I get a team. It's Harps, it's Tiff, and I'm super excited to introduce you to Dr Gladys. We spoke about her last week. This is exciting for me and I can tell you in over twelve hundred episodes of The You Project, I don't think I've ever been more excited about a guest. So, without further ado, Dtor Gladys, Welcome to the Youth Project.
Oh what a thing to hear at my age.
I mean, it's true, like I heard about you, and then I read about you, and then I listened to you on podcast, and I watched you on YouTube, and I went, I want to be I've got a new hero. I want to be like you when I grow up. When I grow up, I want to be like you. How do you How do you enjoy or should I say tolerate all the interviews that you now do, because I mean, you've always been well known and you've always
been well respected. But do you enjoy chatting to people about your journey or is it just a task that you have to tick a box on?
No?
No, it's so exciting. I can really hardly. I can't put my mind around it. The idea that I could imagine such a thing when I was actively in practice and then raising the kids and then all of that stuff.
You know, it's beyond my imagination. So yeah, it's exciting, it's wonderful, and everybody's different, and the questions are all a lot of them very law the same, but they're not the same because they're different people and they're asked differently, and so somehow I find myself answering them the same but not the same.
You know, could you imagine? So what are we now? Twenty three? So you were you born in nineteen twenty uh huh imagine? Could you imagine when you were twenty years old in nineteen forty and I said to you, gladys in you know, eighty three years or eighty two years, you're going to be You're going to be talking to this weird man on the other side of the world. He's going to be in Australia, You're going to be in the US, and you're going to be able to see him and talk to him in real time with
no delay. You would have thought it was one impossible or two magic.
I would have hung up on you. I could not have believed it.
Absolutely not like I can't imagine what one hundred years from now is going to be, like, I mean, trying.
To think that, I know how you know. So you know, when I was a kid.
In school, had no telephone, you know, and in order for my parents to let my grandparents in the States know that I had been born, they had to send a telegram wow, which meant actually the whole thing wire had to go through the Atlantic Ocean. At the I mean, there was nothing, no and it took and it took a letter a month to get from our house to the grandparents house.
So I know, it's just it's I feel like in the last year, the last year, the last century, that technology has expanded more than in the previous you know, ten millennia. Do you how are you with technology? Are you I see that you handed your iPhone to your son before we got underway. Are you comfortable using your iPhone? You technology? My mom's own only, I say, eighty three my mom, and she hates it, but I think it's because she's scared of it.
Well, yeah, you know, I use it. The thing I use it the most for is getting calls. And you know, I answered, well, actually, John answers, then I answered, and you know that kind of stuff. But the big thing is it records my steps. I tried to put one three thousand, eight hundred steps with my walker around the house. I'm not going any place. I'm here, but the things I can imagine, the things I can do, and the life.
You know.
I can listen to audio books and because I can't see very well, but there's nothing wrong with my vision.
So it's.
My mother a statement she used to say, well just make do you know, when you find yourself in a place where you can do, you don't know what you're going to do, you just make do?
Yeah, yeah, can you so? For my audience, who are meeting you for the first time, we have listeners in ninety countries, but the majority of our listeners are Australia and New Zealand, could you tell us a little bit about your childhood and where you grew I know because I've been researching you, but yeah, a little bit of a snapshot of your background and your story so we can get some context.
I would love to. I was born in India. In fact, my mother went into labor with me at the taj Maho. I think she's kind of a little drama queen. But anyway, I was born in Indian nineteen twenty November thirty and I and you know, life went on. I thought life was the best thing in the world when I was young, before I went to school, because my parents were both osteopathic physicians and had gone out to India's medical missionaries. So we lived in tents out in the jungle and
it was wonderful. You know.
We could run around and play.
We had had perimeters as to how far we could go into the jungle as kids, but we could go into the villages and I could play with the village kids. And I spoke Hindustani before I spoke English, so you know, I knew what was going on. And I had three brothers and one sister, and my brother Carl was my big tease and he teased me. You know, life was just beautiful until I started school. Up until then, I loved what my parents were doing. I had told them
when I was two that I was a doctor. And my sister wouldn't let me play with her dolls because my dolls got sick and hers didn't, and and so forth.
You know, life was real.
Yeah, and tell me about you said it? Life was good until school. What happened at school?
When I started school, I couldn't read. I was so dyslexic. Each each number and anything, the elf, the everything just floated around in the page. I absolutely couldn't read. And I knew the alphabet, and I knew the numbers and stuff, but to put them down or to try and look at them. So and the teacher decided I was the stupid in the class. So I was the class dummy
and treated as such. So the other kids teased me and and so on, and I didn't like that, so I'd punch him out and get into fights with them. And my brother Carl taught me how to fight, and in fact, you know, and so all of that would go on until after I after school, I would go We were living in the Himalias at that time. The school was way up seven five hundred feet in the Himalias, and so but I had to go from the school up to our home, which is a thousand feet higher.
So it was a long trip, but it was a wonderful trout up the road, up the little path to the because I was getting away from what I where I was dummy, up to where I was loved and cherished. At the top of the hill my Ayah, who was like a second mother for us, ignorant nun, I couldn't read, couldn't write, had few teeth, and all amazing woman, the
epitome of love for me. And she would see me coming up the hill and she'd say, hithera, and she'd hold out her childther her scarf and I would run over and cumble myself under her arm and stay there until my life came back into focus and then I could go on with what was going on in our family. But it was like I lived two separate lives during that time, and it went on for two years because I fluedged first grade and had to do it again.
Did I talk to Gladys? Did I even have a name for dyslexia? Then? Did I have any like? Was there any awareness around on it?
None? None? But a beautiful thing.
Just to connect this is that when we started the American Holistic Medical Association in the mid seventies, there was ten of us sitting doctor's physicians sitting around a table and we got to talking, and as we were talking, six of us said that we were dyslexic. Wow, And so we looked at each other and we said, well, that's why we had to find an alter and way of thinking about medicine, because we think of things in alternative play. I don't know how I learned to read write.
I really don't, and they didn't either. We couldn't explain to each other what it was, and we knew the word by then, but that was.
That was it.
Have a theory that dyslexics, dyslexi people are often highly intelligent. I've met so many creative, productive, successful people who are dyslexic, and it feels like they've got to create their own map of the world with some components of living. And because you've got to solve problems in a way that people who can read don't. Have you found that I had to.
I wouldn't be here if I hadn't found that way of doing it. Yeah, yeah, And so you know there is to me as they were to my sister who could read and write.
And when did you learn the name for what you were battling with? Like did you did you ever get diagnosed when you were young or did you find that out when you were a doctor?
Oh?
Oh, yeah, it was after I was in I think I had my MD degree because I'd already and through medical school and that was that was a challenge. But no, it was later. It was in the oh, I don't know, I don't know, but I had met other people like me, so that was comfortable, more comfortable.
I mean, if neviguiding, you know, prep or grade one was difficult with dyslexia, how difficult was never guiding medicine? Medical degree? Medical school?
Well, pretty difficult because what we were taught in medical school was all about killing, killing disease and killing pain because it was the middle of the war and that that's all that anybody thought about, and that I knew we probably had to do that. I knew I had to learn that. I knew how to you know, those things. But that's not what I was looking for in medicine because I'd watched my parents work with parents with patients with no no. Yeah, I have a watch here that says, I fell.
I'm glad, I'm glad it's wrong, it.
Is, it's going to go back anyway. It was.
The whole process of medical school was difficult for me. But I could understand, you know, I could hear what was saying. I could I had gotten to the point actually where I could read. It was difficult, but I could do the things and so on and so forth. But the big thing that bothered me in medical school was what what we thought we.
Were disposed to be doing.
And I really did not believe that I was there to kill anything. But I knew that I was there to help people live because that's what my parents did. That's what I thought medicine had to do. Anyway, I was different enough that the dean of the school sent me to the psychiatrist twice because she was sure that I didn't belong And anyway, the psychiaty thought I was, okay, you know.
What God did. What did the dean of the school think was wrong? In inverted commas? Wrong with you?
Well, I didn't understand that. Yeah, that's what I had to know about was killing diseases and killing pain. And to me, I didn't like the idea of killing diseases or killing pain because I thought people have pain, and they have diseases, and I know people that live with them, and I don't want to kill those people who have those diseases. It was just it was to me, the focus was wrong, because that's not why I was going into medicine and I knew it.
And did that kind of that belief of yours and that perspective. Is that what opened the door into holistic medicine for you?
Yes, because I married a man who actually accepted the same and he would He was planning to be a minister, but after he met me, he became a physician, and so we were in practice together so we could do what we felt we needed to do. And so when we began to think of different ways and so on, and Bill loved to write, so he began writing a newsletter called Pathways to Health and this newslet or went around to different please place.
Isn't it amazing things began to happen.
Yeah. Yeah, And of course you started the American Holistic Medicine Association. And how did you start that, what was the thinking behind that, and how was that received when you first began.
I won't repeat the names we were called. Wow, actually we were again it was my first grade experience, because yeah, because we were talking about things that were different from what other people were talking about. And even to the point where when this one must have been in the mid seventies, we got an letter from one of the
men who had received the newsletter that I mentioned. He was a mailman in Maine and he had three months earlier he'd injured his ankle and nobody could figure out what was wrong, and he'd gone to doctors and so on. But he received our newsletter and we'd be talking about using a cast or a pack on your neck if you had a source road. He had a source throad. He put a casse pack on his neck and his ankle cleared up, and he said to us, if you
know why that happened, I'd sure like to know. And we looked at each other and we said, we don't have a clue. So the next newsletter that went out Bill told that whole story, and we got an answer from a doctor in Italy who was saying, if you guys knew anything about acupuncture, you would understand that this meridian that starts at it ankle of the angle of the eye goes over the head, down the neck all
the way down to the toe. When the objection or the object was or whatever it was, the obstruction, I'm part of the work.
When the obstruction was.
Relieved in the neck, it was the ankle. And so we be again writing to people all around the world. And nineteen seventy three we had the first acupuncture symposium in the States because actually it was interesting because Nixon had just gone to China and seen an appendectomin done out with acupulcture the upper time, and we had a bit in Stanford University. We had a two hundred eighty physicians who came, and the whole process of understanding about acupucture,
yeah emerged. You know, it's it's life has been so fascinating.
Yeah, that's amazing. It's kind of like the doctor Gladys the intersection of you know, Western science and medicine and Eastern science. You know, when we're bringing acupuncture into that space, was it Obviously if you had two hundred and eighty physicians come along, they were interested.
Yeah, we were.
They were members of our American holistic medical associations.
Right right, right, and more broadly, there was so the rest of the medical community not such a big fan.
Oh, it was very difficult to get your In fact, in Arizona we created our own licensing process because you know, the rest of the community didn't accept it, but they you know, ultimately, of course, it took us two years to figure out how to spell holistic because the word we were looking for, the root word, was health, healing and holy. In other words, the problem we saw was that was left out of medicine was the you know, we had knew about the body and you knew about
the mind, but where was the spirit? And we understood that that was what was doing the healing, and so there we go, we had to find some way of doing it. In fact, at my uh, what is it one hundred and third birthday? One hundred and second? What is this birthday?
I had?
Yeah, I mean to tell you this gets big stuff. But anyway, at the I wrote it in on a tricycle because I wanted to really I show how what I think about medicine. The first look at a tricycle. You have two wheels in the back. They're wonderful. The body and the mind work, they work together, they're really good. But they can't do anything by the two wheels like that, they're just there. But you put a third wheel in front and a good solid structure, and then you've got
something that's good can go someplace. You know, the mind. You put the mind in there, and I mean the spirit in there and then it can begin to go. And so so now you have a structure that can move. However, that can't do anything until a person climbs onto the seat and takes hold of the handles, and it can
go where the person wants it to go. In other words, when it becomes a actual part of how our human spirit can use it as part of the actual movement of our human spirit, it doesn't really matter who's going to sit on that seat. It matters how what that person wants to do, and then the thing will do it. So the whole field of medicine five mind has got like a big tricycle. You know, it'll go where we wanted to go.
So when you came out and you were talking, you know that medicine is not just about drugs and operations and prescriptions, but it's about love and can passion and the mind and the soul. And you were saying all these weird things. I must have thought you were some kind of unicorn.
And which doctor was it? Oh yeah, a very common but kind word for us.
I saw you talking. I can't remember who you were chatting with. It might have been Jim Quick, but you were talking about the role of love the role of love or the capacity of love for healing, and you know therapy. Can you talk a little bit about that.
It's essential. That's what my parents used to do their healing. That's what I understood. But I have what I called it my five l's, and includes this. The first L is life without life nothing. You know, there's nothing else
to talk about. But you have a seed in the pyramid that has all the life of the universe in it, but it can't do anything because it's held in by this shell until love, in the form of water and sunshine and so on, breaks that shell, and then the whole life force can begin to move.
It's the way life.
And love are one unit. It's like a sperm and an ovun. You know, you don't have any life force in a human until that sperm and oven come together, the ovum being the life force and the sperm being the activating first force, so that it's that combination of life and love which are essential for life to continue. Third, the third L is laughter. For me, laughter without love is cruel, it's it's cold, it's it's it's mean. But laughter with love is joy and happiness and healing. And
the fourth one is labor. You know, I gotta go to work. Too many papers. Life just you know, you drag yourself. It's like I dragged myself up the mountain, but at the top of it, you know. But laughter with love is bliss. It's what It's why you do what you do. It's why I'm in the full of medicine, field of medicine. That's why Peter's paint, why singers sing. And the fifth one is listening. Listening without love is empty sound, but listening with love is understanding.
Wow.
And so when I came up these with these five l's, it began to make more sense to me. Yeah, the whole picture of life.
That is incredibly wise. Thank you for that. Now you've written a new book, of course you have because you've got nothing else to do. So you've written a new book which is called The Well Lived Life one hundred and two year old Doctor's Six Secrets to Health and Happiness at Every Age. Did you enjoy you've written? I think that that was book number six for you. Did you enjoy writing that? Do you? What's the process for you?
Well?
Actually this was a different process because the other books were had a medical bed. Two of them I wrote them. The first one was above pregnancies and birthing and so on, but there were reasons for writing them in the field of medicine. But this one is I was reaching for the very essence of why medicine was what it was for me. Yes, And actually I kind of didn't like the title of the book at first when we began talking about it, because I thought that it meant it
was my life. But what what we finally what I finally realized the book is about what the reader is going to get.
Out of it.
Not I put into it what I could, but now the joy of it has been but the reader gets out of it.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, amazing, Doctor gladys Can, I ask, so, what does your your typical day look like? And how do you how do you manage you How do you manage your mind and your body and your emotions and your lifestyle. I'm sure you have a little bit of help, but in terms of keeping your mind and brain and body and emotions healthy, what's your operating system?
Well, I get up at six o'clock, I go to the bathroom, I go downstairs and I have raisin, brad and prunes for breakfast, and then I start doing the things that I'm going to do that day. Yeah, kids on where I am. I mean, if my kids are or little, I'd be taking care of the kids and then going to work at the clinic or no matter what is what that day brings FORTH like to be here. Now most every weekday, I have at least one opportunity
to talk to people from around the world. I mean it just so I can't tell you what I'm going to do. And I have lunch, and then I take a nap. I take it usually an hour or two nap, and then I continue with the things that I do and I go to bed about eight o'clock in the meantime. I in my head there's a tape that runs that has hymns and pudgeons going through it.
All the time.
Wow, I if I just sit quietly, I have this kind of back. You know, I've got a crazy mind, but it works very well for me. Because I have this, I can move into that state very easily.
Yeah, I heard, I think I heard. Tell me if I get this wrong, but you recently had some stem cell therapy, Is that right?
Yes? I did.
I've had two infusions of stem cell into my circulatory system.
And what's that about.
Well, you know these are stem cells that are embryonic stem cells and they're baby stem cells. So these baby stem cells coming to help supplement my one hundred and two year old stem cells and I so, you know, it's helped. I can't tell you how much it seled, except I know that it's helped in the seeing in my right eye is a little bit better than it was before I had the stem cells. But then, you know,
how do you as you're watching your child grow. You can see that kid and then about uh three months later, you look at it, Look.
How you've grown.
We don't see that kind of the growth is sell By sell By sell By sell into the age that we are, and you don't. I can't say, uh what it is that is better, but I remembering back, I think that my knees knees probably are stronger. But I you know, but I'm happy I did it. And so yeah, you know that kind of thing is available to us. Now.
Yeah, it's it's I mean, it's it's amazing. It's as would say in Australia, it's bloody amazing. Doc. Some of the okay, some of the things that hey, I wanted to ask you on so many things, but we'll let you go in ten or fifteen, if that's all right.
But I wanted to ask you about your thoughts about the patient doctor relationship and how important that is, the kind of the way that you know medical professionals deal with their patients, and your personal philosophy on how you would build rapport or a relationship with a patient.
Well, first of all, I've always hugged my patience. I feel that I's been part of what I needed to do. But my eldest son as a retired orthopedic surgeon, and so when he came, he'd finish his training and he came through Phoenix and he was going down to Del Rio, Texas to start his practice in order to and he said, Bomb, you know, I have all this training and I think it's amazing, but I've scared. He said, 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, you have this amazing work to do orthopedic surgery. If we have a broken bone, we need to have somebody who knows how to fix it, you know, so you use the work that you've been trained to do to the best of your ability, and then you turn the actual healing over to the physician within that patient, who is what does the feeling healing.
So if you support the.
Colleague, the patient's physician within them, that that sense of who they are and what they can do, you support that, and that's what does the healing. Ye And you know, so he took it, he's done with it, and you know it's been an amazing life that he's been able to live.
Yeah, could you talk to us a little bit about your thoughts on the role of or the capacity of the mind for healing or the relationship between our psychology and our physiology and maybe yeah, how how you utilized that?
Well? I think it.
I think we are triune beings, and I think that we have the body minding, the spirit connection that is the physical aspect of our whole being.
But that is.
Let's see fired up or the energy okay here, the energy that goes with that is our divine being. In other words, I think that when God, whatever God is, to each one of us, whatever God created us as humans and he said, now you guys are in charge of Well, he said, I now give you dominion over the earth, and we think we're so smart. We thought dominion was the same as dominance, and so we have taken over the earth and done terrible things to the earth because we thought we were the ones who were
in charge, and we were, and we've done that. But what dominion is is care of So when divine energy gave us the ability to choose, to make decisions, to have purpose in life and all of that, it was because we were given the purpose a purpose of taking care of dominion.
And so.
It's a misunderstanding. And I think we as humans now are really reaching for our true humanity, you know, like she did, she looking for going home, always reaching try to go home. I think that's what the I think certainly the people that I'm hearing from now are people who are really looking for their true humanity.
I hadn't planned to ask you, but just as you're talking, I thought to this, and this is just one of those weird questions. But I'm sure you have some thoughts. What do you personally, if you don't mind sharing, what do you think happens when we die, which, of course we don't have evidence, but what do you what are your thoughts around that.
I think it's sort of like going into a dream, right, I think it's I think it's very real.
I have contact still with my sister and in dreams or she'll show up in my thoughts or so.
I don't think that we just go poof when we're done.
I think that the movement is a actual, real consciousness shift that we go into when we make the transision. I think it's an amazing process. I'm not afraid of death at all.
Yeah, that's amazing.
We die every day, you know, Yeah, parts of us we do.
Now. I heard that you're still doing You're still consulting people on the phone, You're still doing a little bit of work. Is that Is that correct?
Yeah?
Yeah, I know A lowed to practice because I don't have a license anymore. But that's fine, because they didn't tell me I had to stop talking.
Yeah, yeah, they can't. They can't stop you from talking. But so at one hundred and two, what do you know? What do you know for sure that most of us don't know? And I don't mean that with any arrogance from your part, But what do you know now that you profoundly believe that you think, like a lot of us don't know, and perhaps we should think about.
I think that life and love are the two things that we really really need to think about, because that's what changes everything. And in the process of being aware of our life and doing the best we can and loving it and loving those who are with us there, and loving the birds around us, and loving the earth, and life becomes oh wow. You know, there's so exciting and so important and each one of us, and each one of us has that ability within us. There is
that we just have to look for it. It's like the light that all of this comes up. If we look for the light, we'll see the light. If you don't look for it, you won't see it.
Well, that's true.
That's almost biblical. I think there's a scripture that says if you walk in the light as he is in the light, you have fellowship one with another. There I don't know where I pulled that from.
Well that's great because we need each other, we need you know, And so yeah, and you know, I kind of look at it. I have a flashlight in my hand, okay, and I'm walking in the dark, but I can't go any farther than the next step because that's as far as it's going to take me. However, as I'm walking this path, quite often there might be like small light at the side that I could add by light to, which gives them more light and allows them to walk
their path a little better too. So we're, you know, if we can think of ourselves as a community that supports each other in every way that we can, which is completely different from what anybody else can.
Yeah, all right, maybe my last question, I'm not sure. But what my question is what what don't we humans and I'm talking generally, what don't we understand about our potential for healing? What don't we understand or the general public, what don't we understand about healing or our capacity for healing?
We don't understand that we're the ones that we have to do the healing. Nobody else can heal us. Other people can fix us and fix the broken parts or whatever and do something to help us heal. And that's what I think. My job has always been is to help people heal because that but the reality is that each one of us has to take that responsibility because no matter what I tell a patient to do, they.
Either do it or they don't.
And if they can understand it and do it. Then that's there. You know, then they're doing it. But if and if if they can't even understand it, so they don't even know how to do it, then I've sort of done the business of an empty sound. You know, what good does it do to tell a patient a lot of diagnostic stuff if they can't even understand what
you've said. So it's it's the importance of allowing our light or whatever it is that we have to share, which I think is when it's done in love, it becomes a healing process because it activates the life force and the healing aspect of the patient that's that's there, or the a mother who kicks, who kisses the baby's boogle, you know, that whole process is a.
Healing You know what I find interesting And I didn't think about this till a few years ago, But for me, there are some people that when I'm around them, even if they're not saying anything like I don't know, there's something therapeutic or healing or there's some energy being near those people that makes me feel good. And there are other people that it's the opposite. They don't make and it's not about what they're saying to me or ego
or anything. There's just some energetic exchange. And I feel like some people almost have a healing energy that you can kind of tap into a little bit.
Well, the great healers of the world, you know, Buddha, Jesus, Mohams, these were people like that who had the understanding of love being the healer. And so when you go, when you have a person around you who is has their very nature is loving. If you have a person around you who is who is you know, suspects everything you know there's something wrong with you and is looking for what's wrong in the world, you find it. You find what you're looking for.
Well, doctor Gladys, it's been really it's been a privilege. We appreciate you taking some time out of your day and let me just remind everyone so the good Doc's book is called The Well Lived Life, One hundred and two year Old Doctor's Six Secrets to Health and Happiness at every age. Well, say goodbye off Air in a moment, but for the minute, thank you so much for being on the U project. We love you and you're amazing.
Thank you, thank you, I love you and you're amazing. Ha