Show Notes

• Growing up in India
• The challenge of dyslexia
• Why Dr. Gladys wrote “The Well-Lived Life”
• The 5 L’s
• Discovering purpose for your life
• When you’re 103, and you have a 10-year plan!
• Overcoming adversity
• Innovation
• Wisdom of the elderly
• License plate: BEGLAD

Connect With Gladys McGarey

✩ Website: https://gladysmcgarey.com/
✩ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/begladmd
✩ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/pioneerstory/

Summary

Dr. Gladys McGarey is known internationally as the “Mother of Holistic Medicine.” Her newest book, published in 2023, is “The Well-Lived Life: A 102-Year-Old Doctor’s Six Secrets to Health and Happiness at Every Age.” Dr. Gladys shares her philosophy for living life to the fullest, her approach to overcoming obstacles, and why it’s important to have a 10-year plan – even at the age of 103!

Full Transcript

Brian

Welcome to another episode of LifeExcellence with Brian Bartes. Join me as I talk with amazing athletes, entrepreneurs, authors, entertainers, and others who have achieved excellence in their chosen field so you can learn their tools, techniques and strategies for improving performance and achieving greater success. Dr. Gladys McGarey is known internationally as the mother of holistic medicine. She is widely recognized as a pioneer of the allopathic and holistic medical movements, and is the co-founder and past president of the American Holistic Medical Association and a founding diplomat of the American Board of Holistic Medicine. Dr. Gladys has worked tirelessly to bring a holistic understanding – one that unites body, mind and spirit – to modern Western medicine. Although she officially retired from her medical practice after nearly eight decades, Dr. Gladys continues her work through consulting, speaking and writing. She is the author of seven books, and her newest book published in 2023, is “The Well-Lived Life: A 102 Year Old Doctor’s Six Secrets to Health and Happiness at Every Age.” In this incredibly inspiring book, Dr. Gladys shares a philosophy for living life to the fullest, that has healed thousands of her patients and has guided her own life for over a century; a true model of a well-lived life. Dr. Gladys maintains a healthy diet, gets nine hours of sleep per night, still rides a bike and takes 3800 steps daily. She’s a remarkable woman. I’m truly grateful to have her on the show. Welcome, Gladys and thanks for joining us on LifeExcellence.

Dr. Gladys

Thank you. I’m very happy to be here.

Brian

And I’m honored to have you. Thank you, Gladys. First of all, I’d like to commend you for not only living a well-lived life yourself, but for the impact you’ve had on many others for decades in your medical practice and your work around the world and with those who have had the pleasure of hearing you speak, or reading you, in interviews; your energy, your enthusiasm, and your zest for life casts an inspiring vision for a healthier and more joyful future for all of us. I really appreciate you for that.

Dr. Gladys

Thank you, you know, this last book that I wrote, when we were working on the title, I didn’t like it, I didn’t want that title. Until finally, the publisher said, Well, we’re not talking about you as your life, it’s people who read it. I said oh, yeah, yeah, that’s [inaudible, laughter].

Brian

It certainly applies to folks who read your book as they learn your secrets. We’ll get into the book in a little bit but I think also you’re being a little humble and saying that it doesn’t apply to you, because you have certainly lived a well-lived life, from what I know.

Dr. Gladys

It’s been a lot of fun and it’s been a good ride.

Brian

It certainly seems that way. Gladys, you were born in India and your parents were pioneering physicians who devoted their lives to treating the under-served populations in that country. What was it like for you growing up as a young child in India? What caused you to eventually follow in your parents footsteps and also become a doctor?

Dr. Gladys

Well, for me, when I was growing up, life was what I thought it should be. I loved it, living out in the jungles of north India, having access to freedom to go around where I wanted to and little Indian kids all around me, as friends from one village to the next. And fun, as I look back, is having the Indian children rub my arm and try to get the white color off. [Laughter]. They wanted me to be like them, and I didn’t care but it’s kind of interesting to have a memory of something like that, many, many things like that. And I thought it was just exactly the way a person should be living in growing up. My parents, the way they worked with the Indian people was a constant; something I just couldn’t…you couldn’t get away [from] without taking in. Take for instance, when my dad had first gone out there and he was going into the jungle ahead…they were going on a three day journey. They went the three day journey into the jungle and the fourth day my dad’s up – he’s from America; time to go, get up, we’re going – and they’re just sitting there looking at him. Finally, the head [guide] said sibe, we’re not going to move, we left our souls a three day journey behind us and we have to let our souls catch up with us. My dad sat down with them and let his soul catch up with him. That kind of a humble acceptance of life and love, and the philosophy of life – that was his Christian heritage, of course, in what he was teaching – but in the process of teaching, that he wasn’t condemning what they had. And to me, that was such an amazing [thing but] at the time, of course, I didn’t understand it. But as I have looked back on my life, it was such an amazing influence as to what is important and what is not.

Brian

I think that cultural influence that you had early on – of course, you ended up moving back to the United States – but growing up in that different culture clearly has impacted you. In the reading that I’ve done of what you’ve written and the talks that you’ve given, what was it about your parents being physicians that caused you to be attracted to that and then eventually pursue that as a profession?

Dr. Gladys

Well, it was the way they treated people, and what was important to them was important to me and so I worked with that. I loved helping them in the medicine tent, and understanding that the bodies of these folks who were sick, a lot of them were just sick because life was so hard. But then I found out about what a hard life was when I started school because in first grade I found out that I couldn’t read. I was so dyslexic the letters and numbers just floated on the page. I became the class dummy. The teacher thought I was stupid. The kids thought I was stupid. They teased me for that. I flunked first grade and had to repeat it. So for two years, I was the dummy of the class. And that impacted my self image so deeply that if I hadn’t have had the balancing aspect of my family and the people that I knew at home, I don’t know how I would have adjusted to the whole life process. So that was difficult, but really important. In fact I didn’t actually trust my own voice until I was 93. [Laughter.]

Brian

Wow. So there’s hope for all of us, you’re saying.

Dr. Gladys

Well, yeah.

Brian

Oh, that’s funny. So fast forward, you recently celebrated your 103rd birthday so you’ve been trusting your voice for ten years now. And I have to say, you not only show no signs of slowing down, but it seems like you have this strong gust of wind beneath your wings. What drove you to write “The Well-Lived Life” and what do you hope will happen for those of us who are fortunate enough to read it?

Dr. Gladys

Well, I had written five other books, all dealing with medical issues but there was something missing with that. We were talking about illness and how to work with the illness and different aspects of it and so on. This book is about what is the reason for healing itself and that the very core and essence of healing is love. Because you can adapt all kinds of important therapeutic procedures but if it’s not done with love, it doesn’t get the depth at which it should work. It’s like, my eldest son is a retired orthopedic surgeon and when he came through Phoenix ready to start his practice in Del Rio, Texas, he said to me, Mom, I’m going into the world to take care of people, I don’t know if I can handle that. I’m going to have people’s lives in my hands. And I said, well, Carl, if you think you’re the one that’s responsible for that, you have a right to be scared. But if you can understand that your job is to do what you’ve been taught to do as an orthopedic surgeon, which is awesome…if we’ve got some part of our body that’s broken we need somebody who knows how to put things back together again to help us do that. So don’t down grade that, that’s awesome. But if you understand that the actual healing process is done by the physician within the patient you’re working with, that’s your colleague; that’s the person who takes what you’re teaching and makes it work because that’s a very living force within that patient’s body. So if you can lovingly share the important stuff that you know with them and allow them to integrate that into their lives, you’ll have a colleague who is doing the actual healing.

Brian

And so how does that happen? I know that…I’m going to say that you’re not a traditional physician and what you were just talking about is an example of that, the role that love plays in it, the role that the patient plays in healing, how does that work together with traditional medicine to create healing?

Dr. Gladys

You know, it took me a long time to put some kind of a workable structure through that I could say to myself and then help other people understand it. That’s what I’m calling the five L’s. The first two L’s are life and love. Love is the basis for all healing; if it’s done with love, it’s that important so you start out with love. But if you have a seed in the pyramid that’s been there 5,000 years, it can’t do anything until love – in a process of water and rain and so on – waters that seed and it comes to life, then it can use all the energy of the universe that is available to it. So those two have to function together. So life and love have to be partners. Our yin and yang within us, day and night, we are dual beings, that’s the way the earth is. The third one is laughter. Laughter without love is cruel. It’s mean, it causes families to break up, it causes wars, it causes all kinds of trouble but laughter with love is happiness and joy. The fourth one is labor. Labor without love…oh, life is too hard, you’ve got to drag yourself to work, too many diapers, and just life is just too hard, but labor with love is bliss. That’s why you do what you do. It’s why I do what I do, why a painter paints, why a singer sings. It’s that inner core of our being that knows what it is that we’re trying to…why we’re here. That we as an individual are persons who are here…we are an individual person, there isn’t anybody else like us. We are our own being and we’re here for a purpose. When we find that purpose, oh, boy, that’s really wonderful. And the fifth one is listening. Listening without love is an empty sound but listening with love is understanding. It’s when we pay attention to each other and understand each other. So those five Ls have helped me structure the basis on which I’ve built my whole philosophy.

Brian

Thank you for that. And I have to tell you, Gladys, I was a bit surprised when I read “The Well-Lived Life.” You touched on this a little bit, all the books that you’d written prior that were medical books. I guess I didn’t know what to expect from the book. I was probably thinking that it would be either more biographical or have more how-to tips based on something that one would expect to hear from a medical doctor. Instead – and this was a surprise – I was transformed by your beautiful prescription of how to live a healthy, vibrant life in the role of our minds, our hearts, faith, the universe and those around us in creating that well-lived life. So I really thank you for that, I appreciate that. You maintain in the book – and you just mentioned this – that we all have purpose, that we’re here for a reason. And I love the way you describe it, Gladys, that we are all a piece in the great jigsaw puzzle of life. I think, though, that a lot of people struggle with discovering what their purpose is for their life. What advice do you have for people who are trying to figure that out?

Dr. Gladys

It’s really hard. I don’t care how privileged our life is – I don’t mean that as I don’t care, I mean, I think it’s not important – each one of us, even the most privileged, have things that they have to deal with within themselves. Now, this isn’t a theology, it’s not anything, it’s just something I think. When God – whatever God is to whoever we’re talking to and about – when God created the earth and it was done and it was beautiful and it was just exactly the way it was supposed to be, he then created us, as human beings. And he said to us, now, you are the only living beings on this planet that have freewill and choice and I now give you dominion over this planet. And we, in our arrogance, thought he said “dominance” so we’ve kind of taken over and thought, well, you know, we got it, whatever it is that we’ve been doing, but in essence, we’re the ones who are the caregivers of our planet. If we can step into that role for just that one instance…but this goes into everything in life, the whole attitude, that we’re here, really, for a purpose. Each one of us has a piece in this puzzle that is so essential, that there isn’t anybody else on the earth at this time who could ever do the same thing that we are doing and are called to do. We’re not taught to understand that. So I think paying attention to our dreams, paying attention to our dreams at night and our daydreams, and to thoughts that come to us and experiences that allow us to deal with issues that come in relationship to other people, in relationship to ourselves…the very attitude and joy of learning to love yourself is something that is…if you don’t understand that you are a lovable person, and that you really have that essence within you – you can love yourself – then, boy, you could love other people too.

Brian

How did you come to that realization? You’ve talked a lot about love and you write about love in the book, “The Well-Lived Life.” How did you come to that realization and how did that become such a central focus in your life?

Dr. Gladys

Well, those two pivotal years of being the class dummy. And let me tell you, I was a fighter. I mean, I punched out people that made me mad and all that, so when I was at school I was doing that. But on my ay home – our home was up in the Himalayas – it was a mile up to our house and it was 7000 feet up, so we had to climb that hill to get home. And our ayah would always be waiting for me at the top of the hill – our ayah being like the nanny, the second mother really – she’d be sitting at the top of the hill and she’d see me struggling up the hill. She’d hold out her scarf and she’d say to me, come here. So I’d go over and she tucked me in under it and I’d stay there until my life came back full into focus and shifted from the dummy that I was at school to the accepted person that I was up in our home. It was that actual physical presence of somebody who loved me enough to be able to transfer her love to me. And then when I was in third grade – life is so amazing, you know how these things come along – my third grade teacher saw something in me that the other teacher had not seen. She saw that I couldn’t read or write but I could talk and and do things so she appointed me class governor. I was the one who was able to take what we were doing in third grade class and present it to the whole student body, and that I could do. So this one time, our class was doing a play for the whole student body. It was called “The Frog Jumped Over the Pond” and I was the frog because I was taller than any of the other kids because I was older, because of the extra year. The way it was my mother made me a frog suit, made it green and I had that frog suit on and I walked out onto the platform, all my confidence was there. I could do this, you know, but as I stepped on the stage, my two older brothers were in the front row of the audience and it threw me off by a step, just enough that instead of jumping over the pond – which was a dish with water in it – I landed in it. (Brian: Oh, no.) So here I am, eight years old, my green is fading out of my suit, I’m crying, I can’t move, I’m stuck. I’m totally, obviously a failure for everything. The teacher comes and leads me off the platform and I go home. While we’re at the dinner table at home my brothers are telling my mother how funny this was. They said, the audience was in absolute hysterics, the whole audience was just laughing. So my brothers are telling her this and they’re laughing and I’m giving them the devil’s eye and they didn’t pay any attention. Finally my mother, who was this most amazing person, she says, all right now boys, you’ve had your fun. Now, what can we, as a family, do to help Gladdy if this ever happens to her again; not having people laugh at her but having people laugh with her. I don’t know what we did at that table. I don’t know what we said or what that solution was; whatever it was, it did that for me. Because there have been times I’ve seen…dyslexia isn’t something you get cured of, it’s something that is there. It’s the way things are put together. So you learn to read, you learn to do these things because you have to, you know, I have to get to medical school. In fact – I have to tell you this quickly – when we were doing the American Holistic Medical Association, there were ten of us sitting around a table and of the ten of us, we realized six of us were severely dyslexic. So we looked at each other and we said, well, we just had to find another way of doing it. [Laughter.] It’s that kind of ability to reach for something that is almost impossible to put into words and be able to use that for the tool, and what I’ve found out that is, is love.

Brian

I love that, that’s a wonderful story. How great that your mother was able to re-frame that experience that you had and the impact that that would have, really, for the rest of your life. I have one more question, I want to get back to a life of purpose and I got sidetracked a little bit with love, then we started talking about your upbringing in India, which is wonderful. Gladys, as you reflect on your life, though, the duration of which is now over a century long, what do you believe is the reason that God placed you here on Earth? What’s your purpose?

Dr. Gladys

My purpose, I’ve got a ten year plan, and it involves a village for living medicine. I know there are places on this earth that are called Blue Zones, there are places where people live in peace in the community and it’s their whole life. They know how to do that, the other people who live in that community understand that. I think that part of my job is to create a village for living medicine so medicine can find its healing process within the whole process of life itself. That the people that come into this village, and are wanting to be part of this village, can put their life essence into what it is that they feel life is all about. And it’s our choice. We either choose to be miserable, looking over our shoulder for what’s gone wrong in our life, our neck gets stiff and we can’t do anything else, or we can look at what the light shows that is going on in our life that makes us happy or makes us reach for the light or makes us want to be the kind of person that makes us feel good within ourselves. We’re the ones who know that and we’re the ones that fit that piece of the puzzle.

Brian

Well, I think it’s remarkable first of all, that you have a ten year plan; you’re 103 years old, and you have a ten year plan. I love your focus on the future. I’m guessing that you’re very intent on the present too, that you focus on today. Why is it important to reflect on and be grateful for today, while simultaneously focusing on a bright future, maybe ten years ahead or 20 years ahead or further depending on one’s age?

Dr. Gladys

It’s the only thing that makes sense. Because if you can’t take this moment that you and I have right now, which is the most important moment in my life, okay, because if we don’t take the present as it is, and use it with the essence of what we are projecting for ourselves and loving it within ourselves, as we reach out to the world around us, then you’re all discombobulated. Right now, I can’t see. I have glaucoma in one eye and a blind spot in the other. I can barely see you as a person but I know you’re there, and the fact of the matter is, that as my eyesight has gotten poorer, my insight has gotten better.

Brian

Hmm, that’s powerful. You mentioned your eyesight and that’s a segue into the next thing that I wanted to ask you about, that’s the topic of adversity and setbacks. I think we would all agree that you’ve been blessed with an incredibly well-lived life. But I also know from my research that it hasn’t always been easy. If you think back, in your 20s you became a physician at a time when women becoming doctors was not only highly unusual but was frowned upon within the medical community and probably by those outside the medical community. Then later in life, you twice battled cancer, first in your 40s, I believe and then again some 50 years later. And then finally – and by the way, these are just the the big events – your life was turned upside down when your husband of 46 years informed you out of the blue that he wanted a divorce. You were not only husband and wife at the time, but you shared a medical practice. Gladys, you’ve navigated through some pretty significant life challenges, and likely countless others during your life, yet, as we talk, you remain joyful and steadfast in your resolve to live a purpose driven life. In fact, you seem to have used those events not only as lessons but as springboards to a new life. What’s the lesson in your response to those experiences that can help all of us in facing our own challenges and setbacks? Because we all – maybe not on the level of the examples that I described – but we all have challenges, we all have setbacks, we all have failures. What’s your advice on navigating through those
and overcoming them?

Dr. Gladys

It’s the fact that we have free will and choice. If I hurt my arm, and I have a scab on my arm, and I sit and pick out that scab, it’s never going to heal. But if I can do what I can do to let it heal, allow it to heal up and with love take care of that spot, not keep digging at it and make it worse and so on, I look back at it years later, look at that scar and say, oh, I know who you are but it doesn’t hurt anymore. It’s attention that we choose to put into what is important in our lives. The pain has to be dealt with, it has to be taken care of and understood and all of that but if that’s what’s keeping you miserable, why, just that, because there’s always someplace in life that has some kind of light and light always overcomes darkness. It’s sort of like if I have a flashlight and I’m walking down the path, it’s dark and all I can do is take one step at a time. As I’m going along that path I may see a little glimmer of light over here, or over that side and if I take my light and shine that light on that little glimmer, it makes the little glimmer brighter. So if we can allow ourselves to be the one who can help other people shine their light that is the whole business of listening and loving and working toward what can make us happy. We can choose happiness or we can choose misery; and misery, I don’t like it.

Brian

No one does.

Dr. Gladys

But we’re all going to have it, that’s the point. It’s the attention that we give it and how we build on it; you can build your whole structure on the pain that you have. I have friends, one woman who has lived her whole life – well she just died a couple months ago in her mid 70s – anyway, she lived with one quarter of one kidney. That’s not possible but she did. She would come to us as physicians and we would tell her what we would work with her on and she would do what she could do. She would lovingly deal with what it is and she was never without pain. She had pain all her life. It was just the fact that she decided – she chose, not decided, she chose – to live her life in service of other people. I have another friend who is an artist and a painter who has lived with pain all her life. She said that what she does when the pain gets so hard that she can hardly function, she grabs for her paints, and she paints everything; she paints her shoes, she paints her purse, she paints the walls. She does her painting until, she says, the TIG happens. Something happens within her as she’s doing her painting and the TIG happens and she could deal with the pain. So it’s a matter of how we, as individuals, choose to live our lives and what’s important in our lives.

Brian

I appreciate you sharing that. This next question, you’ve battled cancer twice and have survived and defeated it both times, and it’s been a while. I’m thinking that maybe there’s somebody listening to the show or watching the show who is in the midst of that battle with cancer. I’m just wondering what you might say to that person, as a human being, and also with your background as a physician.

Dr. Gladys

Alright. That’s a good question. When I had a cancer of the thyroid when I was in my 30s, I had to do it with the whole process of holistic medicine and herbs that we could do and the poultices we could do and all of that kind of thing. We were right in the midst of building the concepts around holistic medicine. I didn’t even look at conventional medicine for a therapy. So what I used at that time worked. This time, it was a breast cancer, and I had the opportunity to look at what was available to me now. The process of having a lump removed now was completely different from what it would have been the first time, I mean, certainly what was available was radiation. So I had two tools that I could use in a way that would do the healing but I could use it in my way of doing the healing. In other words, as soon as I heard the actual diagnosis and realized what I was facing, I knew that I could not go back to the the whole process that I had available to me in my 30s where I could take the time and do the fasting and all of the things that I did at that time, which worked and it cured. This time I had so much work that was going on and I really felt that the medicine had progressed enough that I could use the tools. Like I told my son, use the tools that you have in a way that allows that to become the actual healing process. So I told them, I talked to my lump and I visualized the lump as a little hand-tooled suitcase. I told that love to open itself up and if there are any other cancer cells in my body, call them all to get into that suitcase because you are going on a big trip; I just created this whole thought. So when I had the lump removed I told the lump to have a family reunion, you know and go…so we just have whatever it was and that’s what we did. In other words, I made it a living experience. It wasn’t something that was killing the cancer, necessarily, that was what it was but that wasn’t the whole object of it; the object of it was to use this experience for something that my body could cooperate with me in the process of working out the whole…it was something that I still had control over.

Brian

So you invited the lump and any other cancer that might be present in your body to pack up for a trip and to never come back and that’s exactly what happened.

Dr. Gladys

It’s a matter of taking the opportunities that are presented to us and choosing how we’re going to use them. Because I think everything in life is a teacher – everything – and we can use it either to learn from or not.

Brian

Yes, thank you for sharing that and thank you for sharing more about your experience with cancer. Gladys, the world has changed so much in the 103 years that you’ve lived and as you know, it’s changing more rapidly than ever before. We’re talking now using technology that wasn’t available, even recently, and we get to know each other and become friends in a way that probably wouldn’t have been possible years ago. I’m curious, though, what innovation in your opinion, has had the greatest positive impact onthe world during your lifetime? Is there an innovation or maybe two, that really stand out for you as being exceptional during your lifetime?

Dr. Gladys

When you think about what we’re doing right now, I mean, how awesome is this to get to know somebody who I know I can see, and I can love and look at…and the way my book is going around the world. I’m getting calls and notes and things from people from Cambodia to Zanzibar and all over the world. I mean, how in the world, when I didn’t even have a telephone when I was a kid. In fact, in the school there was one telephone and I don’t even know who they had to call. It’s that kind of a thing. We have progressed so that we have technology available to us. That is so absolutely awesome. And it can be used…how we choose to use it comes right back to whether the things that we’re doing – based from my perspective – [are] helping us reach our true humanity. Like ET, who wanted to go home, I think our true humanity…the being that is part of this whole world who was given dominion over the earth to take care of it and love it and love each other and love ourselves and love life and be happy and do the things that make us want to live. Because there’s so much to do and life, every moment is so important.

Brian

That’s so true. You may have begun to answer the next question that I have but I wanted to swing to the opposite side. So innovation on one side, and in this world where it seems like the only constant is change. I’m wondering what are a couple truths that have remained constant throughout your life?

Dr. Gladys

I think the five Ls are something that has been true throughout my life. I think to me, my understanding of whatever is happening, I can structure within that five L perimeter [that is] what makes sense to me.

Brian

That’s a great framework and I would certainly agree with you on that. Gladys, I’m so grateful for our conversation. I have so much respect for you and the incredible wisdom that you’ve accumulated during your lifetime. For several years, my wife and I would occasionally go out to dinner with a couple who were in their 80s when we first started going out, and they were in their 90s when we eventually stopped, and it was during that time that I really came to appreciate the wisdom of people much older than me. And interestingly, right around the same time, on the other end of the spectrum, I started to really appreciate the excitement and the energy and the zest for life that people younger than me had and the benefit of investing time with both of those groups of people. So we we tend to be around people who are like us, who think like us, who look like us. It was really eye opening to enjoy that time with the couple who were 50 years older than we were and and also to start to have friends who were 20 years younger than me. I know that you were exposed to well educated adults from a very young age and now at this stage in your life, almost everyone is younger than you. That’s true, right?

Dr. Gladys

Absolutely. All my siblings are gone but I have the most amazing great grand kids that are awesome. I love what you’re bringing up because I think that we have allowed ourselves as elderly people to think of ourselves as being unimportant and sort of shoved into the background and I think that’s a shame. Because I’m telling you, we’ve got stories to tell (Brian: Yes, you do.) and experiences to share and we want to do it. Elisabeth Kubler Ross was a good friend of mine and what she dreamt of didn’t work out for her but she dreamt of having a center for elderly people that had a kindergarten within the premises so the old folks could touch the little people and the little people could touch the old folks. It’s like when I was going with my grand kids when I was 75 and we were in the car. My grandson said, Nani, how old are you? And I said, I’m 75. And he says, is that old? And I said, I don’t know. That’s just what I am. He started pushing my face and he says, but you’ve got all these wrinkles. And so I said, yeah, but they don’t hurt on the inside. So it’s that kind of ability to take where we are in life. I’m telling you right now, I have a family of six children, my one daughter died when she was 58, but these children of mine are the elderly, we decided that they’re the elderly but I’m the Ancient One. It sort of put us in a structure of where we belong. And we’ve got things that have happened to us that are really important, because…watching the wars that are going on now they are something that well, here we go again, I’ve seen these wars. There will come a time…I don’t know what will happen but my hope is, my prayer is, that we’ll learn how to live together on this planet and love each other and not not try to kill each other. And that medicine will find that the purpose for the whole field of medicine is not just to diagnose and treat disease and pain that’s there and that you do it by getting rid of it, but that you look at it and try to figure out what’s it trying to teach you. I’ve known these amazing people who have taken their pain as the biggest teacher in their lives. Some of the most hard…that divorce for me was just, it shattered me. I mean, that was one of the hardest…well, it was, I don’t know why but it was one of the hardest things that ever happened to me. Finally, I was in my car and I was screaming at the universe, I was yelling what I thought about what has happened and how I was so hurt, and all of a sudden, I pulled the car over to the side of the road and I thought, are you going to spend the rest of your life like this? And the words came down to me: this is the day the Lord has made, let us rejoice and be glad in it. I thought, oh, be glad, that’s me. I went home and I changed my license plate to BE GLAD so that every time I got into my car, I had to see that and everybody – I kept that license plate until I retired – behind me in traffic would have to see that too.

Brian

I love that you had a BE GLAD license plate. I have to tell you, I smiled when I actually read that in researching for our interview. My license plate is BE GREAT. I thought it was interesting that we have…it’s a little different concept but the same thing, a way of reminding ourselves of something that’s important and also just a small way to maybe remind people who happen to see that, so I love that.

Dr. Gladys

You don’t know, somebody coming behind you who’s really broken and they see BE GLAD and they think oh, what’s that? Or they see yours and, what’s that? So yes.

Brian

I love that. Gladys, as you know, our show is called LifeExcellence so I have to ask you about excellence. I wonder when you hear the word excellence, what does that mean to you?

Dr. Gladys

It means that you have found what your juice is and you’re living it, you’re using it. Excellence is how you can take what is within you and make it work.

Brian

I love that. Thank you for that. The last secret in your book is spend your energy wildly and you alluded to that when you mentioned juice. It seems like that’s a really fitting place to conclude our time together. Tell us what that means, spend your energy wildly and what can we all do to invest our energy in what truly matters.

Dr. Gladys

Well, you can bank a fortune, you can put it in your bank. You can’t bank juice; if you try to stop it and put it someplace, it’ll dry up, it’ll die. So in order to have your juice, really, really working, you have to use it and you have to keep using it. Life has to live. If life stops living and moving and being what it is, it dies. So if you really, really want to live, have a purpose, work for it, live it and enjoy what it’s doing in any way that you can; whatever makes your heart sing and be part of what you want to keep on doing.

Brian

That’s great, you’ve imparted so much wisdom today. I loved your book, “The Well-Lived Life” and highly recommend it. I hope all of our listeners and viewers will go out and get the book. You can get it on Amazon or wherever you get books. Gladys, thank you so much for being on the show today. It’s been a true pleasure. It’s been a blessing getting to know you and I’m so grateful for all the wonderful information you shared today. Thanks for tuning in to LifeExcellence. Please support the show by subscribing, sharing it with others, posting about today’s show with Dr. Gladys McGarey on social media and leaving a rating and review. You can also learn more about me at BrianBartes.com. Until next time, dream big dreams and make each day your masterpiece.