Your roadmap to finding joy and purpose in life from a 103-year-old doctor

This post may contain affiliate links. See my disclosure for more information.

Like it? Share it!

Find out who you are, pay attention to how you’re called to grow & change, and learn to listen to what makes your heart sing.

Do you ever look back at small moments and realize that they pointed you to something wonderful? I caught part of an interview last year with this sweet, adorable old woman who completely captivated me. After watching a short while, I realized that she was also incredibly knowedgeable, kind and had a wisdom and a peace that I wanted.

I ordered her book, The Well-Lived Life, that day. And after devouring it, I have gone back and pored over it several times since then. It’s the kind of advice that, at least for me, strikes me but doesn’t always stick immediately. Reminders are good.

Going back this week to drink from this well of wisdom once again, I thought it was time to share. Maybe something will strike you too, though I know it won’t be for everyone. If it’s not for you, that’s okay too. I’d love to know what wisdom motivates you to be the best version of yourself, to live and experience all that life has to offer.

Dr. Gladys McGarey

Dr. Gladys was raised primarily in India where her parents, both osteopathic physicians, were serving as medical missionaries. Growing up as she did, she was exposed to a larger variety of experiences and perspectives than most of us. She and her husband pioneered the study and understanding of holistic medicine, helping to found the American Holistic Medical Association in 1978. Holistic medicine referring to the strategy of treating the whole patient, not just the disease.

She says in the the introduction that if she had to distill her life’s work, and purpose in writing the book, to a single sentence it would be this: To be truly alive, we must find the life force within ourselves and direct our energy toward it. Sounds kind of woo-woo, right?

Personally, I love a little woo-woo.

She goes on to describe that what she is referring to is a ‘joyful, participatory engagement’ in life that allows us to ‘keep dancing with life itself, no matter what it throws our way.’

Yes, please. That is the kind of old lady I’d like to be.

Have I told you about my theory of aging? I’m convinced that the kind of old person we become: whether a grumpy old lady, creepy old man, the wise sage, sweet grandma, or free-spirit… whatever comes out in our elderly years, that’s who we’ve always really been, we just aren’t able to filter what’s inside anymore. If that’s true, I want to start now to build [inside] the kind of person I want to exude when my brain is unable or uninterested in putting on a mask to present to the world. We get to create the kind of old person we’ll be one day. Ask me when I’m 80 and I’ll let you know if my theory was correct.

Dr. Gladys tells a story of an encounter she had with Gandhi when she was a child. A brief second of eye contact on a train platform that left her with this recollection:

It felt as if he saw my sadness… my fear, my hope, and accepted all of it. He looked at me with an unforgettable love – one that recognized my very soul.

In her book, she offers us six pieces of wisdom framed in that kind of love. Love that carries hope for the future. Love that gives purpose to impossible struggles that signal a turning point of life pushing us into a new paradigm.

You are here for a reason

Each of us is here for a reason, to learn and grow and give our gifts. When we’re able to do that, we’re filled with a creative life energy that Dr. Gladys calls the ‘juice’.

The juice is our reason for living. It’s our fulfillment, our joy. It’s what happens when life is activated by love. It’s the energy we get from the things that matter and mean something to us.

Discovering and connecting with our unique gifts keeps us vital, it activates our desire to be alive and live fully. In fact, did you know that studies have shown that living with purpose helps our lives be longer as well as better.

Sometimes we may struggle to find out what our ‘juice’ is, other times we may worry we’re being pulled in too many directions, toward different passions. The thing is, we don’t have to choose. Dr. Gladys reminds us that we’re complex beings, and we can embrace that complexity. She uses the illustration of a puzzle piece that fits together with other pieces, different on each side.

One lovely thing about The Well-Lived Life is that at the end of each chapter she shares exercises you can try, to put her advice into practice. Reading about, even talking about, these nuggets of wisdom isn’t enough for them to affect change in us. She encourages slowness and repetition, to really embody them.

All life needs to move

No matter how stuck we may find ourselves, life itself always keeps moving. Trying to stop this flow of life brings us suffering.

Sometimes, we simply need to let life move through us and around us without trying to stop it. Other times we must move…physically, spiritually, emotionally.

When challenging things arise, of course they deserve processing. But have you ever gotten stuck in the processing and you just can’t move on? Or maybe you’ve got regrets, things you’re unable to let go?

I’ve regretted things I’ve said, people I’ve hurt and choices I’ve made. I’ve also regretted opinions I’ve held. But I refuse to hold on to my regret.

When we’re feeling stuck or blocked, it can be immensely helpful to clarify what it is we want. Knowing what we truly want in a situation can help to get our energy moving, it can help to understand what is or isn’t working to move us in the direction we need to go.

Movement, from the outside, doesn’t reveal motive. And you’re the only one who knows if you’re running toward or running away from something.

You are the only one who can say for sure whether you’re avoiding something difficult or simply letting go of something that is no longer serving you.

Love is the most powerful medicine

Love and fear are in a constant push-pull relationship. Love dispels fear, but it can also be blocked by fear.

Even when we’re lost in the dark, each of us can choose how to forge the path ahead.

Fear is a natural response when we find ourself in circumstances we feel helpless to change. But the thing about fear is that it kind of destroys our ability to reason, to see things clearly. For many of us, fear has been our habit. The antidote is to lean into the practice of love. Love is infinitely stronger than fear.

Sounds a bit cliche, right? That doesn’t make it untrue. What it means is that we’re likely to overlook it because we have the t-shirt, we’ve heard the song, seen the billboard, and so we gloss over what it looks like to actually do.

We can start with the practice of loving ourselves. Not pridefully, but embracing gratitude for the life we’ve been given.

This gratitude allows us to fully receive love from others. If that feels awkward or difficult for some of us, she suggests starting with animals. Animals offer us unconditional love, and can remind us that we are both lovable and able to love even when we’ve forgotten how.

Loving ourselves and allowing our self to be loved help us to freely give love. Loving others doesn’t mean that we agree with them. Approve of everything they do. Want to spend a lot of time with them.

Dr.Gladys says that she learned about loving others by watching her parents. She watched them walk into leper colonies to treat people, touching those who had been told they were untouchable. They taught her to love everyone. Absolutely everyone.

She says that if she can’t love someone, she considers that her problem, not the other person’s. (And before you think: this lady must never have been hurt by anyone… know that her husband divorced her when they were in their 70s!) She digs into this idea in the book, reminding us that we can find peace in ourselves even with people in our lives who challenge that peace.

You are never truly alone

We need each other. But sometimes, doesn’t it seem like even when we want to connect..it feels too difficult to get our needs met?

People are messy, chaotic even. We can’t live in community and expect everything to be exactly as we want it to be.

Yet there’s beauty in imperfection, growth in difference. Thinking that we have to agree on everything in order to enjoy each other’s company is dangerous, and lonely.

When we live in community, learning to set boundaries is to our benefit.

Boundaries, however, aren’t what many of us think they are. Boundaries aren’t so much about building walls to keep others out, they’re about choosing what deserves our attention and how we spend our limited energy.

Remember, too, that what we have to offer community is just as important as what we have to gain from it. Someone needs you,

Everything is your teacher

Turning toward life is a process. It can take years, even decades, to fully make sense of ourselves and our role in the world around us. This process is made up of tiny moments-minuscule choices that we get to make over and over again.

Learning to look for lessons, especially in the difficult times, we are able to move our attention away from our suffering and direct it back toward life. She’s not talking about toxic positivity here. Our hurt continues to hurt, we’re just looking for the lesson in it, finding a sliver of gratitude for the growth.

What about chronic issues, those things that we are helpless to change? They offer us the chance to practice finding and making choices repeatedly.

Dr. Gladys tells a story about two patients, women, who were suffering from the same chronic illness. She observed over the course of the several years that she treated them both that they were dealing very differently. Both women were in pain, both were deeply challenged by their symptoms. Yet one seemed to be always suffering while, most of the time, the other wasn’t.

She was learning life lessons from her body, such as how to find purpose and flow…to [let go of] foods and activities that weren’t serving her, to practice loving self-care, and to lean on her community. She was allowing it to teach her how to live her best life.

Something very telling occurred to her when she asked each woman the same question, “Do you identify with your pain in any way?”

The woman who was coping better responded that while she had the illness, she had pain..those things were not her. She went on to describe some visualizations she’d come up with to mentally separate her illness and pain from her self. The other woman, however, responded very differently. She replied that she was proud to be living with the illness, proud of all she’d overcome. In fact, she’d even gotten a personalized license plate with the name of the illness on it. She had made her pain her identity.

The truth is, when we focus on turning towards what increases our energy, we naturally turn away from that which drains it. The things that drain our energy, especially those things we can’t escape, we can consciously choose to give them a different kind of energy.

She gives a number of examples of how to choose how we spend our energy. One question she poses is to ask yourself if the things you put your energy toward return energy to you? Do they amplify your energy or deplete it? (This idea reminds me of one of my all-time favorite books, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck… another one that may not be for everyone. But if you’re interested in the concept of being intentional about what you give your time, care, & energy to, definitely check this out. I keep it next to my bathtub and flip through it on the regular)

You are right on time

Maybe you wonder if you’ve done enough, if you are enough. Shouldn’t you be further along by now? Aren’t you too old to be starting this? Everyone else is surely doing better than you.

Life has it’s own timing. No matter how hands on or off you believe God is in any given situation, that timing deserves respect. We’re typically most interested in when something comes into being..when the baby is born, when the book is published, when we win the award. But remember, the things that will one day be revealed, manifest, born–in you… those things may be growing now.

Is it possible there’s hope you can’t see?

Dr. Gladys tells as story from her youth in which a crocodile that had been attacking a village was hunted and killed. Inside the stomach of the crodocile, along with the jewelry of some of the villagers, they found a whole turtle, and were startled when it began to move. Her father brought the story up frequently to her and her siblings, saying, “Imagine it from the turtle’s perspective! He sure didn’t foresee a rescue. When things look dark and you’re tempted to give up, remember that turtle and hang on a little longer.”