Pod Insights The Ed Mylett Show 102 Year-Old Doctor Reveals Secrets To A Successful Life w/ Dr. Gladys McGarey About this episode What can you learn from 102 years on this earth? You’re about to find out!
My guest this week will leave you STUCK in amazement! At 102 YEARS YOUNG, Dr. Gladys McGarey's wisdom, experienced and accomplishments are unparalleled and clearly solidify her status as the revered MOTHER OF HOLISTIC MEDICINE. Her extraordinary book, THE WELL LIVED LIFE: A 102-YEAR OLD DOCTOR'S SIX SECRETS TO HEALTH AND HAPPINESS AT EVERY AGE, unveils the timeless insights she has gathered over the years and I’m so honored to welcome her to the show.
Prepare for an episode brimming with profound yet straightforward guidance that will leave you yearning for more, just as I did.
Get ready to take notes as we discuss:
How to maintain vitality.
How to live in your PASSION.
Dr. McGarey's advice to her YOUNGER SELF—a perspective that holds timeless wisdom.
The power of AWARENESS and attentiveness to the things that truly move you.
The harmonious interplay of the five foundational "Ls" (LIFE, LOVE, LAUGHTER, LABOR, LISTENING).
How to create a life of HARMONY.
Her inspiring journey of overcoming severe dyslexia at an early age.
How to find your authentic voice
How to be a life-long learner
Contemplating the significance of the end of life and the wisdom it imparts.
While books, television, movies, and podcasts offer valuable insights, there is nothing quite like learning the lessons of the world IN REAL LIFE. And with over a century of profound experiences, Dr. Gladys McGarey stands as an eloquent and practical teacher like no other.
This is an episode that will leave an indelible mark on your path to a fulfilled and purpose-driven life. Don't miss out on this extraordinary opportunity to learn from this jewel!
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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1:01 Speaker 01 Mr. President, my company, for me, of the explosion on our rig.
1:05 Speaker 02 On October 2nd.
1:06 Speaker 01 Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me.
1:11 Speaker 02 Tom Cruise is. Digger got us into this mess. And Digger's gonna dig us up. From the director of Birdman and the Revenant.
1:18 Speaker 03 What would happen if I stopped drilling? You stop, you freeze to death, that's what.
1:22 Speaker 02 With great power comes great deniability.
1:25 Speaker 03 I'm not the first nanny.
1:27 Speaker 02 Digger, see the trailer online, only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R, under 17, not a minute without parent.
1:36 Speaker 02 This is the Ed Mileage Show.
1:40 Ed Mylett? Okay, welcome back to the show, everybody. Today's an honor for me. Today's all gonna be about really wisdom. And my guest today has 102 years worth of that wisdom. Yep, my guest today has lived 102 years on this earth. She's a remarkable woman. She's a mother, I believe, of six children.
2:04 Ed Mylett? She is also a doctor. She also met Gandhi. And she has a book out that is just extraordinary called The Well-Lived Life. 102-Year-Old Doctors, Six Secrets to Health and Happiness at Every Age. So Dr. Gladys McGary, welcome finally to my show.
2:24 Speaker 04 I'm so happy to be here.
2:26 Ed Mylett? It's my absolute honor to do this today with you. So I have so many things I want to ask you. So let's just get right into it. We got a hundred.
2:34 Speaker 04 Let's do it.
2:34 Ed Mylett? A hundred and two years worth of stuff to get out in an hour. So here we go. You said something, you said, if I could distill my life's work, and you nailed it down here, you said, to be truly alive, we must find the life force within ourselves. And direct our energy towards it. That sounds like an awful new age thing to say. And I'm wondering what you meant by that when you said it.
2:56 Speaker 04 I mean that we all have it. So it's something that we just just have not introduced ourselves to because we've been so busy looking outside for our fixits. And the things that make us happy or whatever we think has to be outside of ourselves and don't realize that. Inside. The very core of our being is what keeps us happy. As a matter of fact, I just learned a while back that the Welsh, when they get up in the morning and meet somebody, they don't say good morning. They say, how's your weird?
3:37 Ed Mylett? Really?
3:38 Speaker 04 Because the weird that they're talking about is this inner core. Of our being that is the thing that really keeps us going, our life force. I call it the physician within, but it's that life force that really. Is the engine that keeps the thing going.
3:58 Ed Mylett? Is that what you mean about the juice of life? Because you also, by the way, it's amazing. I've not really heard anybody else use that term. I've been using the term about getting the juice out of something or the juice of life now for probably thirty years. Is that what you mean by that? I have, as I was fascinating when I was reading your work, I'm like, oh, my gosh, the juice of life. So is that connected to the life force? Or is it something? Okay.
4:20 Speaker 04 No, it's it's definitely connected to the life force because it's what juices are a lot, you know? If we don't have any juice, we're just kind of. Oh, you know, it's very sad.
4:35 Ed Mylett? Well, I think most people, maybe you would agree. I shouldn't say most because that's a judgment. But you, you say that the juice has two main parts, our individual essence, and then how we fit into the whole. And if I think about our culture today, I wonder how many people listening to this right now go, you know, I haven't tapped into my life force and I, I don't get a lot of the juice out of life. So could you elaborate on that, our individual essence? What a beautiful way to say it. And how we fit into the whole.
5:03 Speaker 04 If we start paying attention to some of the things that make us happy, that make us want to dance and sing, that want, makes sometimes just make you wanna yell. Something has happened and you really don't like it very well. It's okay to go about yourselves and just holler sometime, you know? Sometimes we need to express ourselves in a way that we can understand it. Or we can understand what it is that, that I'm trying to say to myself, you know, this, this, this either is, really it's so good, I like it so well, or it really makes me sad,
5:45 Speaker 04 or it's, however it's acting us, however we're reacting, whatever it is, is our way of responding to life.
5:58 Ed Mylett? Does that mean that you think that, you know, the full expression of your emotions matters? Meaning, like I, I've had this theory for a while that I don't even know that there are positive or negative emotions. They're just our emotions and that some-
6:10 Speaker 04 They're emotion, yeah, it's energy. Energy is energy. And sometimes it's, sometimes it just doesn't feel very good and sometimes it feels great. But whatever it is, if we can begin to say, oh, yes, or no, no, no, I, I, and we back away from it, it's something that guides us from within ourselves. That allows us to know what is what we're responding to and how we're responding to it.
6:42 Ed Mylett? How do you figure that out, Glass?
6:44 Speaker 04 I want.
6:45 Ed Mylett? How do you figure that out? How do you know why you're, you know, I'm a big believer in self-awareness.
6:50 Speaker 04 Yeah.
6:51 Ed Mylett? Some of that just comes, I think, maybe with age because you've been around yourself a little bit longer. You know, I know more about myself at fifty-two right now than I certainly did at twenty-two.
6:59 Speaker 04 Yeah, you pay, you've been paying attention to it. And a lot of times at a hundred, haven't been paying attention to it and still don't feel it. You know.
7:10 Ed Mylett? How do you do that? How do you pay more attention? Is it, is it a little bit, is it a little quiet time? Is it, is it, is it starting to take note of how you behave and what your patterns are? How does one begin to do that?
7:21 Speaker 04 It, it, I, I think it's an individual thing, so it's hard to say blanket how. But when you begin to pay attention to what makes you respond to something.
7:37 Ed Mylett? Yes.
7:38 Speaker 04 A person or, or a poem, or a song, or, or a flower, you know? Sometimes a rose will just say, oh, you know, ooh, that's great. You know, it's, it's the awareness of how we respond to the inside and outside of ourselves.
8:00 Ed Mylett? You're right.
8:01 Speaker 04 I'm part of a community.
8:04 Ed Mylett? I think so many people, and by the way, I have for many years, and sometimes I regress. But I kind of like an autopilot human being. And so the same things generate the same responses from me, no matter what the conditions of my life are. Sometimes I feel like I still find a way to get those same emotions. And in the book, you teach a way to do this and, and you label it.
8:26 Speaker 04 Right.
8:27 Ed Mylett? Five Ls. It's just sort of like a way to look at your life, right? Like these five Ls. Could you, I just, I never even heard any of this before. And I've read a lot of books and had hundreds of podcasts. So this is really important, everybody, what she's about to say, because it's kind of a way to actually measure or look at your life. So what are the foundational Ls? What are those?
8:48 Speaker 04 Well, I like you use the word foundation because they kind of, for me, when I, when I came across them. I don't know how I came across, when I came across them, they kind of gave me some foundation from which I could. Begin to talk about some of the things that I wanted to express either to myself or so outside. The five L's, I'll start with life. The first one is life. Life by itself has, it can't do anything. It's like a seed in a pyramid that's been there for 5,000
9:32 Speaker 04 years. It's got all the energy of the universe within it, but it can't do anything until love, which in the, would be in the form of water or sunlight or something. Love activates, it cracks a shell and the energy comes out and the two become one. It's like a sperm and an ovum. A sperm by itself and an ovum by itself can't do anything, but when they connect, life comes forth. That's, that's what happens. Yes. And when life comes forth, then we begin to in, involve ourselves. We involve ourselves
10:12 Speaker 04 with life. And as we do that, then we go up to the third L, which is laughter. Laughter by itself is cruel. It's mean. It's, it can be hard and, and, you know, and rough and rude. But laughter with love is joy and happiness.
10:39 Speaker 04 And labor is the fourth one. Labor without love is, oh man, there are too many diapers. I gotta go to work. It's just, like, you know, it's really hard. But labor with love is bliss. It's what makes you happy. It's what makes me happy. So it makes a singer sing, which makes a painter paint. I mean, it's that inner core within us. Labor is there. I mean, you know, it's there. But when, when you approach it with the whole force of love. It blooms. And the fifth one is listening. Listening without love is empty sound. The kung fu, you know, it's empty sound.
11:24 Speaker 04 But listening with love is understanding.
11:27 Ed Mylett? Oh, my gosh.
11:28 Speaker 04 So as we use these as kind of the five, part of the foundation of what love is, what life is all about. It kind of allows us place to put things where they belong in some kind of order.
11:47 Ed Mylett? I have to tell you,
11:51 Ed Mylett? that might be, I'm sorry, I get a little emotional with that one. That might be the most profound and beautiful thing ever said on my show. Ever, ever.
12:04 Ed Mylett? That's the foundation of life is love.
12:06 Speaker 04 That takes my life, that takes my breath away.
12:11 Ed Mylett? I, I mean it. It's the foundation of life is love. And to add to that, life, laughter, labor and listening with love. My gosh, what a, what a remarkable formula. How beautifully said. By the way, I use the word bliss all the time also. I feel like I have this long lost friend that I'm meeting today. Thank you for that gift. I'm curious if you went back, all the way back and you could give little girl some advice on her life. You go back all the way back to, I don't know, the 12 year old Gladys and she was embarking upon this long life she's going to live. Would there be any specific advice you would give her? Now that you've lived 102 years that,
12:55 Ed Mylett? I guess through you giving it to her, you can give it to all of us. Was there something you would tell her that you would whisper to her about her life and her in particular? That you would want her to know before she goes out into the world and lives this thing?
13:07 Speaker 04 Yeah, definitely. I tried to tell her that she's really not kind of a nice person and she's not a dumbbell. Well, when I, until I started school, life was wonderful. We lived in tents out in the jungle and my parents were doing the medical work and life, you know, it for me, life was just. The way it was supposed to be. And then I started school. And I couldn't read or write. The letters were all over the place. The numbers were all over the place. I just absolutely could not read or write.
13:44 Ed Mylett? Oh, my God. Are you dyslexic?
13:46 Speaker 04 Really?
13:47 Ed Mylett? Oh, my gosh. Wow.
13:49 Speaker 04 Are you?
13:50 Ed Mylett? No, I'm not. But I'm sitting here talking to the mother of holistic medicine. She becomes a medical doctor at a time where not very many women were doing that. She writes a book and she's telling me she's dyslexic after she's lived this life. I'm just sitting here going, oh, my gosh.
14:05 Speaker 04 Well, you know, I was so severely dyslexic that I had to repeat first grade twice because a teacher
14:14 Speaker 04 labeled me the class dummy.
14:17 Ed Mylett? Oh, my gosh.
14:18 Speaker 04 And so I was really, I was fight, I was a good fighter. My second oldest brother taught me how I could punch people out. And so people
14:31 Speaker 04 it was, you know, it was, in fact, I remember being, as I said, 12 years old. Being about that age, 10 or 12, waking up one morning and saying to myself, there's something wrong in this world. Gladys, you don't have a friend. And then I said to myself, and why don't you have a friend? And I said, well, you know, you punch people out if they say something and that's, that's not, I don't think it's working.
15:09 Speaker 04 And then I said, and who do you know that doesn't do that? And I realized it was my mother. My mother was the kind of person, if something happened. And she didn't like it or or something. She would deal with it either with humor or just let it go. And it was something that I and she had friends all over the place. I mean, she, everybody loved my mother. She would, everybody knew that she accepted them and life was good. In fact, she was the kind of person, I remember being as a 12 year old again, sitting at our dining room table when my mother was going to have a tea party
15:54 Speaker 04 and her fancy ladies were coming to tea. This is in India, up in the Himalayas. Okay.
16:01 Speaker 04 So I hear my mother close the front door and because I had my stuff all over the table and it was a mess. And my mother says to the ladies as they're coming through, don't look straight ahead. Don't look to the right. Don't look to the left. Go straight ahead. And they go marching through and into the parlor and they have a wonderful tea party. And I'm sitting there embarrassed because my mother did this, but what a wonderful thing that happened. But then something happened, you know, I person second grade were just terrible. But third grade was different. I had a teacher who saw something in me that
16:42 Speaker 04 the others hadn't. And so she appointed me class governor. I couldn't read or write, but I could do other stuff. And she saw that in me. And so I was class governor. And then I had the opportunity to present stuff that our class did to the whole student body.
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19:08 Speaker 04 And so at one point we had a play that was, and it was, the play was the, the,
19:20 Speaker 04 what was it jumped, the frog jumped over the, frog jumped over the pond. And since I was the biggest one in the class, it's, I had an extra ear here. I could jump over this pan of water that they had. And I was really confident, but I knew I could do this. So I come march yada on the stage and I look over into the audience and my two older brothers are sitting there. And it just threw me off my steps enough that when I jumped over the pond, I landed in it, not over it.
19:56 Speaker 04 And my mother had made me this frog suit, uh, she dyed it green and all this. So I'm standing there, the green is fading and I'm in tears and I can't move. And the audience is hysterical. Everybody's just laughing, laughing. And I can't move. So the teacher comes, takes me off the stage. And, and, and I go home totally human again. And we're sitting at the dinner table. My brothers are telling my mother this just great thing, you know, it was just sister. Finally, my mother says to them, all right, boys. You've had your fun now. What are we as a family going to do to help Gladys?
20:41 Speaker 04 So if this ever happens to her again, people won't laugh at her, they'll laugh with her. And that has stayed with me throughout my life because there've been many, uh, you know, this dyslexia thing keeps, keeps you off. It's hard to keep right in the center of things. You get off balance easily. So I've stripped and tripped and fallen on stage and always been able to pick it up. And I'd have the audience in my hand before I ever said a thing. And so it was, uh, one of these huge life learning experiences. And another thing that was really, really interesting.
21:27 Speaker 04 When we started the American Holistic Medical Association, first of all, it took us two years to decide how to spell it because we were looking for the word health, healing and holy. Because what was missing in medicine at that point was the spirit. We had the mind and the body, but we didn't have the spirit. So, but we got it in two years and we got it and so on. But one day, there were 10 of us who were part of this group that started, sitting around a table. And six of us were severely dyslexic.
22:03 Ed Mylett? You're kidding me.
22:04 Speaker 04 I'm not kidding. And so we said to each other, that's why we started this. It must be because we, in order to read, I don't know how I learned to read, you know, I really don't. I have no idea. And they didn't, some of them had some ideas which I didn't particularly agree with, but,
22:23 Speaker 04 it was that kind of thing. But we decided that it was because we were looking for something beyond.
22:32 Ed Mylett? Yeah.
22:34 Speaker 04 Reading, writing, arithmetic.
22:36 Ed Mylett? Yeah. I have to say something to you. There's so much to unpack there. The first thing is when you go back to the 12 year old you. A version of that advice is something I hope everybody in the audience gives themselves.
22:47 Speaker 04 Right.
22:48 Ed Mylett? Which is first, first part of it is, hey, you're a pretty good person. And just that reminder, you're a pretty good person.
22:55 Speaker 04 Yeah.
22:56 Ed Mylett? And, and then the second piece of it is, kind of the second part was, give yourself a break. Give yourself a break. You know what? You're a little bit better than you think you are. And I gotta tell you, if I could go back to the 12 year old me, I would tell me, I would say, you know what? You're a good man. You care about people. You're kind. And you're giving. And you know what? You're not so bad, man. All these things that you know are so bad about you. Those are actually the things. Then the third lesson is that this woman becomes an M D at the time, you know, she's the mother of holistic medicine, number one. But she ends up doing this at a time where this is just not something that very many women were doing at the time. And she does this now to know that you were severely dyslexic. And now to know that when you founded this group,
23:38 Ed Mylett? that the people around the table also shared what most people would think is this deficiency, which ends up to be a gift because it probably caused you to work harder, be more diligent and think beyond, as you would have said. And those are all the things in life. We all think our limitations, or what we think are our limitations. These are the things that steal the juice from our life. To go back to the juice, we think, oh, this limitation I have is why I'm not going to do it. Most humans lose the juice of their life because they're so familiar with their deficiencies and not, and not their possibilities.
24:10 Speaker 04 Yeah.
24:11 Ed Mylett? Not their possibilities. And you say something, she has in this book, six profound principles for living. And the first one is, this is just, you don't always hear doctors say this, but you said, you are here for a reason.
24:26 Ed Mylett? And I'm curious why that was the first thing you listed of the six?
24:32 Speaker 04 Because if you don't get that, where do you put the others? You know, if, if, if you don't realize that you really have a reason to be here. To bring me, it's kind of like a huge jigsaw puzzle and we're each a piece in that jigsaw puzzle. And if you've ever had a thousand piece jigsaw puzzle and got it all done and you couldn't find that last piece, it drives you crazy, you know? We all are that important to the whole. The whole is not complete if we don't recognize ourselves as, as whole.
25:16 Speaker 04 My youngest son, who's an, a, uh, ophthalmologist in Flagstaff, came down, we were talking one time and he says, you know, there's a guy up in Flagstaff. He doesn't like me. He says, I don't understand, but I like me.
25:37 Speaker 04 Yeah.
25:38 Ed Mylett? That, that means you did your job right. That's what that means. Cause that's not, that's not true for most people. By the way, guys, I'll just give you a couple of the other ones. Two is all life needs to move. Third, love is medicine. And fourth, this is a big one, if you could speak to it. Cause I think so many people feel alone. And you said, four, you are never truly alone.
26:00 Speaker 04 Absolutely, absolutely. If you just take the time to, to really look at that, you aren't. There's always some life moving around you and it's, it's, it's the whole process of life. Even if, you know, during, during the pandemic and so on, people were feeling alone. One of the reasons they were feeling alone was because they had never had this experience before of being isolated like that. And for a lot of people, it was a soul awakening. Whereas prior to that, they may have felt like they didn't fit into a community or something, but the community was always there, you know?
26:45 Speaker 04 And they, they always had something that they could reach out to, whether they wanted to or not. But. One of the things that the pandemic did was to give people the awareness Yes. That they needed each other. Yes, yes. And here's another great thing that I think is really interesting. I have a friend who's a visionary and a psychic in Virginia Beach. Rosalie, she, I was talking to her, she and I were talking one time about manifesting something or other that we were trying to manifest. And she said, you know, I think that there's another word that we really need to use.
27:30 Speaker 04 She says, that's femifesting. What does that mean? Says, we manifest things and we think that we have to manifest things. But where is the feminine aspect of this? We need to femifest. So as we talked about it, we realized that manifesting is like climbing Jacob's ladder. You, you get into first grade and then you, you know, you climb the ladder and you get up the where that's manifesting. But femifesting is like a spiral. You can be on the fifth level and you know what's going on down the second level. Women know that.
28:11 Speaker 04 You know, you can be, have a baby in one arm trying to do dishes in another and take care of the one on the floor. The difference in the feminine energy and the masculine energy, which we need both. In fact, I had, the reason we started talking about this is I had a dream. I had this dream where I woke up, there was a huge crash. And I woke up and I looked and I was in the high hemolysis. In a valley and on the one side, there was a young woman just lying there, almost dead,
28:52 Speaker 04 just barely breathing. And on the other side, the left side, there was a man in armor doing the same thing. And I heard the voice saying, this energy, these, these two have been doing this for eons. It's time they did this.
29:12 Ed Mylett? Hmm. By the way, if you were listening, she did her fists together and then put her hands together, come together is what she said. Yeah.
29:18 Speaker 04 And I realized when I began thinking about it, that the, the girl was on the left, on the right side, which is the masculine side. And the man was on the left side, all in armor and everything. And they were been for eons fighting. And so that's when we came up with this femifest and manifest.
29:43 Ed Mylett? Well, it's about to go to millions of people right now. So now I can already see the hats and the T shirts and all this stuff being used today.
29:49 Speaker 04 And you know what happens with a pregnancy?
29:54 Speaker 04 The egg and the sperm come together and life happens.
30:01 Speaker 04 There are a egg by itself is, you know, what's it gonna do? Sperm by itself, what it's gonna do. But when they get to that together, life happens.
30:12 Ed Mylett? So good.
30:13 Speaker 04 And that's manifestation. So pregnancies are femifesting.
30:20 Ed Mylett? So good. I have to tell you, I'm sitting here just going, I don't do very many shows like this where I go, I want to listen to this one back right away. I knew this would be good today, but I didn't know it would be. I knew your depth, but I didn't know you're this deep. And after you've lived a little bit, you have a tremendous appreciation for the things Gladys is talking about. And you said something there, I don't want to miss skip over. You said, I spent time with my dreams. What, what, what, what do you mean by that? I'm just curious. Is that something you've done all your life or?
30:52 Speaker 04 Well, I didn't. Yeah. You know, we used to talk about our dreams when we were kids and all that. And my mother didn't discourage us. But as I.
31:04 Speaker 04 Do you think they have meaning, Gladys? Oh, wow. Yes. In fact, guidance and all of that. In fact, I really didn't understand that I had a voice until I was 93. Now, that didn't mean that I wasn't using my voice, but I didn't really respect it until I was 93. I'm just so, help me, this is true. Because I was dyslexic and I was a dummy. You know, you don't realize how some of these ambiguous things happen to you when you're young, little, and you, you know, you're the damaged one, you know?
31:48 Speaker 04 I was forever asking somebody else to validate it until I had this dream. I was watching nine-year-old Gladys, okay? And we were in the, in the tents, in the jungles where we had grown up. And in our family, on Sunday mornings, we were not supposed to sing anything but hymns or budgens. And as this nine-year-old smart aleck, I thought that was the stupidest thing. And I wanted to sing whatever I wanted to sing. And so I saw myself pulling the tent flap back and looking out to see that my little brother wasn't there because he'd tattle on me and then I'd have, you know, so
32:34 Speaker 04 I had to get out. And he wasn't there, so as fast as I could, I ran and I climbed up my mango tree that was out there. And I'm sitting up at the top and I'm singing. Oh, man, I'm singing the Caterpillar song or any old thing that came into my head and just having the best time. And every so often, I look over my right shoulder and Jesus is up in the tree with me. And Jesus is laughing and I look at him and I say, Jesus loves the little children, right? And he's laughing, and he says, yes. And so I go back to my singing, and then I get to doubting it, you know, and I think,
33:17 Speaker 04 you better check again. So I look back and I say, I'm still a little children, right? And he says, yes. So I go back to my singing and I wake up, and I wake up singing and laughing.
33:30 Ed Mylett? Oh, my.
33:30 Speaker 04 And it was a Sunday morning here.
33:33 Ed Mylett? Oh, my.
33:34 Speaker 04 So it tied all this in. And at that point, I said, Gladys, you have a voice. You have to start claiming it.
33:44 Ed Mylett? Oh, my gosh, Gladys.
33:47 Speaker 04 It's true.
33:48 Ed Mylett? That's amazing. The idea that when we're little, these wounds stay with us till we're 93 or beyond is an absolute fact. The idea that you listen to your dreams, what a lesson for everybody here. And this idea that you find your voice at 93 is absolutely extraordinary. And by the way, thank God you did, because I wouldn't be with you here today if you didn't find that voice.
34:10 Speaker 04 Yeah, well, it was important to me. When I realized what I realized was that every time I had deflected what I had said to somebody else, I was denying what I said.
34:23 Ed Mylett? My gosh, Gladys, there's millions of people right now that are crying, I can promise you, going, that's me. I need someone's validation. I need their approval. I need, I need permission in my life. And not, and not everybody, Gladys, is going to be as blessed and as fortunate as you to be here for the 93 years and to the 102 years. So they better figure it out right now, listening to your wisdom, that they don't need validation or permission, and they have a voice. Because they may not get a chance to figure that out in the 93rd year.
34:53 Speaker 04 That's absolutely true. You need to, you know, we are, I am me, you are you. And there isn't anybody else in between us, except the whole world. You know? So it's, it's, we're there and we bump up with each other and find each other. And I couldn't begin to do this if my son didn't do the technical, you know, we're totally dependent on each other.
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37:26 Speaker 04 Let me tell you, my eldest son.
37:30 Speaker 04 Is a retired orthopedic surgeon. But when he finished his surgery, he was came through Phoenix and he was going down to Del Rio, Texas to start his practice. And he says, Mom, you know, I'm, I'm real worried. He said, I have all this training and everything. And I'm going out into the world. I'm going to have people's lives in my hands. I don't know if I can handle that. And I said, well, Carl, if you think that you're the one that does the healing, you have a right to be scared. But if you can understand that you have this amazing training with this orthopedic surgeon that you have gotten and you've spent all of this time doing,
38:15 Speaker 04 you need to keep that and keep doing it. And then turn the healing of it over to the physician within the patient. Because you can do everything that you do. But if the patient doesn't accept it and doesn't do what you are telling them or work with you with it. And you haven't even accepted the fact that that that they can do that.
38:43 Speaker 04 There's a, there's a gap. So in the whole process of healing, we all need, in the field of medicine, we all need to respect the physician within the patient as our colleague.
38:59 Ed Mylett? I, I think, Glass, I, uh, I'm sitting here thinking, I wish I was giving a seminar and a speech with you. Because I don't, I think, I know what you mean too. And it's not just, it's the field of medicine, it's the field of life.
39:11 Speaker 04 Yes.
39:11 Ed Mylett? There's this, there's this physician within us. Now, for me, that's, that's God living within us. But whatever you're, and I know you believe that too. That that, that, that, that's the healer. That's the one where you, you can do everything you can and you just separate from the outcome and just let things happen the way that they're naturally supposed to happen in life. And too many people, I think sometimes it's actually an ego. Actually, even you might think there's humility involved. You think you're, you, you control everything. There's got to be an element in your life where you do your part. And you actually say this, number five in the book is. Everything's your teacher. And I want you to talk about it, but for me, maybe about fifteen years ago, I I stopped trying to control every outcome. I stopped looking at everything as a win or a loss.
39:56 Ed Mylett? And I started to look at myself more as a learner. And more as a curious person. That didn't mean I don't want to produce a result. I'm driven. I'm ambitious. But when I started to position myself as this life's an experience. And and the things in my life I'm going to learn from. Now you flip it and talk about everything is your teacher. So I want you to share that wisdom as well.
40:22 Speaker 04 If you're stuck in a place. And for for whatever reason. And you don't understand that this is here for a reason. In fact, that's what's happened to the field of medicine. We think, see, I was, I went through medical school during the war. I started.
40:41 Ed Mylett? World War Two.
40:42 Speaker 04 World War Two. I started in.
40:45 Speaker 04 In September and the war started in December. So all those years and it was all about. Trying to get rid of an enemy. And there were the two enemies that were so huge were the enemies that we were we were fighting against. But in the field of medicine. When I got out of the medical school, we still had two enemies. And those enemies were disease and pain.
41:19 Speaker 04 And so those were, we're still trying to do that. Eliminate the disease. And pain. I'm so committed to having in this world, a loving birth. Place where babies can be born in a.
41:39 Speaker 04 Loving in environment, not something that's just trying to kill pain. Because when I was in medical school, we were doing twilight sleep.
41:50 Speaker 04 My first two sons I delivered with twilight sleep. And I didn't know I had a son until twenty four hours later. Because. All the pain was taken away. Every, not all the pain, just. Everything was taken away. It was completely gone. And the baby had to be delivered with forceps. So I was really good at that. I could, I could, you know, deliver a, a baby with after coming head and all. And I've tried, I've realized now that what we did with that whole process of taking away the pain
42:34 Speaker 04 is we've taken away the power from our very women. And we talk about having to be delivered of our babies. We don't have to be delivered of our babies. Women need to birth their babies. And I have to constantly, I'm so many years I talked about delivering babies. We deliver pizzas and we deliver speeches. We don't deliver babies. Women birth their own babies. But we're there to support them and help them and work with them and be part of the world that the baby comes into.
43:17 Ed Mylett? Yeah. I was just thinking about
43:21 Ed Mylett? really good friend of mine is doing a home birth. She just decided to do a home in a loving environment. And you know, a lot of people actually believe the birthing experience affects the emotional well being of the child as well.
43:31 Speaker 04 Oh, absolutely.
43:33 Ed Mylett? I also think about people out there that want to birth their dreams. And the fact that, you know, there's a necessity for pain to go through that. That dream, your dream's not delivered to you. You birth your dream. And there's going to be pain involved. And it's part of the experience of birthing your life and birthing your dream is the pain. And the, the notion that you just remove all of the pain removes the experience. Because when you get to the other side of your life and you do write that book that you finally write, or you make that dream happen. It's some of the pain and the discomfort and the learning that you went through that makes it so worthwhile. And if you stripped out all the pain and all the learning and all the experience, it's just the result instead of the, the journey, the experience that you have.
44:13 Ed Mylett? I'm so fascinated by you. I, I, I want to ask you a question, if you don't mind. This is probably a bit intrusive, but.
44:21 Ed Mylett? I do, and I'm only fifty-two.
44:23 Speaker 04 Oh, you're a baby.
44:25 Ed Mylett? Well, by the way, I feel so good to have somebody that's fifty years older than me on my show because you, really, most of the time, I'm the oldest guy on my show. But I, I wonder if you think about the end of your body in this life. Do you think about those things? If you do, what are your thoughts about them? Do you fear it? Do you want to run full speed towards it? Do you never think about it? Or does thinking about that give you some of that juice in life to live and be present for today?
44:54 Speaker 04 Yes, alas.
44:58 Speaker 04 Yeah, because my sister, well, I've had experience with death that is so inspiring that I don't, you know, like, okay, I'll tell you. My sister, she was two years older than me. And she wasn't a fighter. She was a peacemaker in our family. She was a little child. And, you know, she was that always throughout her whole life. She was, so she was ninety-eight when she was, when she passed over. And she'd been healthy and well until she got the flu.
45:42 Speaker 04 And then she just didn't get over it. And so just as she was, her youngest son and his wife were with her as she made the transition. And she was lying in bed and started singing. And she started singing hymns and bhajans, which are Indian hymns. And as she started, first, her voice was weak, but it got stronger as she kept singing. And every so often, she'd say, "And Aya is here." Now, Aya was our... Well, she was like our second mother. She was this Indian woman. She was
46:28 Speaker 04 totally illiterate and everything, but she was the one that encompassed us and love and all that, you know. My mother was busy with her practice, but Aya was always there. Well, Aya taught us how to play the Indian pulak, the two-sided drum. But she tried to teach me, but I wouldn't sit still long enough. But she taught Margaret. And so she's, Margaret's saying, Aya is here. And in my mind,
46:59 Speaker 04 I can see them moving over to whatever the scope of heaven is that they're moving into, singing and drumming as they go. You know, and to me, what could be more beautiful than that?
47:17 Speaker 02 My gosh.
47:18 Speaker 04 And, and you know, the other
47:22 Speaker 04 times when I've watched people make the transition and, and, and they've communicated with me from the other side. And, you know, there are stories that go on. I, I don't think, see, I know that the baby in the uterus knows what the mother's doing. I mean, as, as a unit, a pregnant woman and a baby are one unit. And it's not until the baby takes it, so that we're feminesteing, okay? So it's not until the baby takes its first breath that it becomes a separate unit.
48:08 Speaker 04 It's that moving into its own person, taking, taking that first life-giving breath that is its own. You know, the mother didn't have to give it to it. It had to find that life force and become not an it, but a real baby. I'd had my last two babies at home.
48:33 Speaker 04 And when I came to Phoenix, we created the baby buggy program so that we could, we had a way in which if there was something, something that needed to have one or the other transported or something, we had the equipment we could transport. And it was, as a matter of fact, it created communities because it was this huge van with a stork painted blue and a stork painted on the side. And when, when I or the midwife went to the house, we would park this baby buggy
49:13 Speaker 04 outside. And so the whole neighborhood knew what was going on in that house. You know, this baby's coming. So it was like it brought the neighborhood together.
49:26 Ed Mylett? You, uh, I'm thinking about, I'm just watching you right now. I'm thinking, she could be doing whatever she wants right now. Right? And, and so could I. And yet you're investing and spending energy on other human beings. And of all the things in your book that made me, well, not of all, one of the things, I can't even pick one. And I can't even pick one out of today. So what we're going to finish this, I'm going to tell everybody at the dinner I'm going to tonight about our conversation, they're going to ask me to pick one thing and I can't. And nobody that's listening to the show can pick one thing. It's too profound. But you say in number six in the book, spend your energy wildly. And a lot of people think, I don't know, rest, take it easy,
50:09 Ed Mylett? you'll live longer if you do that. And a lot of people kind of hit me like, why are you so engaged in your life? You know, and I don't know that I've ever answered it very well, but I almost feel like you gave me permission. What do you, you don't, you have a 10 year plan and you're 102 years old, right? Right? You actually have a 10 year plan.
50:28 Speaker 04 102 and a half.
50:30 Ed Mylett? And a half.
50:33 Speaker 04 My great grandkids, my great grandkids say that. So I can say it too.
50:38 Ed Mylett? 102 and a half.
50:40 Speaker 04 Yeah.
50:40 Ed Mylett? What's this notion of spend your energy wildly?
50:44 Speaker 04 Well, you know.
50:47 Speaker 04 If you try to save it, it doesn't work. And a lot of times when we tell a patient, you know, you have such and such, and you really need to go home and rest.
51:01 Ed Mylett? Yeah.
51:02 Speaker 04 They think that you are saying you have to go home and do nothing. But to go home and rest is to do something. Going home for a rest is actually a prescription for you to do something. You go home and you rest. Then you're not just doing nothing. You're allowing your energy to do what it needs to do, which is sort of refocus itself and do whatever it needs to do. But it's not putting it in a bank and then having to go and pull it out again or something like that.
51:46 Speaker 04 It's something that that has to be allowed to be something.
51:51 Ed Mylett? Yes.
51:51 Speaker 04 And so to be resting is a very good thing. If that's what you're supposed to be doing. But if you have, like I have a patient not too long ago, who was retired from the work that she'd been doing, and she'd been resting, and she had lost all of her juice that she thought she was saving.
52:17 Ed Mylett? Yes, yes, yes, yes.
52:19 Speaker 04 Reconnect her with her juice.
52:22 Ed Mylett? Oh, my gosh. You're just unbelievably awesome. Like, you're just unbelievably awesome. You are. I, um, okay, I got two more things for you. I, I tell you what. I would love to have you come back on. Would you come back on again?
52:39 Speaker 04 Uh huh.
52:39 Ed Mylett? Okay, I would love that.
52:43 Speaker 01 Mr. President, my company foreme of the explosion on our rig.
52:46 Speaker 02 On October 2nd.
52:47 Speaker 01 Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me.
52:52 Speaker 02 Tom Cruise is.
52:53 Speaker 01 Digger got us into this mess, and Digger's gonna dig us up.
52:57 Speaker 02 From the director of Birdman and The Ravenette.
52:59 Speaker 03 What would happen if I stopped drilling? You stop, you freeze in there, that's what.
53:04 Speaker 02 With great power comes great deniability.
53:07 Speaker 03 I'm not the first nanny.
53:08 Speaker 02 Digger. See the trailer online. Only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17. Not admitted without parent.
53:14 Ed Mylett? We'll do, we, there's just too many things I want to ask you, but
53:20 Ed Mylett? two things. You met Gandhi at one point in your life, correct?
53:23 Speaker 04 Uh huh.
53:23 Ed Mylett? What you, what did you learn from Gandhi, if anything?
53:26 Speaker 04 Well, it was one of the
53:32 Speaker 04 experiences that you don't forget, okay?
53:34 Ed Mylett? Yeah.
53:35 Speaker 04 The family was in the process on a train going from the Rodeke down to Bombay to get on a boat and come to the States because every seven and a half years, my parents had a furo. And so I was on the train and we, the train started slowing down because there was a huge crowd, but there are always crowds around in India, you know? But there was this whole crowd and they were chanting and saying something. And I saw up ahead of them, this man with, just a small man with a large lark t, which is his staff, and his dhoti, which is the
54:19 Speaker 04 the dhoti that he wears around loin cloth.
54:24 Speaker 04 And he's walking along and comes right about outside of my window, just not, not outside, but in my light of vision, and stoops down and a little girl is handing him a flower. And when he's picked, he hands, takes the flower from the little girl, he looks up and looks straight into my eyes. Now, nobody can tell me he didn't do it.
54:53 Speaker 04 Nobody can tell me what happened, but I knew at that time there was something there. And so I can, I can still conjure up that look, you know, it was, it was just.
55:09 Speaker 04 Sometimes a newborn baby can look at you like that. There's sometimes there's, there's a connection with you and another person that is there. And, um, and that's what happened. So, well, you know, I, I took it in and, and thirty years later. When India partition happened and the Hindus were killing the Mahamahans, you know, there was such awful stuff. My parents and my brother Carl, who was a, a physician.
55:48 Speaker 04 Had a little mobile unit that they were traveling around to the camps where the people were having. And, and my dad and mother were working with Gandhi, talking to the people about. From the stage about trying to get some kind of movement of life that would. He helped to heal this whole thing. And, um, so they, they became friends and I was in. Uh, college at the time. So, you know, I was here in the States, but that my parents were out there working with Gandhi.
56:26 Speaker 04 And when they, uh, at one point Gandhi gave my mother a, a, a Kashmiri shawl. Which I have here in my house and my dad a blanket because they.
56:44 Speaker 04 Respected each other so much that it was one of those things that I still connect with the time that I had connected with Gandhi at when I was 10 years old.
56:57 Ed Mylett? Hmm. I think what you're saying there too is that, by the way, this is an experience I'll never forget. And I think what you mean by that is that there's an energy when you meet certain people and that that's what life really is. You talk so much about energy, the way that we use it, the way that we give it to other people. And I think everybody, one of the lessons today is just to be conscious of energy, conscious of you're, you're, you're always making people feel something. So take, be, be intentional about what those things are. And you're always making yourself feel something.
57:28 Speaker 04 Absolutely. Yeah. And you're, when you're aware of it, it really is a teacher.
57:35 Ed Mylett? Hmm.
57:36 Speaker 04 When you become aware of what this, what you're doing, no matter whether it's a pleasant, well, not, I'm almost no matter whether it's good or bad, but it's not that. I don't mean that. I mean, energy is energy.
57:52 Ed Mylett? Yep.
57:53 Speaker 04 And, and whatever it is, it is.
57:56 Ed Mylett? That's right. It is. And don't judge it when you, when you experience it. It's beautifully said. I, I don't know. I don't know. I, I, I didn't know that this was going to affect me as much as it did today. And it really, really did.
58:08 Speaker 04 It touches me too.
58:11 Ed Mylett? I'm deeply moved by you and your work. And I'm speaking for millions of people. I just want to say thank you. Thank you for finding your voice at 93.
58:20 Speaker 04 Yeah.
58:20 Ed Mylett? Thank you for having that dream. Thank you for listening to that dream and thank you for what you do.
58:25 Speaker 04 And thank you for allowing me to, to say it, to talk about it.
58:31 Ed Mylett? I'm quite grateful. This is one of those experiences I will never forget. And so I can't wait for the world to hear this. So everybody make sure that you get Dr. Gladys McGary's book, The Well-Lived Life, 102 Year Old Doctors, Six Secrets to Health Happiness at Every Age. All right, everybody. God bless you. While you're getting it, grab the Power of One More, Ed Mylett's book. I hear that's pretty good, too. And share this episode with as many people as you can who just want to live a better life and want to learn from someone who's got unbelievable wisdom. God bless you, everybody. This is the Ed Mylett Show.
Previous Step Into Your Worthiness Next Diversity Empowers You Page updated October 26, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
