Tami Simon: Hello, friends. My name’s Tami Simon, and I’m the founder of Sounds True, and I want to welcome you to the Sounds True Podcast, Insights at the Edge.
I also want to take a moment to introduce you to Sounds True’s new membership community and digital platform, it’s called Sounds True One. Sounds True One features original premium, transformational docuseries, community events, classes to start your day and relax in the evening, special weekly live shows, including a video version of Insights at the Edge with an after-show community question-and-answer session with featured guests. I hope you’ll come join us, explore, come have fun with us and connect with others. You can learn more at Join.SoundsTrue.com.
I also want to take a moment and introduce you to the Sounds True Foundation, our nonprofit that creates equitable access to transformational tools and teachings. You can learn more at SoundsTrueFoundation.org, and in advance, thank you for your support.
In this episode of Insights at the Edge, my guest is Dr. Gladys McGarey. Dr. Gladys, as she is known, is 102 years old and still a consulting doctor. She practices what she now calls “living medicine,” and we’re going to hear more about what that is. She’s a remarkable person, I would say a force of nature. At age 100, she started penning her book that was released in May of this year. It’s called The Well-Lived Life: A 102-Year-Old Doctor’s Six Secrets to Health and Happiness.
Some people refer to Dr. Gladys as the mother of holistic medicine. She’s the co-founder and past president of the American Holistic Medical Association, now called the Academy of Integrative Health in Medicine, as well as the co-founder of the Academy of Parapsychology and Medicine. She lives and works in Scottsdale, Arizona and is the mother of six children and a great-great-grandmother. Here’s a meeting you won’t soon forget with Dr. Gladys. Dr. Gladys, welcome.
Gladys McGarey: Thank you. Thank you. I’m so happy to be here.
TS: Great to be with you. You begin your book, The Well-Lived Life, talking about this notion of finding our juice, our juice in life, and that is part of what fuels us. I’d love to know right here at the start, where do you find your juice now at this point at 102?
GM: Well, I don’t think it’s ever changed much. It’s grown, it’s developed. It’s morphed into different places, and things, and different ways that the world could accept it. The fact of the matter is, I think that all of us are born here for a purpose. We have a reason for being here. We aren’t here randomly, just plucked around and put there. I think our souls know where and what it is that we came to do this lifetime. I
t’s nice if you know early, but sometimes you don’t. Sometimes you go through a lot of different trials, like internships or something like that to find out where you fit. Then, if you’re looking for it, I guarantee you’ll find it. You won’t find it if you don’t look for it.
We are looking for the thing that lights our souls up, what made you create this whole concept, and now feel that this is why you’re here. You know why you’re here. When we recognize the reason that we’re here, then we can really share it with other people. Prior to that we’re sharing it, but we can share it from deep inside ourselves and it makes a difference to other people.
TS: How would you language the reason you are here and when you first discovered it, how did you first discover it?
GM: I came here to be a physician. I came here to be a doctor. When I played with my dolls, my sister wouldn’t let me play with hers because mine were always sick. And I had to work with her, and she wouldn’t let me do that to her dolls. I knew when I was two that I didn’t question it. I knew I was a doctor. I have three little great-granddaughters who, when they were two, told their parents they were doctors. I had one who didn’t want to get a COVID shot, so she was objecting to that. When she came home, she stood in front of her grandfather, who’s my son, who’s a retired orthopedic surgeon, and she puts her shoulders back and looks up at him and she says, “Next time when I get to be a doctor, I’m going to be a good doctor.” She didn’t like the shot. [LAUGHS]
I think we all come in with a special place. In my mind, it’s like a huge jigsaw puzzle. And each one of us is a piece in that jigsaw puzzle. There isn’t anybody else that can fit in there. I’ve tried to put other pieces in jigsaw puzzles but they don’t work. Then if you have a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle, you put the whole thing together and one piece is missing, you drive yourself crazy looking for that one piece. Because each one of us are essential in the place where we are and who we are. It’s finding that inner knowing about who and what we are and what we really want to do, what it is that really makes our souls sing. When you find that, you know it.
TS: Now, in your case you knew from age two that you wanted to be a physician, and here you are at 102, still a consulting physician. A lot of people that I know who decide to be doctors, they go into retirement in their 60s. It’s over. They made enough money, they banked it. Now who knows what they’re going to do? I think that’s a narrative in our culture. Not, “As I age, I’m going to continue to animate a professional life of some kind or a purpose-driven life.” It is time to go to the golf course. What do you think about that?
GM: I think it’s very sad. I think it’s very sad because we’ll always have people that… Are you talking about physicians?
TS: Well, actually, more broadly than that. I see it all over the place.
GM: It is all over the place. If you come to a point where you think you’ve lived your life and you’re done and you can just play now, well, maybe that’s true, but find out what your play is for and what it’s going to do for the world. I mean, have a reason. If you’re going to spend the rest of your life playing, all right, there’s nothing wrong with that. What’s it going to do for you and for the rest of the people that you meet? In other words, if life is going to go on, how do we keep it alive? It has to be moving. Life has to move. If it gets stuck someplace, it dies. Life itself is a moving energy and energy has to move. When that moves, it moves with love, no matter what it is or who it loves. Can I tell a story here?
TS: Please.
GM: I had a friend, and he was a patient of mine, and he moved into dementia. We had him in a nice home where he was being taken care of and everything seemed OK. One day I took a little plant over to him and put it in his window and I said, “James, this little plant is your plant, but it’s going to need you to take care of him.” Now, he didn’t know what I was talking about that I could tell. I said, “It’s going to need water.” I talked to him a little bit about the plant. That’s about as much as I had done. I brought it, gave it to him, and left it with him.
I came back a week later and he met me at the door, and he said he was so excited. He said, “There’s magic here. There’s magic here.” I said, “Oh, well, yeah. Well, great. Where?” He takes me over to the air conditioner box and he points up to that and he says, “See? Push this button and the whole room gets cool and my plant likes it.”
He said, “You push that button and the room gets hot and my plant doesn’t like it.” It was just that little plant that gave him a connection to something that was living, that he had some control over keeping alive and keeping happy. I was in tears when I left. Because to me, that’s what life can and will do if we can see the places, any place that you see, there’s something that you can do that reaches out to somebody else.
It’s like, if I have a flashlight and I’m going down this dark path, so I can see as far as I could go and so on. As I walk down that path, if I see to the right or to the left a little light that’s flickering and then I add my light to that light, all of a sudden, the other light has a lot more light. It’s the ability to be looking not just for your own deep light, but what else is going on around you, how you’re connected with the world around you.
TS: In The Well-Lived Life, you actually cite various research studies that have been done that show how when we’re on purpose, it affects our health. What I’d love to know is how do you understand that? How is it? I think people are looking for, is it my diet? Is it the exercise? Is it how much sleep? Is it this or that? You really come out strong. It’s living with being turned on with juice, that from your view is such a huge factor in our health. How do you see that directly impacting our longevity and health?
GM: I think each one of us is personally in charge of how we use our juice and how we’re going to do with what is my own personal life force. My oldest son is a retired orthopedic surgeon and when he came through Phoenix, he was going down to Del Rio, Texas to start his practice. He said to me, “Mom, I’m going to go into the world with this amazing work that I have to do and I’m going to have people’s lives in my hands. I don’t know if I can handle that.”
I said to him, “Well, Carl, if you think you’re the one that does the healing, you have a right to be scared. But if you can realize that this amazing work that you’ve been trained to do, and believe me, if I have something that requires orthopedic surgery, I want a good orthopedic surgeon to do the work that he’s been trained to do. This is amazing stuff that you’ve learned and you know how to do.
You do it to the best of your ability and in the meantime, you’re in the process of contacting the physician within the patient who now takes what you’re saying and what you’re doing and allows it to happen, makes it real. That physician within that patient becomes your colleague. If that patient doesn’t understand and keeps asking you questions, keep answering them the best you can. You can’t make that patient do what you want him to do. You can explain it the best way you can. He may become a resistant patient, but whatever it is, that patient has within her whole being, the life force.
The life process that you now have connected with, with your techniques and the things that you know how to do. You bring about the ongoing healing process, but it’s her job to continue that.” It’s like I gave the little plant to James, but he had to keep watering it. It’s the importance of understanding that life has to move, it has to keep going, or it gets stuck, and that we’re not alone in this world. We’re all in it together.
TS: One of the teachings you offer that I thought was so helpful had to do with, “Look for the trickle around the dam.” Look for the trickle. As you’re talking here about movement, when someone feels stuck in some way, look for the trickle, that trickle of life force. Could you maybe tell me a story of someone you’ve worked with where from the outside it might look like, “Wow, this case, it’s over.” And you helped that person, as you did with the story of the plant, find the trickle for themselves that led them really back to health.
GM: I have a friend and a patient who just died a couple of months ago at the age of 98. No, wait a minute. Decades do this in my life now. She was 78. I had taken care of her for 50 years, with other physicians too. She had lived her whole life with one quarter of one kidney.
That’s not possible. That’s not possible. None of us physicians could understand how she was doing it. She always knew that within herself she would know if something that we suggested for her to do, to use, to work with, would work, she’d try it maybe or she wouldn’t. She was the one who was in charge of what her body did and how she worked with her body. To me, she’s a person who really constantly, her whole life, lived living medicine. She was in such a deep awareness of what it was that she was doing. She was always the person that people who had gone to a physician and were asking questions.
She had people come to her to have her give an opinion. Sometimes it was right along with the doctor and sometimes it was some other thing, but she knew and I totally trusted her. I trusted what she said. If she said to me, “Well, no,” I’d back off. If she said to me, “Yes,” I’d say, “Well, let’s do it this way.” It was something that was all through those years that—I took care of her for 50 years. We always had an ongoing process of her letting me know that she knew what was going on within herself.
I think one of the big things that we’ve done wrong in the field of medicine, is we’ve taken away from our patients their own power. We’ve let them know that this can’t be fixed if it wasn’t this or that or the other kind of physician or, well, I don’t think it’s a modality that is the important thing. I think it’s there, like orthopedic surgeon or whatever the surgery was.
The way with which it’s done, whether it’s done with love or not, is what’s important. If the surgeon and the patient can connect with that love flow, there’ll be healing that’ll happen. I guarantee it. It just is true. If there is no love, you can have the best technique knowledge in the world presented in the best way in the world, but it’s just empty sound. It’s just not going to go through.
Love is the key that connects. Love is the great healer in all aspects of life. It’s a thing that cures the baby’s boo-boo when the mama kisses the baby when it hurts. It’s the reality of love in action, trickling around the stream, the whole life stream that’s going along. It gets stuck sometimes, but there’s always some little part that’s still going. If we can look for that, instead of thinking, “Oh, well, I’m really stuck and things are done.” We stay stuck because we won’t be looking for the light.
TS: Now, in your own life, Dr. Gladys, it was very interesting to me to read that when it came to how you approached your own self-healing, that you’ve gone through two different bouts of cancer and you took very different approaches each time it happened. Can you share a little bit about that and how you were able to ascertain for yourself how to approach the situation?
GM: Because life was different both times. What was available to me when I was in my 30s in the way of help and what I was doing and what the work was doing and what I was looking for in the way of working with my community and helping them understand what it was that we were talking about was completely different from what I had when I was in my 90s. The technology had evolved to a point that was completely different.
Breast surgery when I was in my 30s was brutal. I used to dread scrubbing in on a breast surgery patient, a surgical procedure. Because what we did was brutal. It was just getting rid of that cancer was the big thing.
When I was faced with it when I was in my 90s, we had surgical techniques that the lump could be removed. The radiology, they could pinpoint where they were going to put the radiology instead of radiating the whole area. They could get it to the very cells that were there. It was a completely different procedure. I went on a 30-day fast when I did the first one. I couldn’t have done that when I was in my 90s.
I created what I could do, and it was a fun trip. Because as soon as I got the diagnosis, I came home and I told my lump that was in my breast what I was going to do. Because we worked out a procedure. I visualized a beautiful little hand-tooled suitcase. This is all in my visualizations. I told the lump that it was going to get into this suitcase in the future, that this is what it was going to do. It was going to get into this suitcase, but in the meantime, it was to call all other cancer cells within my body to come and join because they were going to go on a family trip. When they got them all together there, then I was going to send them on the trip. When the lump was removed, I said, “You’re gone. You’re on your own trip. Have your fun.”
It was that kind of a living process that I felt was important for me to make the connection with the actual cells within my body. Because what we’re learning about stem cells now, is that they are aware and they know what they are and what they’re supposed to do. To compare what I had available to me in my 30s and what I have available to me now, it’s hard to even think about how far we have advanced in those areas. However, the process is still the same. That inner process of knowing.
TS: That’s what I’m curious about, especially for someone who is perhaps listening and is not sure what medical pathway they should take with a difficult diagnosis they’ve received. Potentially the person is afraid, isn’t sure they’re thinking clearly about the matter. Trying to think clearly about the matter. Trying to find their true inner compass, how they move forward. What would you recommend?
GM: I’d recommend that they get as much information about the procedure or whatever it is that’s going to be done as they can, so they understand it, and then put it to their dreams. Put it to that inner aspect of themselves. Get some other information. Look a little farther into the deeper feelings that you have about the procedures, that you’re being told or see how you feel about it. If you have questions, ask them. If the provider can’t give you answers, start looking for them yourself.
In other words, don’t give up on something just because it’s been handed to you as this is the total answer. It may be, but it may be that for you, there’s another aspect that would add to it or something. You have a right to become part of the deciding factors which make these decisions. In fact, you have a responsibility to take it in and do with it what you feel is right to do with it.
TS: Now, in the example of the breast surgery that you had, and you talked about this very finely-created suitcase and how you spoke to the cancer cells lovingly to go on a journey. I think some people have an attitude more of like, “OK. We’re going to declare war against these invading cells.” Do you think if that kind of imagery works for someone that, that’s valid, or no?
GM: I think it’s limited. I think that, that’s where conventional medicine has gotten stuck. See, I went to medical school just as World War II started. I started in September and the war started in December. All we were taught was about the killing. We were at war. We were at war, specific things. Medicine got stuck in that, too. Medicine, the whole field of medicine believes that its job is to get rid of disease and pain. I don’t see it that way.
In fact, I was not seeing it that way during my medical school, enough that I got sent to the psychiatrist twice because my thinking was wrong. The dean felt that if I was going to stay in medicine, I had to change my thinking. The way I had watched my parents work with healing in the jungles of North India with very little in the way of technology, but a whole world in the way of love. It was a different world that I was coming into.
I knew, I knew in my very gut, that love was the important issue here. That if I loved my patients, I could get to aspects of their healing process that was different. Now, what we have done is really gotten to the point where we people don’t think we can do anything for ourselves. Like, the place that really, I worry a lot about and I’m very concerned about is birthing.
When I was in medical school, we did what we called twilight sleep. In fact, my first two sons were born with this. It was a way of totally anesthetizing the mother so that she was gone. It was 24 hours after my sons were born that I knew I had a boy. We were so totally anesthetized that there was no way we could birth our babies. We couldn’t push them out. We delivered them with forceps.
After I began to understand some things, I had spent a number of years judging myself for why I did that. On the other hand, at that time, it was the only way that that baby could get out is with the help of the doctor and the forceps. I was good at it. I could help a mother with baby with an after-coming head deliver properly. We did our work and we did it well. In the process of doing that, what we have done has been to take away from our feminine self, our basic human power to do what we can do as women.
I’m trying hard to say that I didn’t help deliver a baby. We deliver pizza, we deliver speeches. We don’t deliver babies. Our job is to help mothers birth their babies. I think that it’s a huge shift that we need to reclaim. It doesn’t mean that I don’t have a part in the birthing process. I’m there to help her with the birthing, but I’m not doing the birthing. Each mother herself has this in her, the power to do the birthing. That’s not only her right, it’s her glory. It’s what women do best, is to birth babies.
In the scheme of life’s process, I think there are things which actually in our ignorance, we have judged things so that we think we, as physicians, that we have to take charge of doing this, and then it’s our responsibility. I think, this is just my idea, that when God, whatever God is to whoever you are, when he created the Earth, he created the Earth and it was beautiful. Everything was lovely and so on. Then he created the human being.
He said to us, “You’re the only living thing on this earth that has free will and choice. You humans, you human people are the only things that have free will and choice. Now, I turn over to you the whole process of taking care of that. I give you dominion over the earth.” We thought he said dominance. We thought, “Oh, yeah. Goody, goody. We can do anything we want to with all this earth stuff.”
We’ve literally taken over the Earth’s juices and betrayed her. I think what people are looking for in the way of healing that I’m hearing, and the aspect that I understand, is that we’re re-reaching for our true humanity. It’s like E.T., he wanted to go home. It’s that inner core within us that is really saying, “I’m a human being. I have this amazing power that nothing else on Earth has.” With that power, it’s to take care of, not to take and do with.
TS: Sure. Let me ask you a question, Dr. Gladys, when it comes to bringing love to ourselves, to ourselves, to our body that might be suffering from an illness, I’ve seen situations where people that I know, with all sincerity, apply all the love they have, and it doesn’t stop the disease process. The disease marches on and they die. From the outside, you could say, “That didn’t work.” I’m curious what your view is of that. In your case, in your 90s, you’ve had remarkable results from your own work with your own life force and body, but it’s not always like that.
GM: Well, I still don’t. I have trouble with my eyes. I can’t see well at all. There’s trouble with my eyesight, but there’s nothing wrong with my insight. The point being that, that’s true. I love working with patients who have chronic illnesses that they’ll never get rid of. There are thousands and thousands of people who have chronic illnesses. Franklin Delano Roosevelt had post-polio syndrome. Did it stop him? No.
See, I think everything in life is a teacher. I think that some of us have disease processes, which we’ll never get over, but what is that trying to teach us? I was born with dyslexia. I couldn’t read and write. I had to repeat first grade and all that stuff. Still, I’ve learned how to read. I had to get to medical school. I don’t know how I did it. One time there were 10 of us doctors sitting around a table, holistic doctors, American Holistic Medical Association, and we realized of the 10 of us, six of us were dyslexic. Well, you see, we looked at ourselves and we said, “How did you learn to read?” I said, “I really don’t know, but I did.”
What we realized, was that the reason we started alternative medicine was there’s an alternative way of not only learning to read, but how we were looking at medicine. It’s that ability to see that if we’re stuck someplace, along the line, there is a way out. However, sometimes our soul is saying to us, “No, this place that you need to understand is here for a reason.” What’s the reason? What is it that is behind the whole process?
I don’t know what Roosevelt learned from his disease. I don’t know what this friend of mine that had one-quarter of one kidney learned from her disease. I know she learned how to live. I know she lived to be 79 years old, and had a baby and lived her life, and all of that. It’s not that you have to get rid of the disease, I think the process is finding what the disease is telling us, whether it’s one that we could get over quickly or whether it’s one that has deep, deep lessons that we need to learn.
TS: You’ve talked about how you believe the greatest medicine is love.
GM: That is true.
TS: You mentioned seeing your parents operate as physicians. Can you tell us more about your parents, introduce them to us and how they impacted you, their work you mentioned in India?
GM: Well, my dad was a Kansas farmer, but he always wanted to be a doctor. He had that within him. His father was in the Spanish-American War and came home injured. My dad was the oldest son and had to stay there until his brother was old enough to take over the farm and help the mother and so on. When that happened, he got an opportunity to go to medical school in Chicago.
When he went to get on the train, he put his suitcase up into the train, but he did something to his back. He was walking down the aisle in the train limping, and there was a man sitting there in one of the benches who said to him, “What’s the problem?” My dad said, “I hurt my back when I was putting my suitcase.”
He said, “Well, we’re going through Kirksville, Missouri.” Now, this is 1911. It would be about that time. “Going through Kirksville, Missouri, and there’s a doctor there who started a new medical school. His name is A.T. Still. I suggest that you get off and go. I think he might help you.” My dad did. A.T. Still helped him. He went to school there and got his degree in osteopathy.
My mother had a similar experience where she got into medical school, and they then with the information and the technology that they got from A.T. Still—and then my dad took a whole year in ophthalmology on top of that—went to India as medical missionaries. I grew up there. My mother went into labor with me at the Taj Mahal. I think she must’ve been a little drama queen or something, because I love the idea that she went into labor with me at the Taj Mahal.
Anyway, we lived in the villages of North India. My parents went from one village to the next, to the next, with their medical work and took this healing with them that had very little in the way of technology, but trunk full of love. No matter what the patient was, how dirty they were or how sick they were or what, my parents treated them with love. It was that whole aspect that I saw working, as I was growing up. It’s what I have known right from the start, is the essence of what healing is all about.
TS: You write in your book, The Well-Lived Life, “Our life force is activated by love.” And I wrote that sentence down, because I can imagine someone’s listening to us. “Yeah, healing and love, whatever. What’s the mechanism? How does it work?” Yet, our life force is activated by love. I think people can relate to that. You go further to talk about how if we’re in a situation where we’re feeling afraid that if we can activate our love, that activates our love force. Can you share with me in your own life a situation where you felt afraid and chose to invest instead in love and how that activated your life force?
GM: Oh, my. It’s happened so many times. The biggest fear that I had was when Bill, my husband, asked for a divorce. We had amazing life, and I was really happy with it and all. Then all of a sudden, he asked for a divorce.
TS: This is after 46 years together?
GM: Six children and the A.R.E. Clinic and the holistic movement. All the things that we had done together, all of a sudden, they were just thrown into the universe. I really didn’t know what I was going to do. I was floundering. Fortunately, my youngest daughter was just getting into medicine and had started with us at the clinic before Bill asked. So we started our own practice. Fortunately, I had something that I had to do. My core was just shattered.
At this one point, I was going from my office to my home in Casa Grande. It was an hour’s drive, and I was screaming. I was screaming at the universe. I was screaming, “You don’t know how hard it is to live here. You just don’t understand.” It was just awful. I was driving and I was angry and I was scared and hurt and totally damaged. I felt so fragile.
Then all of a sudden, I pulled my car off to the side of the road because in my mind, there was this verse, “This is the day the Lord has made. Let us rejoice and be glad in it.” I sat in that car and I thought, “OK, your name is Gladys. Be glad. Be glad.” Then I realized, “OK, I can do something here.” I went home and I changed my license plate to BE GLAD so that every time I got into my car, I could say to myself I was going to be glad. And in town, I had that same license plate until I stopped my practice. Anybody who came up behind me was being faced with a license plate that said, be glad.
In other words, what I was able to do was to get hold of that trickle of life force that was going down the stream and just, I was going to nothingness. It was just total nothingness, but it wasn’t nothingness. It was that little bit of knowing that I could even hear within my own soul the verse that I had obviously learned when I was a kid. It came to me with the two words, be glad.
That turned me. I realized that I needed to change from this awful fear that was consuming me and really hurting me, yes, and put it into something that I could actually see happen. And so if we can take the slightest little thing and hang onto it, something that has life in it, some words, some child, some plant, some dogs, some patient. Something that is a living force that you can reach back and forth from so that you can feed each other from this. Then you are released, not released, then you can move through the fear into the whole love process. The fear can just sit up on the shelf and feel bad for itself.
TS: All right. But Dr. Gladys, let’s address that person who’s listening right now who’s in the scream in their own life. They’re in the outrage about something, or they’re listening to this and they’re like, “God, I don’t know how to do this without it feeling phony. It would feel phony, be glad, or find the lesson.” Like, “No, I’m upset. I don’t know how to make that move in a genuine way.” What would you recommend?
GM: Keep trying. Keep trying, because just because you can’t find it at that moment, doesn’t mean that it’s not there. One of the things I learned from my dad, I was quite young and I don’t know what I was doing, but I remember I said, “Well, I quit.” He was standing there and he looked at me. He said, “Are you a quitter?” I can see those black eyes looking at me and saying, “Are you a quitter?” That was as bad as saying, “Are you a liar?” I said, “Oh, no, no, no. I’m not a quitter.”
I went back to doing whatever it was that I was working with. It was being able to connect the pieces so the jigsaw puzzle is whole. The fact that when you’re in that awful space of the fear is so great, you feel so alone. You feel like, “Well, nobody else understands how bad it is. My pain is worse than your pain.” All of that kind of stuff. Which is true, because it’s our personal stuff.
That doesn’t mean that we can’t find, deep within ourselves and within the world around us, something that will say, be glad. Something that had to say to me, be glad. It was that inner knowing and hearing it that grabbed me. If we’re not looking for it, we’ll never see it. If we’re not listening for it, we’ll never hear it. If we don’t care, if we want to stay stuck, and the fear is so great that we feel that we absolutely terribly possibly cannot get out of it, we’ll stay there. If we can just grab hold of some glimmering of something that we can say is real or that makes sense to us. That’s why I came up with these five Ls that I talk about.
The first L is life. If without life, nothing else comes. We have to be alive. But life by itself can’t do anything. It’s like the seed in the pyramid. It’s there for 5,000 years and it’s never been able to do anything. It got all the energy of the universe within its shell, but it can’t do anything.
Until love, in the form of water and sunlight and so on, breaks the shell and then the two become one. At which point life starts, life starts to grow. It’s like the sperm and the ovum. By themselves, they really don’t amount to much. Together, they become a person. They don’t become a person until they grow into that.
Then the third L is laughter. Laughter without love is cruel. It’s mean. It takes families apart. Laughter with love is joy and happiness.
The fourth L is labor. Labor without love is drudgery. “Oh, man, I got to go to work. Too many diapers.” Whatever it is. It’s just too much. It’s just too hard. Labor with love is bliss. You do the diapers because you love the baby. You sing because you sing. You do this work that you created because it makes your heart glow. It’s what brings bliss to us. The painter paints. The singer sings. The doctor works. Because it’s that inner juice that’s there, it’s our bliss.
The fifth one is listening. Listening without love is empty sound. You can try to teach somebody something, and if they’re not listening, they’re not going to hear it. It’s just empty sound, clanging gong. Listening with love is understanding. It’s that taking it in and making sure that you understand what it is that you’re listening for. For me, I was looking for some kind of a visual way in which I could put this concept in place. These five Ls have helped me with that.
TS: Beautiful teaching, Dr. Gladys. Now, I have two final questions for you. I pulled this quote from The Well-Lived Life, “A belief in reincarnation guides much of what I do on Earth as a doctor, mother, grandmother, and human being.” I thought to myself, “Huh, I wonder how this conviction about reincarnation has informed how you approach life.”
GM: Well, my parents really didn’t like that when Bill and I started talking about it, because they had been preaching against it in India, and really thought it was the wrong thing. We had our family issues on that. We had gotten into the Edgar Cayce readings, which is a whole new page of history, which explained it in a way that actually brought some reason into why things happened. Why a person has an illness that they can’t get rid of. Then they come back probably, and they may still have aspects of that illness because they really haven’t gotten the whole lesson that goes with that illness.
It’s that life is a continuum, and we meet the people that we meet. We live the ways that we do. I don’t think it’s something that’s essential. It was Jesus who helped me bring my voice back when I had a dream with him up in the tree. I’m still a committed Christian to the work that I’m doing. Then my husband talked to my dad one time and said, “Well, Jesus said that John the Baptist was Elijah.” There are statements in the Bible that you can pick and find that it can validate the teachings. It’s what works for you, if it doesn’t work for you.
TS: How has it impacted you? How has it changed how you look at? That’s what I’m trying to understand is, for people who are like, “Hmm, I’m not sure.” How has it impacted you?
GM: It gives me understanding about why some people can’t hang onto their illnesses. and why certain illnesses are like karmic illnesses. And why, for me in my life, and in the people that have been born into my family have been, in fact, I can trace in my own awareness things that I believe I was. Not things, but people. That I learned when I was in a lifetime such and such and such and such.
TS: Can you share some of that with us, Dr. Gladys?
GM: No, I don’t want to.
TS: OK. That’s fine.
GM: It’s personal.
TS: That’s fine. I respect that. Totally.
GM: It’s not gospel. I don’t preach it, but it makes sense to me. For me, I have to understand stuff in order to work with it. That’s why I came up with the five Ls and the “be glad” and all this kind of stuff. There are things that have helped me learn the lessons, which I don’t think I’m done learning yet. I came up with something just the other day that gave me a whole new look on certain aspects of my life.
The beauty of it is when you’re looking for it, you find it. If you’re not looking for it, you’ll never find it. If you’re always looking over your shoulder for the bad stuff that happened to you, it’s going to keep on. If you look up for the light, look towards, it’ll just be there.
TS: Now, you’re going to turn 103 later this year. I read that, even at this age, you have a 10-year plan, that you develop a 10-year plan for your life. I thought to myself, “Really?” God, I think a lot of people, they’re just planning their funeral at that point. They’re not making a 10-year life plan. Tell me about that.
GM: I envision a village for living medicine, any place on this earth where people want to do it. It’s a village where when a person steps on the land, the healing starts. It’s a place where like-minded people who believe in life and love and the healing aspect of life and love become part of the very essence of the place. That it pays attention to Mother Earth and how she’s working with this. It’s something that is a living process. I have a little sketch that I have that I envision.
It can happen where any persons, group of people who have the same loving, living, laughing, hopeful future that they work towards are gathered together. Hopefully, it’ll start with a loving birth center where the very conception and the whole birthing process is one where the baby enters a world of love, not a world of fear. It’s not cold, fear that the baby comes into a world with.
It comes into a world where love and concern are the things that welcome the baby. I remember, I had a family up in the hospital here in Phoenix one time. The mother had five other children and she wanted them in the birthing room when the baby was born. When the baby was born, they simultaneously began singing Happy Birthday, and the nurses and I were all in tears. It was that kind of an overpowering feeling of love and welcoming. Here, this baby comes out and he’s being welcomed by all of this loving birth.
In other words, having that kind of thing manifest spontaneously in a place where that’s where it grows. A village for living medicine, and it can be any place in this earth where people of like mind gather together, and really understand the depth to which we can reach, and the height to which we can grow, and become living people in this whole process.
TS: Dr. Gladys, what if someone says, “God, 10 years from now? What are the odds that you’re going to be alive to see that? Really, is it realistic to have a 10-year vision at your age?” Do you not even think that way? Like, “I’m not going to think that way.”
GM: What difference is it going to make? I’ll live as long as I need to, and then I’ll make the transition. Who knows what I’ll do next? My soul isn’t going anyplace. My soul is a living thing, and so it’ll stay as long as it needs to.
TS: I’ve been speaking with Dr. Gladys McGarey. At age 102, she’s released a new book. It’s called The Well-Lived Life: A 102-Year-Old Doctor’s Six Secrets to Health and Happiness.
And if you’d like to watch Insights at the Edge on video and participate in the after-show Q&A session with our guests, come join us on Sounds True One, a new membership community featuring award-winning original shows, live classes, community learning, guided meditations and more with the leading wisdom teachers of our time. Use promo code PODCAST to get your first month free. You can learn more at Join.SoundsTrue.com. Sounds True, waking up the world.
