A 102-year-old author reveals how to live a happy and meaningful life

Gladys McGarey, M.D., the author “The Well Lived Life,” is a 102-year-old writer who lives in Scottsdale, Arizona. Dr. McGarey, also lovingly known as “Dr. G,” is a still-practicing doctor and has been called the mother of holistic medicine.

In her new book, Dr. McGarey reveals her powerful and life-changing secrets for how to live with joy, vitality and purpose at any age. Dr. McGarey, cofounder of the American Holistic Medical Association, began her medical practice at a time when women couldn’t have their own bank accounts. Over the past sixty years, Dr. McGarey has pioneered a new way of thinking about disease and health that has transformed the way we imagine health care and self-care around the world.

Dr. McGarey joined us on Arizona Horizon to share her six actionable secrets to enjoying lives that are long, happy and purpose-driven. She will be appearing at Changing Hands Bookstore in Tempe, Arizona, on May 9.

“We each have the opportunity to live our lives to the fullest,” Dr. McGarey said. “And if we do, that is the well-lived life.”

Dr. McGarey commented on the concept of aging into health. “I think it’s quite possible… as we get older, to find things that we can do that are really, really important, or help us to keep going,” she said. “But it’s a matter of choice.”

With regards to the anti-aging industry, Dr. McGarey said she advocates for focusing “on life and living and love and feeling, not on the war against disease and pain, which is where our medical field has focused,” she said. “If you focus on the negative,” she added, “which is issues and has to be dealt with and all of that, but if that’s the whole purpose for it, which is what I was taught in medical school and has been carried on through, it’s taking us back into the dark areas of our being, whereas really, as true humans, we have the opportunity and the ability to look towards the light.”

Dr. McGarey wrote about the six secrets for living a full, healthy and happy life. “If you try to save your energy, you kill it,” she said. “But, you know, sometimes when the doctor says to us, ‘Go home and rest’ because you’re tired or you’re working too hard or something, that’s doing something if you take it that way. But if you take it as, ‘Go home and rest,’ and you stop doing everything, you just fade away, and you lose the juice that you have because you think that you’re saving it. You can’t save energy. It’s not savable. Energy has to be used. So as we use our energy, it becomes more and more alive and real.”