Dr. Gladys McGarey Teaches How to Awaken the Physician Within
The holistic wellness pioneer Dr. Gladys McGarey has spent a lifetime promoting health, specifically for seniors. In books such as The Physician Within You and Love and Energy in the Healing Art, she presents her vision for holistic health through a framework that she calls the Five L’s: Love, Life, Laughter, Labor, and Listening. These books serve as a blueprint for cultivating what she calls her ‘living medicine’ approach.
Dr. Gladys, as she affectionately known, expounds on this philosophy in her latest book, The Well-Lived Life: A 102-Year-Old Doctor’s Six Secrets to Health and Happiness at Every Age. In it, she shares her daily routine which she calls “movement with active rest,” and centered on her Five 5 L’s necessary in securing wellness and vibrancy.
Love: Nurturing the Soul
In what is arguably the first ‘self-help’ book for patients and doctors alike, McGarey explains that a new way of thinking and acting, which she later termed ‘liberated’ healing, involves tuning into self-love, compassion, and ‘flow’ with the universe. In her work, love encompasses the self and others. Self-love, as she explains, requires a deep respect for the vulnerability one encounters within. McGarey believed that ‘harnessing the power of love fuels the human spirit.’ It may be easy to dismiss the modesty of McGarey’s account today, but it was a significant contribution that helped patients and doctors move beyond the understanding of self and wellness limited solely to bodies, chemistries, or machines. She provides detailed accounts and practices of love that readers could adopt, and she shares beautifully intimate stories of her patients, noting how she integrated her ‘self-help love’ to help tune their bodies and spirits toward coming from a place of flow.
Life: Embracing the Journey
Dr. McGarey invites her readers to embrace Life, capital L, because, as she writes: “Life is seen not so much as a path to take as a story to be fully learned.’”By entering fully with the freshness of mindful awareness, by staying present to whatever may occur, the individual ‘draws a story, a life, that is filled with authenticity.’ An essential ingredient of this mindful wholeness is that it recognizes how ‘all life is connected to all other life.’ Each cell has within it an intimation of the intricacies of the natural world, and by entering fully into each moment with a sense of wonder and curiosity, we grow more grateful for the mystery of it all. This sense of life-as-a-gift flows from Dr. McGarey’s belief that through a healing choice and practice, ‘the human self can engage with other species and with the larger living world in a way that is deeply enhanced through shared embeddedness and connectedness.’
Laughter: The Medicine of Resilience
Laughter, which in ‘Love and Energy in the Healing Art’ is presented as a sturdy regimen, is described as a response to Life that’s both counterbalancing and transformative. The physician explains that the spirit of laughter existed before science understood it, and he draws distinctions between laughter as a fleeting feeling and as a season of experience, innate or learned. ‘In East and West alike,’ says Dr McGarey, ‘the capacity for laughter and the joy it creates bring resilience into our lives undergoing ordinary suffering or great tragedy.’ By opening ourselves up to laughter, he says, ‘we become vital to life, not victim to it.’
Labor: Purposeful Contribution
And you have the need for a kind of Labor, and that is meant in a high Literary sense, not for bread-earning or making a living, hardly at all for supplying the routines of Life either externally or internally, but for giving one’s Life a purpose, a meaning, for doing something worth doing, something that will be worth doing when we come to look back on it, something that will be worth the while of having lived something real, felt strongly, thought hard, been quite passionate about something, and even, perhaps, having made a tragedy of one’s Life through ill health or even suicide, if by doing so one made it worth living. Throughout his work, McGarey emphasizes Labor as the principle of vital and meaningful activity that propels one, beat by glorious beat, toward realization and societal contribution. The right kind of work, for pay or otherwise, is integral to good health and allows one to experience fulfillment in the context of one’s inherent interests and values. In the broad sense he intends, Labor deepens lives and functions positively in the wider social realm.
Listening: The Art of Connection
In all her work, ranging from The Physician Within You, Dr McGarey emphasizes the power of Listening to transform the clinical encounter and become a radical act of narrative medicine in a noisy world. Listening becomes a quiet (and kind) act of relating to self and others. It can approach the formation of a communal state. Listening is what vitamin C is to body and soul to immunity, bridging an empathic gap and comprehension. Balint already encouraged his readers to bear witness – using their senses of hearing, seeing, and feeling to understand who stands before them – as something distinct from clinical listening. His student Mary Schneider, now a psychiatrist in Kent but just starting on her body-mind adventure under Balint, wrote a provocative paper entitled ‘The Overlisteners’ in the British Journal of Psychiatry in 1961. She proposed that listening, when it is concentrated, may be used as a mode of therapy. In the sense spoken of, it should not be shut off by words or the sound of a strange language. The sense of hearing stands out in the second row of communication among people who are isolated.
Gladys McGarey’s work can be read as a road map for wellness – from Love, Life, Laughter, Labor, and Listening to true philosophic insights and celebrations. Readers draw sustenance from the fountain of her health, gleaning insights from her books, which draw on research and application over decades, and viewpoints borne of insight into suffering and a deep compassion for humanity. Her work captures the classic precepts and, perhaps, the deep longings of the human soul. Her story and philosophy are valuable sources of insights for drawing on what is required to live a vital life and be ageless – today and always. Remarkably, Dr. Gladys continues her word as a consulting physician at 103 years of age.
