holistic. The word holistic is, you know, a taboo word in medicine. It used to be, it isn't in my world. And the beautiful thing is, I mean, it really used to be bad. I mean, I was brought up to the authorities, medical authorities here because of the things that I was saying and doing.

9:16But now that's really shifted and shifted enough that about 15 years ago, I was in the grocery store pushing my cart around. And I heard over the PA system, the hardware store down the street calling itself a holistic hardware store. So I stopped my cart and I said, well, we've gotten that far now. Now we have to come up with another name. And so now what I'm calling it is living medicine because living medicine brings life and love into the whole practice of medicine and lifts it to another dimension. It does not eliminate the conventional medicine. In fact, is it okay for me just to freewheel like this?

10:04Yeah, yeah. We're going to freewheel the entire time. Okay. Well, my oldest son is a retired orthopedic surgeon. So when he'd gotten all of his training and he came through Phoenix and he was going down to Del Rio, Texas to start his practice, he said, Mom, you know, I'm real scared. I'm going to go into the world. I'm going to have people's lives in my hands. He said, I don't know if I can handle that. And I said, well, Carl, if you think you're the one that does the healing, you have a right to be scared. But if you can understand that your job is to do this amazing practice of orthopedic surgery, which is just an amazing ability that you have, and you can do that for the patient and then support the patient as they do their own healing, because the healing has to be done individually by the physician within each patient.

11:03because it doesn't matter what I tell a patient to do or what I tell them not to do. If they don't do it, it's not going to happen. If I tell them what I think they should do and they take that, then it's their responsibility to carry on. I mean, I can tell them not to eat onions. It'll make them sick or something. And they'll say, oh, no, I'm going to eat them anyway and eat onions and get sick. I mean, my second son can't eat onions if he eats onions, he gets sick. It's an individual life that we live. It's our responsibility. I agree with that. But you look at like people's psychology and I look at my own.

11:45So at an extreme case, everybody knows that smoking on average reduces six years of your life or some number. And yet people smoke. But more subtly, and you refer to many instances in your book, being angry and not forgiving. could reduce years in your life. You have many examples of somebody who can't get rid of some old anger, some chronic anger, and it shows up in the form of some, I don't know, an abdominal obstruction or bronchitis or some illness. And those are hard to give up, angers and stresses. We kind of get addicted to them, I guess, the same way somebody gets addicted to cigarettes.

12:24Well, they are hard to give up because we experience them. It's like if you have a cut and it forms a scab and it's on your arm and every time you look down, you scratch that scab and scratch that scab. It keeps on hurting. It kind of hurts good. I mean, it reminds you that you hurt. Okay, this hurts. But if you leave it alone and let it heal, you can look at that and say, oh, I remember you. You know, it's that kind of a choice that we make. See, I think one of the things we really need to look at again and again, and that is blaming ourselves or other people for what it is that we think and what we do.

13:16It's just what life does. You know, there's something to learn by everything that we see and do and work with, because there are lessons all around us if we look at them. And as we begin to really engage with life as it is, like we're doing right now. I mean, this is a moment in time which will never happen again, never happened before. It's that precious moment in time which we are, I think, using to help other people in this moment in time to grasp the importance of what time and life is all about. And that the way we work with it, see, I happen to love talking. I don't write very well, but I like talking.

14:09So this is fun for me. all right me too yeah that's why you do it yes I feel I used to be not and this is a hard thing to admit but I used to be not as angry as I am now like sometimes in the morning sometimes every morning I'll wake up and I'll think about someone who was once close to me who did something that made me angry and I'll never know why and I'll never understand it and I can't help thinking about these things and what I would say to them if I saw them. It just pops up in the mind, like a craving for junk food. It's the same kind of craving. And how do you or how have you gotten yourself over those situations?

14:54Well, you know, the second secret I have addresses that because we all have that. You're not alone in that. All of us have spots like that because there's some people who really get on our nerves and actually do things that hurt us. We get hurt by each other. And sometimes we hurt other people. But those are things that happen and we can build on them and keep hanging on to them, like I said, with the scab. Or we can do, because life itself has to move. It's always in motion. Like the next moment is the next moment. And as you do that, if you're moving towards the light, things get more clear.

15:43They're less heavy. The load isn't as hard. But if you want to keep on carrying this heavy load of what this person did to you, it's very difficult to get on. And that's why the second secret is that life has to move. It can get stuck. And if it gets stuck, that's our choice. And we can hang into that. But it'll kill the life force within us. But if we actually look at that issue, whatever that issue is, and sort of do what my mother did, which she called Kuchwarwani, which means it doesn't matter. You take the issue that's there, the person, the whatever it was, and you hold it in the palm of your hand and hold your hand up like this and then say, it doesn't matter, and let it drop.

16:42But it's a choice. And when you let it drop, you can either go back and pick it up again, and by now it's dirty and messy and stuff, or you can just say, oh, yeah, well, yeah, it's gone. But it doesn't mean you forget it. It doesn't mean there isn't a scar there. We're doing a lot of work with people with ambiguous loss, you know, losses that they've had. They don't really remember, but it's it's scarred them. I've worked with that personally. I mean, like what's an example from your life to having to repeat first grade twice because I was the class dummy. I can't believe that, actually. I think you're lying to me.

17:26They told me you were a liar, so I don't know. Well, that's what they call me too. But it's, no, before I went to school, life was perfect. I was with my friends in the jungles and playing with people, doing whatever I wanted to do. And then I started school. And although I knew the alphabet and I knew numbers and all, when I started to read they were all over the place I could not read I couldn't read what was on a page and so it was just I was the class dummy interestingly enough when we started the American Holistic Medical Association one day there were 10 of us doctors sitting on around table and I brought this dyslexia thing up and six of the 10 of us were severely dyslexic.

18:22So we looked at each other and we said, well, maybe that's why we were able to see another dimension in what was needed because, you know, I don't know how I learned to read. Honest to Jack, I don't know how I learned to read. But it's interesting. Maybe it gave you, because learning to read was more challenging for you and your colleagues that you mentioned, maybe that gave you sort of a fighting spirit that you learned this muscle, this fighting spirit that many people don't learn. Like if someone learns, if everything comes easy to somebody, they don't quite learn that toughness, which really helps in a moment by moment basis.

19:05I think in some ways, I'm tough in some ways and not tough in other ways. And it's hard sometimes when you realize the areas where you're not tough. That's right, because that's your learning process. In fact, as we were kids, my sister, who was two years older than me, we were in our 90s. and she tells me that she was really jealous of me when we were younger because I could hang by my knees and she tried and tried and tried and she couldn't do it. And she said, why do you think you could hang by your knees and I couldn't? And I said, well, I guess I was looking for another dimension or another way of looking at life or something like that.

20:05look as a manager of people as an employer as an entrepreneur and as even an investor in startups i can tell you the most important thing for your business is the quality of the people you hire the best part is that great candidates are already on LinkedIn. Employees hired through LinkedIn are 30 % more likely to stick around for at least a year compared to those hired through the leading competitor. And I will tell you that the great thing about LinkedIn is that you're not just looking at random people. You're able to see the people who your friends and trusted peers and colleagues who they trust and who they've hired in the past and who they recommend.

20:48And hiring doesn't have to be complicated. Realistically, when you have a business to run, you don't want to spend hours on hiring. You want to hire the right person as quickly as possible. That's why LinkedIn Jobs AI Assistant suggests immediately 25 great fit candidates daily so you can invite them to apply and keep things moving. Hire right the first time. Post your job for free at linkedin.com slash Altature, then promote it to use LinkedIn Jobs' new AI assistant, making it easier and faster to find the top candidates. That's linkedin.com slash Altature. Post your job for free. Terms and conditions apply.

21:24As a business owner, Jennifer Garner knows it takes hard work and patience to keep growing. So finding a serious business card that goes the extra mile was important for the success of Once Upon a Farm. That's why they chose the Capital One Venture X Business Card. With unlimited double miles on every purchase, they have big purchasing power so they can spend more and earn more. The Capital One Venture X Business Card. What's in your wallet? Terms apply. See CapitalOne.com for details. Now, everybody has problems. Everyone lives through their own hardships and so on. You were a teenager during the Great Depression and years of 20 % unemployment and banks failing and businesses failing and people hungry.

22:11Then you started to be an adult when the world was at war and then the beginnings of the nuclear bomb and the Cold War. Like, just tell me a little about your life. Like, what was it like as a teenager in the Depression? There's nobody I could talk to who could answer this question right now. Well, I can tell you, we came to the United States during the Depression and couldn't go back to it. My parents had a furlough. Every seven and a half years, they came to the States and then went back to India. But during the Depression, we were here in the States and we couldn't get back. We were in Kansas.

22:49We were living there in a house that was fine for us. and it was okay because everybody was having trouble. Everybody was going without things. In fact, my mother, who was a physician, started a little side job because we needed more money than we were coming in and she started ordering non-alcoholic vanilla extract. And then she had us kids go around to the neighborhood and sell this. It was not a big deal, except it was a big deal because it fit into where we were and we needed that much more money. And I went to this one place and when I was saying we were selling this, the kid that came to the door was a classmate of mine in a family who was actually not in as much difficulty as we were.

23:53And he began really laughing at me and saying, well, you're just, you know, you're going around begging and all this kind of stuff. I mean, that kind of thing. There still was something that the people who didn't have anything were reaching to other people to help give to us. And there were those who made fun of it, but there were those who worked with it. Life was going on. and even because we were in Kansas and Kansas was, you know, you could have non-alcoholic vanilla extracts for crying out loud. Did you order it from like a foreign country or did they make it here? No, my mother found something.

24:37I don't know where she found that. But, you know, you look for, if you're looking for something, you find it. See, that's the key. If you're not looking for it, You can see it pile up there and all this trouble and all these things and all this pain and all. But if you are looking there and you see a bit of light and you say, oh, now that's interesting. And you begin to follow the light instead of some awful thing that's happening. Let's say right now, okay, we're not going through a depression, but there's economic hardship out there. And let's say somebody loses their job, also gets divorced at the same time, is dealing with medical issues.

25:21And they think to themselves, gosh, I just haven't had anything good happen to me for a really long time. And I don't know how to change that. And you see that they're actually like physically getting ill, perhaps because of these emotions. What would you say to a person like that? I'd say start looking for what's working, not for what's not working for you and it may be just some little thing like the vanilla extract i mean it's not the looking for the big money dumped on you so now you have money and you can do everything it doesn't work that way when you're particularly when there's a depression when the whole world around you is having trouble with having enough money to to pay the bills and to do the things that need to be done.

26:11Then you start looking for little things that you can do. And it's amazing what shows up. But if you're not looking for them, they're not there. They're absolutely not there if you're not looking for them. It's like walking down a path with a flashlight. If you're walking down a path with a flashlight, your steps are directed by the light that you are using when the light goes forward you step forward it's that kind of a movement where our whole being can work together moment by moment and find something and something it's you know maybe you just need to plant a plant for people who are elderly whatever that means in a home, if they at least have a plant that they can water and work with, it gives them something to live for.

27:09You refer to this in the book, like you have one of your secrets. And so I should say the subtitle of The Well-Lived Life is 102-Year-Old Doctor's Six Secrets to Health and Happiness at Every Age. And one of the secrets is you are never alone. And some people do feel alone. Like say their significant other passes away or child passed away or friends moved to another town or you say something interesting, which is try to find the friend in everyone. And maybe you could describe what that means. Well, you know, it just means what it says. If the woman at a grocery store is your friend, she's there because she's your friend, not because she's had to work or whatever problem she's having but if you choose that she's your friend then you treat her like your friend so if it's totally a choice you know you can live in a friendly world with unfriendly people and still treat them sort of like your friends sometimes you have to have your boundaries and say that's enough now and just do a kuchpaluane and move away but sometimes that person is looking for a friend and it's like oh I love it when you come into the grocery store because yes it's that kind of a recognition that my spirit bears witness with thy spirit.

28:43There is a connection. And that connection, it can be broken or not. But if you choose, it can continue. And I guess that kind of connection also takes you out of your head a little bit. So let's say you're constantly thinking about your problems. But thinking of a connection you might have, however small, with another person sort of takes you out of your head. So you're not necessarily obsessing on whatever grief you might be going through. That's right. It moves you to a point of where your heart is, you know, because you're looking for a friend. And so I like how with a lot of these secrets, you mean it very literally.

29:24So like when you say, you know, all life is in motion, you're really talking about where all life is moving. You're really talking about moving. Like you described one person who you even say when they read a book, they should not just turn the page with their fingers, but move their whole arm. Like you should move your whole body. But now we're all stuck next to these monitors all day long. Like you and I are sitting, talking to each other through monitors. How can we bring motion into even an activity like this? I type on the keyboard all day long. That's what I do. I sit here and type. Well, you know, some people doodle.

30:01Some people, and there's nothing wrong with doodling. You have to throw the piece of paper away. It didn't mean anything, but it kept you moving. Maybe you move your feet. Maybe it's just your head, but your body needs to move. Now, another interesting thing is there are times when, this happened not too long ago, I think I write about it in the book, a patient is told they needed to rest. And so they thought they just needed to rest and just lay down and life went past and they couldn't have anything. Life meant nothing. The fact of the matter is when a doctor tells you you need to rest, that's doing something.

30:44You are resting. You're not just a slug that laid down, you know. This is part of the process of getting well at that particular time is rest. It's like you need to sleep. And you need, you know, you don't need to. It's, except you really do. You know, your body is really saying, no, I need to rest today. I just, there's too much going on. I'm going to take a day of rest. And I'm just not going to do nothing. But it's a choice. It's something that I need to do at that time. Not all the time. you know, you also talk about resting in the context of your first secret, which is, you know, finding your juice, finding what it is that you love in life and doing that, even if it's different from, even if it doesn't pay the bills and whatever.