Bonus Episode: The Well Lived Life with Gladys McGarey, MD
2023 has been a doozy, let’s end it on an inspiring note.
First and foremost, thank you so much for listening to Wellness in the Wilderness this year. We rang in 2023 in the middle of our pilot season and decided to continue the conversation throughout the year. In the middle of recording and producing the #5years5women mini-season, I stumbled across a book called “The Well Lived Life” written by Dr. Gladys McGarey, MD and it was one of the most affirming reads I’ve read in my entire life.
For the past seven years, I’ve been sharing my story and finding the language to articulate what happened to me, how I healed from it, and how my experiences can help other folks along the way. Reading this book, I was aggressively nodding, occasionally fist-pumping, and definitely resonating with Dr. Gladys’s six secrets for a well-lived life. Through her writing, I found a kindred spirit and I knew I needed to chat with her.
This podcast episode was recorded during our summer season in Sequoia National Park in the middle of a super bloom and my allergies were trying to dominate the conversation. Big shout out to Barry for the heavy editing lift on this one!
ABOUT OUR GUEST:
Gladys McGarey began her medical practice at a time when women couldn’t even own their own bank accounts. Over the past sixty years, she has pioneered a new way of thinking about disease and health that has transformed the way we imagine health care and self-care around the world. The cofounder of the American Holistic Medical Association, Dr. McGarey has mentored everyone from Dr. Mark Hyman to Dr. Edith Eger and has helped hundreds of patients live happier and healthier lives. In a voice that is both practical and inspiring, Dr. McGarey shares her own extraordinary stories and eternal wisdom from her early childhood in India and chance encounter with Mahatma Gandhi to her life as a physician and a mother of six children, to her survival of both heartbreak and illness. And she doesn’t just look backward, she looks forward. At 102, Dr. McGarey has a ten-year plan and an eye on a healthier and more joyful future for all.
IN THIS EPISODE:
Dr. McGarey shares her six actionable secrets to enjoying a a life that is long, happy, and purpose-driven.
She teaches you how to spend your energy wildly in order to embrace your life fully and feel motivated every day.
You’ll learn that you are here for a reason, and how to find the “juice” that helps you stay grounded in your life’s purpose.
She shows you how to move—spiritually, mentally, and physically—helping you let go of trauma and other roadblocks, and how to discover the deep learning that comes from pain and setbacks.
Orienting you in the love she considers the most powerful medicine, she’ll show you that you are not alone, and guide you on how to build a community that’s meaningful to you.
CONNECT WITH DR. GLADYS
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LISTEN HERE:
SHOW SPONSORED BY:
Foreword by Dr. Gladys McGarey
After this conversation with Dr. Gladys, I asked her if she’d write the foreword for my next book, Hiking Your Feelings: Blazing a Trail to Self-Love and she agreed! So, if you’re looking to make some changes to your life in 2024 and are ready for a refreshing perspective on what a well-lived life looks like, I highly recommend picking up a copy of her book or pre-ordering the new paperback version. When you read it and are fired up about finding your path to your version of a well-lived life, pre-order Hiking Your Feelings too! In each chapter of the book, we offer prompts for reflection, rituals, and practical advice to help you navigate the Trail of Life through a mindful hiking practice.
SHOW TRANSCRIPT:
Please note, we use Otter.ai to transcribe episodes and while the technology is impressive, it’s not completely accurate. Please excuse any missed words, nonsensical sentences, and missed interpretations of foreign language below:
Announcer 00:04
Welcome to Wellness in the Wilderness. Come with us on the trail of life as we inspire you to take a step outdoors to disconnect from the distractions and reconnect with yourself. Sydney Williams and her guests will motivate you to get active and get well. Now, here's Sydney.
Sydney Williams 00:22
All right, everybody. Welcome to Wellness in the Wilderness. I'm your host Sydney Williams, author and founder of Hiking My Feelings and today we are recording in Sequoia National Park ancestral lands of the Western Mono, Tübatulabal, Yokut ,Paiute and Western Shoshone people. In this mini season sponsored by Sawyer Products, we are celebrating five years of Hiking My Feelings by sharing conversations with five women who have been incredibly inspirational or instrumental in this journey so far. Now, if you've been listening, then you know I've already had those five conversations and I decided to add a bonus because I recently read an incredible book. And I just have to share this author's story with you. And I've literally never felt so validated in my life. So upon reading the most recent book from today's guest, I couldn't help but add this episode to the mini season because in the short time that I've been aware of her work, this has just been a really affirming journey for me. So in 1978, Dr. Gladys McGarey co founded the American Holistic Medical Association with the goal of bringing a holistic understanding one that unites mind, body and spirit to modern western medicine. Informed by this philosophy, her book, The Well Lived Life flips our understanding. So we asked not how to live a life, but instead how to turn toward the life that's within us. From encounters with Mahatma Gandhi to overcoming bias against women physicians amid raising six children. Dr. Gladys has incredible stories to share and six profound principles for living, which we will get into today. And I should also note that she is 102 and one half years old, as I recently heard the distinction on her recent interview with the mind body green podcast, Dr. Gladys, welcome to the show. How are you today?
Dr. Gladys 02:00
I'm fine, thank you.
Sydney Williams 02:03
Oh, it's such a treat to have you here and I the book that you wrote, and Well Lived Life. I just, as we were saying, before we started recording. This has been one of the most validating and affirming reads, I've had the pleasure of enjoying in my now 38 years. So I guess to start us off, I'd love to know, let's bring it let's get grounded in the present here. I'm 38 You're 102 and a half. Where were you when you were in your late 30s? And what did you care about what was top of mind and on your heart at that time?
Dr. Gladys 02:35
Oh, man. I was in Wellsville, Ohio. And I had, well, Bill was back called back into the service. So I had the whole town of 9000 people basically as patients of mine, and I had four little kids at home. And so I just was kind of busy.
Sydney Williams 03:07
One might say that many children at home is busy enough, let alone a town of 9,000 relying on you for their care. Um, thank you for sharing that. And one of the stories that I found interesting and where I kind of like to start our conversation today. This show is called Wellness in the Wilderness. It's rooted in my belief that we are all deeply disconnected, unfortunately, from the planet from which we came. And I'm hoping that we can get into a little bit of that with you today. And one of the stories from your book, and from some other interviews that I've listened to, you were sharing about how you grew up in a family where your parents were medical missionaries. You grew up in the jungles of India. Now you live in Arizona, where you've mentioned the springtime is just spectacular. And I gotta agree. The desert is full of life. So, for you personally, Dr. Gladys, have you had any experiences of healing in nature or any of those moments where you're like, Yep, this is what live in life is all about?
Dr. Gladys 04:10
Oh, absolutely. Before I started school, we lived in my parents took their work out to the jungles of North India. And so I ran around in the villages in the jungle with the Indian children. And they kept rubbing my arms to see if the white color would come off. But it was but we got to go places into the villages because we were kids. And it was so I thought my life was bliss. I totally loved every part of it. And so, you know, we we my parents My dad and my brothers were actually good hunters. But that not that wasn't because they were hunting for game. They were protecting the people that I have a tiger on the wall on one wall, and a skin. Skin. A leopard skin on the on the other wall, my dad shot the tiger because she was marauding a whole village and the village people had nothing to to do, they had no way of protecting themselves. And when I was 15, I shot the leopard, because she was doing something in different different place. And it was my job before I left for college, to have done something like this. So I have the leopard, but it was it was a way in which to understand that no matter how big or how small, a not another living aspect of my childhood was it was important. Like, when can I just start talking? Okay? When my second brother was eight months old, and my oldest brother was two, my parents were in a certain part of the jungle where it was, it was pretty wild. Well, it was jungle, it was wild. And my parents took there. In the evenings, they had a lantern lecture that they took into the village and showed lantern pictures, which were just magic for the village people that never seen anything like that they couldn't figure out how those pictures were there. You know, they would look at the back of the box and all. So it was just a huge thing. But it was one way in which my parents could get their message to the people. Well, this one night this is before I was born. They were in the they had gone into the village and our Ayah who was like another mother for us. She you know what? Wonderful Angel people who take care of children whose mothers are doing other things. I they've saved my life many times. But anyway, our Ayah had put that my brother's too bad. My older brother was in the top bunk and my younger brothers was in the bottom bunk. And she fell asleep at the end of my mother's bed, which is just right next to the bunk beds. And all of a sudden she was awakened. And she turned around to see a she wolf with her mouth open above my brother's head, just ready to pick him up and carry him out. Well, she screamed, and she reached for the Topis other hats that were on and began throwing them. And the dogs came running. And the wolf dropped my brother and went out the back of the tent. And so when we can't when my parents came back to camp, that everything was in an uproar, and they were telling my parents what had happened. And my mother, who was five foot one, I mean, she just wasn't a very big person. She says to my dad, well, that thing's been coming in here, the last two nights. And he says, What? Why didn't you say anything? She said, Because you wouldnt believe me. He says, What do you do? He says, maybe I will. That thing wasn't going to bother my baby. I picked up a pillow and I shoved it off the back of the tent. I mean, this is a she Wolf. Who in India, you know, the Romulus and Remus stories these stories about children being taken by the wolves and raised they are real because in India repeatedly drunk people have a write a story about some child who was found in the jungles you know, and here was my second brother, who was the you know, this was the what happens if the if she wolf loses her babies. She goes looking for something to supplement that. And humans are the easiest to get somebody something from so Oh, my brother Carl, just about let you know that just bad happened to him. He, he go, Well, I wont even, He is an amazing person for all he's done. But the reality of the nearness of nature and where we were living didn't stop with him. Because when I was about two, I think, no, no, I was a little older than I was about four. A rat came into the tent and chewed my ear. And I began crying, and they saw the blood on the pillow, and the footprints from the rat. And as it was leaving, and my dad shot at it, it was leaving. So you know, we were that close to what was going on, in the not just the lives of the village people, but our lives as they were tied in with the village people, it was an amazing time to be alive.
Sydney Williams 11:12
That is, that is just fascinating. So your brother was literally almost raised by wolves, that's fine. You, you live in community where a rat comes and gives you a little kiss on your ear, the nighttime. So as you think back over your life from when you were younger, and four and getting your ear chewed on by a rat in a jungle in a tent. When I think about my personal journey, healing through nature, I was born in 1985. Like the internet wasn't really a thing yet, but I grew up I'm like, one of the last generations of people that grew up with a childhood that wasn't documented on the internet. But in like college years, I started getting on like Facebook, and all the different social media things. So I have this like pre pre internet and post internet thought process. And what I'm curious about Dr. Gladys is if you think about, from the time that you were living in the jungles in India, to present day and all the patients you've seen, and all the technological advances that we've experienced, and everything that's changed. Have you seen in your patients this, like, have there been any trends where you've noticed, like, oh, society is doing this, and we're getting further and further and further removed from nature, because we I mean, I heard a statistic. Recently, the average American present day spends about 90% of their life indoors, especially pre pandemic, because if you think about it, like we wake up in a house, we get on a bus, or we drive our car to our office, where we stay inside, maybe we walk outside from our car to our office, but then we go back to the grocery store or the gym, and everything's indoors. So over the course of your life, in your career, have you seen like this rise of technology? And has there been like a corresponding rise in discontent or mental health issues or physical health issues that you think could be attributed to our separation from nature? Because that's been true for me, but I'm a case study of one and I'm not a doctor. So I'm curious. Has that been? So have you seen anything like that, where we've just been further and further separated from nature as a society, and maybe it's in the different communities you've lived? Where, in India, that wasn't as much of an issue as it is here in America? Any thoughts about that?
Dr. Gladys 13:28
Oh, absolutely. You know, with that retching on my ear. When my daughters wanted their ears pierced, I wouldn't do it. I said, so they had to go to college, and have their roommates pierce their ears, because I said, No, I had a rat chew on mine. You know, it's very personal when something like that happens. But the reality is that we need to be connected to the outside we see I have this concept that when God whoever, whatever God is to whoever, when He created us as human beings, he he said to us, Look, I've I've created this earth, it's it's beautiful. It's all in an order and everything. I now and you as the only beings who can choose and have free will I now give you dominion over the earth. And we in our arrogance, decided that was dominance. And so we thought, okay, yeah, boy, we got all this we can do anything we want to to and we've done that. So now I am delighted that People are beginning to not, Well, there are a lot of people that are beginning to really see that Mother Earth is trying to tell us something and say, you guys, you really have messed up. And, and I want to show you have strong I am. You know, like, I tell my daughters, I'm not going to pierce your ears, because this happened to me. But we have this inner connection with all of nature. And all of life. And life can't do anything, until love activates it. And so it's that process of ongoing life, love and experiences that we have, which we either use and work with, or toss out someplace.
Sydney Williams 15:58
i, Yes, thank you for bringing that up. I love that distinction. When they said dominion, we're like, Yeah, let's extract all the resources, capitalism, here we come, let's tear up this planet. And I was thinking so there's a really great documentary series. It's on Netflix, I believe it's called The Day the Earth changed or The Day the Earth healed or something. It's narrated by David Attenborough. And it talks about the year of the pandemic and how all these different landscapes, like healed themselves, like the air became cleaner. When we stopped doing shipping up near Alaska, the whales, like the mother whales were able to leave their calves in a bay, which they hadn't felt safe to do since modern shipping. And they were just like out there being mama whales doing all the hunting. And while they're corralling all these fish than the seagulls are stoked, because now there's all these like fish that they can go feed on. And it really demonstrated to me how everything is so interconnected. Like, in the absence of human noise and human destruction, essentially, in their waterways, these whales were able to sing their songs and be heard for miles further than they had in the last however many decades. And it kind of showed me like, okay, so if the whales are here to haunt, and they want their fish, but then the seagulls also benefit from that. And when the seagulls benefit from that, then they go, and they poop somewhere, and that nourishes something, it got me thinking, like, what is the purpose of a human on planet Earth in an ecosystem? Is that something that you've given thought to? Because like, I can't help but wonder, like, what are we actually here for? And I think I know where you might go with it. And I think I know where I might go with it. But like, why are we here? And how have we gotten that wrong?
Dr. Gladys 17:36
Well, we are here to protect the Earth and take care of it. That's what Dominion means, you know, that's what we're here to do. But we're also here to protect each other as, so it's not just the earth around us and the under us and, and the creatures on it, but also each other. It's like, I have this friend who was he really friend a really good man, but then dementia set in and we I, we had a nice home where he had a nice room. And but he just, you know, he just wasn't connecting with anything. So I bought him a little plant. And I told him this flat, put it in his window. And I said, Now, James, you take care of this, you water it, this, you take care of it. And he kind of so but I repeated it several times. And I showed him how to do it. And then I left and a week later, I came back to check on him. And he's he met me at the door. So excited. He said, There's magic in this room. There's magic in this room. And I said oh, where? so he takes me up to the air conditioning box on the on the wall. And he says look at this, look at this. If I push this button, my fat and it makes it a room hot. My plant doesn't like it. But if I push this button, it gets all cool and my plant likes it. All of a sudden, this man who for about five years, had sort of moved from the wonderful guy that he was that I knew him as into somebody who had reconnected because of a plant in the window. Now, if we can understand that that's That's the way it works. You know, you reach out, you see somebody who just needs a little help. It doesn't take much sometimes, to do that, I kind of look at it like, I've got a flashlight, it's a good flashlight that I've gotten my hand, and I'm walking a dark night. And I can see as far as that flashlight lets me see, that's as far as I can go with it. Because it travels so. But as I'm walking on there, if I'm paying attention, I can see sometimes a little flicker of light over here, not much. But if I put my light over on that, that light flashes up, and all of a sudden, that little flicker becomes something that's big and understandable. So it's a matter of really understanding that we as humans, are so interconnected, not just with people, but with the earth, that it's just a well, life is awesome.
Sydney Williams 21:21
I will agree. And I will say I think life has gotten more awesome, since I've discovered that. And in my trail of life. That's the metaphor I use with our programming and how we frame up self reflection and self awareness and then therefore self love. I've come across a lot of things, and some of them have been hard, and some of them have been absolutely beautiful. But I think it's in the unlearning of this society and the unlearning of my parents beliefs. And you know, we're all everybody out there, I truly believe we're all doing the best we can with what we got some of us got a little bit more to do good with. But it's interesting to me how at every step along the way, especially. So a couple weeks ago, we moved into Sequoia National Park, where we're looking over a historic campground that's been used from indigenous people during summer camps up in the mountains to escape the heat in the foothills to the Boy Scouts of America back in the day built this place out as a prototype for all of their future campgrounds. It was an artist colony. And now it's home to the Vlunteers in Parks program. And since we've been in there, and we've been just living amongst the trees and drinking the water that comes from the ground, or from the creek, and foraging for mushrooms, and just enjoying waiting for the berries to come because I'm so excited to eat the berries, like there's something about settling into the rhythm of nature that has really helped regulate my nervous system. And as somebody who has worked in stressful careers, I used to work in communications for corporate America, I used to work in Marketing, and it was all very busy and very connected to the internet. And very indoors, the more I've kind of spread out from that, the more that I can feel exactly what you're talking about, like I I have not been suffering from dementia for the past five years. But in a way I think I have been and I think all of us are not maybe diagnoseable. But in the like sheer essence of what it means to be a human and to be connected to others. I think we're all kind of walking around in a little bit of a coma. And the more that I connect with these things, like the more that that story about that man, finding the magic in that plant in his window resonates. And I think that that's a really beautiful example of how simple it can be, to start to reconnect to nature to each other, and to ourselves. And that's something that I really appreciate about your work is your talk about self love, and how love is the greatest medicine and the greatest healer. And it's I'm of the firm belief. And I again, I'm a case study of one and we host events and we host these programs. So we're starting to see some people come through and have the same experience I had. But I I really truly believe that the more that we can get curious about the things that have happened on our trail of life, the good, the bad, the ugly, the beautiful, the less we judge ourselves for those things that have happened and the things that we've experienced. And then on the tail end of that, like that kind of translates into less judgement for each other. And for people that are different and we start to have when we have a deeper understanding of self, we have a deeper understanding of each other. Has that been something that has shown up in your work? I know that you you are you really from the stories that you've shared in your book and the other interviews I've listened to it sounds like each individual patient is its own ecosystem and you really get into like who these people are, what they've been through where they're going and tailor their treatment and that way Is that? Is that true? And and how have you been able, I guess, in a sense, have you been prescribing self love over the years? And how has that worked out?
Dr. Gladys
Let me answer that a couple of different ways. I don't know how many patients I've had, who've said, told me their story and say something like, oh, but you wouldn't understand because you've always had it so easy. And my answer to that was Honey, if you only knew, you know, it's that kind of a reality, and to see our pain as and whatever difficulties we have, as harder than anybody else's in the world. And as a matter of fact, that's true. You know, it's mine is mine. And it's the pain and the things that I have had to learn are my issues that they're not necessarily anybody else's. But my I'm the one that has to take care of those things. So it's the reality of who we, as individuals see ourselves are as, and what and what's going on within our whole being, including, let me tell you, I pay attention to, and I have my patients pay attention to their dreams. So I had this one dream. Well, I woke up because of a huge crash. And the crash was it just woke me up. And I realized that I was in the high Himalayas in the valley. And on the right hand side, so I was standing in this valley. On the right hand side, there was a young woman splayed out on the ground, just barely breathing. And on the left hand side, there was a huge man dressed in armor, splayed out on the ground, brilliant, just barely breathing. And I looked at them and the voice came in and my however said, these two aspects of human life, have been fighting each other for eons, like your fists together, it's time they put their put their fingers together, and began to work together. And I woke up completely. And I realized, the woman was on the right hand side, which is the masculine, and the man was on the left hand side, which is the feminine, and we've gotten our identities, so completely confused, and so on, that we don't know what it is we're supposed to be doing of what what is working or anything. It's just, we're just trying to kill each other. And so I had a friend in Virginia Beach, Rosalie Gearheart, and she is very psychic. And so So I said, you know, I had just had this dream, we talked about it. And she said, well, and we were had been talking about manifestation. And she says, Well, I have another word. And that is femifestation. And femifestation, and manifestation have to work together. Because that's just the way it is. Manifestation is like Jacob's Ladder, you get a degree, you do the work there, then you do something else and you buy a house, then you, you know, you manifest on this level, you're supposed to manifest on this level. That's what your masculine energy is all about. However, the other part of that is the femifestation, which is like a spiral. And the spiral, you can meet on the second level of the spiral. And know, what score I mean, on the fifth level this bar and know what's going on in the on the second level. In other words, we have these two basic inner aspects of our beings, which we as we begin to understand them, we can begin to work together. Like we can work with Mother Earth. I mean, it's the whole Mother Earth is forever femifesting. But she's manifesting all the time too. It's like with a pregnancy throughout a pregnancy. That baby is part of the mother. They're one one unit. They're not two units. That baby eats what she eats and sleeps. It's a total femifestation. But when that baby takes its first breath, it has to take on the task of manifestation. Because now it has to produce from within its own self, the process of who and what he is, it's that whole beingness that that is inherent within each one of us. Let me tell another story. My oldest son, when he had finished his training of in orthopedics and surgery, surgery, came through Phoenix, and he was going to Del Rio, to Texas to start his practice. Just before he left, he said, Mom, you know, I'm real scared. He said, I have all this training, and I'm going 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 to him, Well, Carl, if you think you're the one that does the healing, you have a right to be scared, you can understand that your job, which is orthopedic surgery, for crying out loud, that's tremendous. If some part of their body is broken, you want a good orthopod to help you with that. So you, you you understand your work as being the work that you can offer to the patient. But now, it's the time for the physician within that patient, to connect, and do the work that you're talking about. So that you now have a colleague, so really, you're not doing the healing now, that patient is doing their own healing. And it's the reclaiming actual power within our own being, that allows us to do the healing, the the helpers are there to do it. But the actual process has to be accepted by the patient or the person or the gardener, or they're there to do this work. And then watch what happens.
Sydney Williams
Well, I gotta say, that's been my experience, personally. And I love you, you got you jumped in on the femifesting thing, which is my next question, which I'm obsessed with, because I hadn't heard that term before. And how you liken it to a birth and, you know, building another life within another human body, like the way that I've come to describe my own personal process, at least with mental health. I call it my contractions now, do I have children? No, do I want any? not in this lifetime. But for so long, I would go through life. And I would just react to everything I didn't know I had a choice. I didn't have the awareness that I was my greatest healer, I was looking for everything outside of myself. And then at some point, something switched. And it was like I call it my contractions now. So I would go, I would have an event, I'd be triggered by something. And I'd lash out, have some kind of big reaction. And I wouldn't come to know what or why I reacted in the way I did or what the stimulus was, for weeks or months or in some cases, years. There would be these events, and then time would pass and then the time would get shorter and shorter. And now I think of my creative process as contractions as well, like I'll have an idea. And then time will pass and the time gets shorter and shorter. As they get shorter and shorter. Then like something is born an idea for a book an idea for a program or realization about my own healing journey and things that I've been through. And this concept of manifesting versus femifesting, completely unlocked, like a new level of understanding for me. So I love that phrasing. And I love the stories that you shared about it. And so I'm curious, in that in the context of femifesting, the quote that you have in the book that just really struck me was sometimes we're good and ready, but someone or something or even the world itself is femifesting, preparing to receive what we have to offer. Over the last five years since I've been building what we're building here at Hiking My Feelings I have felt continuously like I'm I'm I'm too early. I'm ahead of my time, or what I'm saying is such bullshit that nobody can wrap their heads around it like it just doesn't like this feels so true to me and reading your work affirms that it is true that this is how we can move through life and really beautiful away. And we can learn from everything. And we can when we find our juice and when we live in motion, like all of these things come together to build just like a beautiful, beautiful life. And so I'm curious because like you went to an all women's medical school you were one of the first women to to do so many things in your career. Did you also feel like you were ahead of your time or too early? And if so, how did you move through time and space with that trust, because like, clearly, you're still here, you've brought about this message. But like one of the I would argue probably at least the most important time in my life, if not like society in general, we really need to get back to these core principles. Like the other interviews I've heard people are like, really trying to extract like what you eat and the medicine you take, and how many steps per day are you doing this. But it all comes back to what you said about us being our own healers, and they're really like, we have to take this journey for ourselves. So back to the original question, like, did you feel ahead of your time? And how did you hang on when the world wasn't ready, and the world was femifesting and ready to receive but you had to give.
Dr. Gladys 36:11
My fitting into stuff in the medical field was such a aberration, that when I was in medical school, the Dean sent me to the psychiatrist two different times, because she was so sure that I was not thinking properly for a doctor, because I was asking questions and doing things that I knew within my own being, having watched my parents did what they did. I mean, that's where I learned most of it. But but my own suffering and the stuff that I'd gone through, had allowed me to look at life differently. And healing is different, maybe because, but now when I was a little kid, life was bliss. I mean, all this jungle stuff was wonderful. But as soon as I started school, everything went haywire because I was so disliked, like dyslexic. I couldn't read. I absolutely, the things wouldn't stop on the page. I couldn't read, I couldn't write, I couldn't add, I couldn't subtract. I was a class dummy. So I was in first grade two years, being called the class dummy. And, and the kids were calling me the class dummy, which made me fight and I was fighting with the kids. And, you know, I was miserable. At home, it was another whole story. I mean, I could go home, my Ayah was there, and things were just wonderful. But I had to get back to school. So that deep injury that I had, my first two years in school carried me through with a sense that I didn't trust my own voice until I was 93. And it was because I had, and during this period of time, I had written books, I had done lectures, I had done these things, but I was always having to look at somebody else to check to see if, you know, have I really done this, I'd ask Bill to go through the whole lecture with me and you know, so that kind of a I think it's called an autologous injury to this spirit. Where some injury happens. And we've hidden it. So that we don't really know that that's what's happening. But it is, and it's, it's a very, very deep soul trauma. And I finally found my light my voice when I was 93. But at 93, I had a dream. And in this dream, I knew I was I was in the I was in the dream, and I was watching it too, you know, so I was awake and asleep. So I saw myself as a nine year old Gladys in the jungles of North India. And I was peeking out of our tent flap to make sure my younger brother wasn't anywhere around because he would tattle on me. If he if if I did what I knew I was going to do. He was wasn't there so I could do it. So I climbed as fast as top of my mango tree outside of the tent. And I'm sitting there and I'm singing. The thing was in our family, we were not allowed to sing anything but hymns or budgets on Sunday mornings. I mean, that was the rule. And if we, I would be punished if I sang what, but I thought it was a stupid rule. And so I'm sitting up in the tree where nobody can hear me. And I'm singing the caterpillar song or whatever song I wanted to sing, and just having a ball. But every so often, I look over my right shoulder. And up in the tree, Jesus is in the tree with me. And I look over and he's laughing, like everything. And I said, No, I'm nine years old. So I say to him, Jesus loves the little children, right? And he laughs and he says, yes, so I go back to my singing, and then I get to thinking, Did he really say that was okay, you know, I begin to doubt it. So I looked back at him, and I say, I'm still, right. And he says, yes. So I go back to my singing. And I wake up. And when I woke up, I realized it was a Sunday morning. And I was singing and laughing at the same time. And I realized that the dream was all about my own voice. And I figured, oh, boy, if Jesus could say it's okay, it's okay for you to sing in your own voice. So after that, I began to really not deny what it was that I was saying, because every time I deflected it to somebody else, in essence, I was denying it. And so it took, you know, you're pretty young, to, you know, it'll come in time, you'll get it. But because you're looking for it, you know, we get what we look for. And if people aren't looking for the light, if they aren't looking for hope, it's very hard to teach them. You know, one time I was working on this book, and trying to explain what love is. And for, I don't know, two or three hours, this friend of mine who was working with me at the time, we tried, because songs that we knew, we're about love, paintings that were about love stories that were about love. So all the years, everybody has been trying to say, this is what love is. And it we just couldn't come up with a word or an explanation about love. And finally, I realized, if I was trying to talk to a man who was born, born blind, and explained to him what the color green was, he would never understand because he'd never experienced it. So if a person has never experienced love, how can you explain to them what love is. And I truly believe that one of the reasons here in our country, we're having this really sad process of young men killing children in the school classrooms. I don't think teachers need to be armed. I think that's a bad solution. I think that we should put guardian dogs in the classroom. If we had a guardian dog in the classroom, that dog would know if there was any child who didn't know what love was. And it would come up to the child, the child was ready, and let the child pet it and begin to understand that this is love. But they not only don't know what love is, they don't know what death is. Because they watch their TV. And the person they're heroes has died, but he's next day he's there. But then he dies the next day, he's there and he dies, you know? So what is death anyway, doesn't mean anything, doesn't mean anything to do them to their own death. That's why they'll kill the children in the classroom then turn around and kill themselves. They think they're going to pop back up again, or something like that. There's some some glitch in their thinking there. But I'm telling you, if they had a dog. And that dog was, and they loved that dog. And that dog died. They would know if, if they had a rabbit that died. Or if they had a parakeet that died, you know, if any one of us has truly experienced death of a living thing, like James with his plant, but or a living thing, we would know what death is. But if we haven't, if it's all been, what has been presented to us, and so on, then how would we ever know? So I think we can start a whole new profession of guardian dogs in the classroom, they would have to be at hypoallergic they shouldn't be they, they would have to be trained they, you'd have to have a trainer to train them, the teachers would have to be trained the parents would, you know, it's a whole new profession. And I think it's, I think it would solve our problem.
Sydney Williams 46:12
I really appreciate what you say about that, and that they don't know death and how, when we come to know death and loss, we have a greater appreciation for life and therefore can better understand love. And I think if I look back at my life, that's 100% True, I was a competitive skydiver for four years. And in those four years, 23 of my friends passed away. And I didn't have any really great coping mechanisms, I thought the answer to my pain was at the bottom of the wine bottle or carton of Ben and Jerry's ice cream or something. And turns out that wasn't the case. But even though I don't, even though I, if I could do it now, with the skills that I have now, I would cope in different ways. But regardless, that experience gave me that a deeper understanding of what life is what life could be, and how we all relate to each other. And I think something that that really stuck out to me about your hypothesis there is like, I think, yes, we don't know. They don't know death. And so therefore, they think that they're going to pop up because the death that they've seen is in their video games, or movies or whatever. But also, I don't think they know, love, either. To your point about like, if if it's as simple as adding a dog to a classroom, then we can introduce love. But I think if we zoom out and look at the adults in the room, depending on how they were raised, and the skills that their parents had, and the exposure to different ways of living and loving they had or traditions, even around mourning, like I think back to my family growing up, we didn't talk about death, like I found out, my grandfather died. When I crawled into my dad's van. When he picked us up from school, he was like, Hey, grandpa died. And like that was it. But if we look at other cultures, if we look at indigenous cultures in North America, if we look at cultures around the world, it seems to me that the ones that have a tradition around mourning, a tradition around honoring life, that they, in my very sweeping generalization that I'm about to make the cultures that have that seem to see less violence, I think, at the very least less violence internally and within their family systems. As somebody who's lived and worked all over the world, with people from all different cultures, would you have you seen those kinds of correlations? Am I Am I on the right track here?
Dr. Gladys 48:30
I think you're on the right track. I think that that is that we trivialized the whole process of dying to the point that so many people that I know, are really so afraid of death that they're they don't live, it's that lack of engagement into what really is going on within your life. And if you if you don't know, this is not a judgment. It's if if if a person doesn't really know, how it feels to be in love with someone else, I mean, it doesn't have to be a romantic love or anything, but the whole process of loving someone else, inner connection that allows us to, to be really engaged with life. So that life is a wow, you know, it's not a big drag. I have a dear friend who is in her 90s and she, she's lost her eyesight. So and she's always been a real good reader. And but she doesn't like radio or anything. So she, she, she's cut herself off from communicating with other people, pretty much. And so each morning, she gets up and says, Oh, not another day. And to me, that's so sad. I've been trying to get her to listen to audiobooks, and so on. She just doesn't want to do it yet. I don't know if she ever will. But that's, that's, you know, I, we keep offering it to her. And the thing that I've found, my eyesight has gotten so bad that I can I'm listening to audiobooks, I can't read of back to first grade. But no, it's it's completely different. And it's my eyesight, that isn't working as well. But my insight has gotten better. And it's that ability to actually understand that we will get what we're looking for. And I'm not looking to be cut off. I'm looking to be connected, and understand things as best as I can. And I know that there are things that I don't understand and won't understand in this lifetime, but, you know, maybe some stuff that there is still there. I mean, like, just like this whole business of femifestation, isnt that lovely? So, you know, these things come and we can learn about them, and delight in them.
Sydney Williams 51:35
I think of the six principles, so there's you're here for a reason, all life needs to move, Love is the medicine, you're never truly alone. Everything is your teacher and spend your energy wildly. For anybody that's listening. Is there one? Like, are these done in order? How like, should somebody start at one and then move down to six? Or is there one, that's an easier entry point for folks? Like, if you could offer something about one of the six for anybody that's listening to help them like if they're listening, and they're like, Okay, Dr. Gladys is onto something like I, I should really start thinking about life in this way, how do I get started? Do you have a direction in which you could point people to get started on moving toward living a well lived life?
Dr. Gladys 52:22
The linchpin is love. That's the central, I have five L's that I think are really helped me to have a foundation. The first one is life. Life by itself, is like a seed in the pyramid. It's got a shell around it, and it's got all the energy of the universe in that seed, but it can't do anything. It could be there for 5000 years and not do anything, but when love in the way of water and air and so on, reaches it. So the shell cracks, then it love joins with love. And it becomes life. So life and love are integral like I said with the pregnancy, there, they have to go together in order for it to be real. So the two of them, like day and night like yin and yang, this just need to be together. So those two are together. But the third one is laughter. Laughter without love is cruel. Tears families apart it countries apart. You know, it's it's mean it's cold, but laughter with love is joy and happiness. The fourth one is labor. Labor with love is oh man, I got to go to work. Too many diapers. I got to drag myself through this again. It's that kind of burden and heavy work and all of that. But labor with love is bliss. It's why you're doing what you're doing. It's why I'm doing why I am a Doctor it's why a painter is a painter is why a singer is a singer. It's why really brings your life force out. My oldest son who's a retired orthopedic surgeon, he now builds boats. It's because he can he can he's a fixer of things and you know, so it's it's that ability to take what you have and make it real. So you now have self you know, you femifest it until you manifest it. And the fifth one is understand is listening, listening without love. There's an empty sound, it's just nothing. People don't understand what's going on. But with with listening with love is understanding, you begin to understand what it is that you're talking about. And when somebody is talking to you, or you're talking to somebody on the current communication of the earth with us and us with the Earth at all, it's beginning. And, you know, I think you're right about the pandemic. I think it has awakened us to some of the things that Mother Earth had been trying to tell us for ever. And we've either misunderstood or not listened to forever, and gotten ourselves into the messes that we're in. But if we can begin to reclaim our dominion, not our dominance, we can help Mother Earth. And that's all she's asking. She's just saying, hey, you know, let me tell you a story. My eldest daughter, when she was three, she was trying to tie her shoelaces. And I went over to help her and she switches her little ponytail, and she stands up and she says, No, I'd rather do it. My own self rawness is okay. Okay. So I back off, and I watch her she's working and working. Finally, she just can't do it. So she looks up at me. And she switches her ponytail, and she says, If you ever help me, help me now. And I think there are times in our lives when we just have to say Mother Earth. Oh, if you ever helped us, help us now. Because we finally wake up to the fact that we can't do it ourselves.
Sydney Williams 57:01
Yes, no, continue. Sorry. I just Yes. I love that. Well, I think something that's, I got one more question. But before I ask the question, on that note of like, listening to the earth and asking her for help, I think that there's an I don't know if it's one or the other. Or maybe one helps us with another. But like, there's a couple phrases that come to mind. And one of the phrases that I heard early and often was like, you can't love someone else, until you love yourself and respectfully to everybody that's ever said that I call bullshit. Because my relationship with my husband is how I learned to love myself, self love was not modeled or taught for me growing up. And it was through seeing how this man, for whatever reason, and all of my weird glory, He loves it, he can't get enough of it. And it was like, Oh, me being myself fully expressed. And all of my glory, weird, beautiful strange, is okay. So like I had to, I had to witness myself being loved in order to give that back to myself, which I thought was pretty interesting. And also, I think, and I don't know if it's chicken or egg, but like, for me, personally, I had to be diagnosed with a chronic illness at 31 years old type two diabetes. Before I could understand that my body could talk to me, and that I could have a relationship with it. Because my relationship with my body pre diabetes was violent, I wanted to be smaller, I punished it, I ate nothing, because I thought that being small was the goal. And that was my mission as a woman on planet Earth in America was to be the tiniest I could possibly be in this body. And diabetes was like, hey, down here, help. Like we're sending messages. You need insulin, meh, whatever, beta cells, you don't need them now. And it was just like this, my body was screaming, because I had been ignoring the worst day of my life for over a decade, and just suppressing and suppressing and suppressing. And so for me, I can't actually narrow down if it was my body that I heard first, or if it was Mother Earth, giving me signals and signs. But at some point, there was some message that I heard outside of the voices in here. And it was either a message from my body or a message from the planet. But then, all of a sudden, I could hear like it was it was like, it was like I had noise cancelling headphones on to where anything that could possibly be positive and helpful was out. It's kind of like when you take off your blinders, and you're like, oh, wow, look at this whole big world out here. It was like that. And all of a sudden, I was like, Okay, now my body won't shut up. Like I've gotten, we got a lot of talking to do. Like there's so many messages coming through about everything, whether it was the disease state that I was currently experiencing to get these messages, or the planet itself. And I think when you're talking about like, asking Mother Nature for help, I think maybe it's we got to learn how to tune into our bodies and then the planet can we can understand that the planet has messages for us as well. Or maybe it's vice versa. But I gotta believe that between The two, we can find that curiosity that we naturally have as children, where we just ask why about everything? Because once I gave myself permission to start asking why more, then I was able to hear those things that were coming up. And so as we kind of like wrap things up, there's one question that I like to ask all ads. Oh, yeah, jump in.
Dr. Gladys 1:00:25
Two things. First of all, there's a synchronicity. I love the word synchronicity, because it tucks these things that are floating around into like, my, my five L's do it for me, that kind of thing. And then the reality that you finally listened to the things that have been said, and had been said, and were said, and finally they came together. But it's not that these things are random or dumb stuff. It's talking, I heard. I was doing a lecture. And my son had introduced me as his mother. And he said, and we come from a weird family. And so everybody laughed. And the next person that spoke, she said, You know, I'm Welsh. And we Welsh when we get up in the morning, we don't say to each other. Good morning, how are you? We say, how is your Welsh? Because the Welsh people understand that that core within us is what they're greeting with the with, with their neighbor, or with themselves.
Sydney Williams 1:01:51
I love that. Yeah, that's interesting. Yeah, well, I think and you said something else, too. I was reading there's a book called The Art of Asking by a musician called her name's Amanda Palmer. And the the one line that stuck with me through that from that book, where she was talking about how and I think this kind of speaks to the femifesting. Like you go through life, and there's chapters where you're collecting the dots, like you're having the experiences that will become a book or whatever, and then you're connecting the dots. And then once the dots are connected, they're shared. And, for me, the sharing of the dots that I've connected and collected, is what this life is all about. Like, that's all I want to do, because like if, if, for me, the shared language of other survivors of sexual assault, which was like the worst day of my life that I had been suppressing for so long. It was because other people had found the language to talk about it and speak about it and share about their experiences that gave me the understanding that what happened to me, is what happened to me. And I strongly believe that it's, it's, it's as simple as and God knows, it's not easy. None of this is easy if it was and we wouldn't be having these conversations that we're having. And we wouldn't be hypothesizing about putting dogs in classrooms to help ease the gun violence epidemic in America. But like, when it when it all comes back around, it's as simple as just slowing down enough to be able to hear the messages that life has to give us. And I wish it was easier. But it really is that simple. Everything that I've experienced in this body, in my short, 38 years, everything that I've read, in this book that you wrote about your six tips for a well lived life, like it is as simple as love for ourselves and then and by proxy, our community and the ripple effect. I think like when we take that time to really tune into ourselves and find a way to sort out the noise and like really just get grounded and centered and what it means to have this experience in these bodies on this planet. That it is the root of everything. You're right like it it is as simple as love. But man, it sure ain't easy. We've really done a number on ourselves to try to make this as difficult as humanly possible. And I truly hope that the work that you're doing and will continue to do I know you have a 10 year plan. I hope that with more exposure to the simplicity of love and the message that you're sharing, that will start to figure it out. And I hope that in what's left of your lifetime, I hope what's in what's left in my lifetime that will get to see us turn that corner. Do you think that that's possible?
Dr. Gladys 1:04:31
Oh, yeah, I do. And I think you know, so I'm 102 I've done a lot of stuff. Look what you got to look forward to. I mean, to me, all that I've done wouldn't amount to a hill of beans if you didn't pick it up and do it. It's that ability to let go of what you've done and let it flourish. I mean, I nothing nothing that I've learned is secret to me. It's, well, maybe there are some. But basically, it's my life is an open book. And because I've lived it, and people know me, and they know where we're going, and I really think that that the, that I love life enough that I can trust life to be the thing that does the healing for this world.
Sydney Williams 1:04:31
Mic drop. Okay, I got one more question. And this is the one I like to ask everybody. Dr. Gladys, if you had a magic wand. And with this magic wand, you can instill an understanding about a topic you can eradicate a behavior, you can bless the world with knowledge or something, you can use this to save the planet, you can use it to save yourself, you can use it to do whatever. What would you do with your magic wand and who would benefit from what you're doing with it?
Dr. Gladys 1:06:09
I would put my five L's on the magic wand. And I would show it to everybody that I could want to show it to. And they could do what they want.
Sydney Williams 1:06:22
I love that. And I'd also like to say you're the first person and I don't think it's a coincidence that has not hesitated to answer that question. I asked that question. I was like, oh, man, that's a real doozy. And you knew exactly what you wanted to do. And I thank you so much for making the time to connect with me today. And before we go, is there anything on your heart or mind that we haven't covered that you'd like to to end us on here?
Dr. Gladys 1:06:46
No, I really think we've done a good job. All right. bless it. Thank you.
Sydney Williams 1:06:51
Yes, thank you. Um, for anybody that's listening that isn't familiar. Where can they follow you? How can they learn more about what you're doing and your 10 year plan?
Dr. Gladys 1:07:00
gladysmcgarey.com, and the the foundationforlivingmedicine.org.
Sydney Williams 1:07:08
All right, thank you so much. Gladys us and for everybody that's listening. Thank you for joining us for this week's dose of Wellness in the Wilderness. I sincerely hope that today's conversation was a breath of fresh air. Until next time, take good care of yourself, take good care of each other, dream big and be kind.
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