In celebration of my 100th episode, join me for Part 5 in this six-part book series where I share insights from “The Well-Lived Life” by centenarian Gladys T. McGarey, M.D.
Everything is Your Teacher is the topic for Part 5 in our six-part book series. I share a teaching from Gladys’ life where she learned that finding courage can be the greatest challenge. I detail four events from my own life that were incredibly challenging and the unique themes that surround the experiences we face. I end the episode with Gladys' practice for finding the teacher in all things.
Gladys shares the challenge around divorce and personal devastation, but how it was also a calling to something greater. I share a visualization practice I used during a difficult time that allowed me to keep the emotional pain separate from the specific moments. I also illustrate Gladys’ practice of finding the teacher as a way to access the lesson in each challenge.
This courageous message is a reminder that everything is a teacher. Listen in to learn more about the wisdom and insight Gladys has to share with us. What wisdom can you receive from an extremely challenging experience? Please reach out. I would love to hear from you.
If you are enjoying these conversations, help me hit 100 reviews in celebration of my 100th episode! Please subscribe and spread the love by leaving a review and sharing it with your friends. Thank you.
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Dana Frost 00:07
Welcome to Vitally You, a podcast created to introduce you to the tools that will be your roadmap for feeling younger while growing older. I'm your host Dana Frost, a wellness expert, life coach and energy medicine practitioner. Here's what you can expect conversations about vitality from the inside out with guest experts in the field of health, culture, and spirituality, and solo episodes along the way from me where I do deep dives into the topics of aging, heart intelligence, energy, medicine, and your innate capacity to heal. If you want to feel younger, while growing older, this is the place for you. Hi, everyone.
Dana Frost 00:53
Welcome to the Vitally You I'm Dana Frost your host. I mean to you this week for episode five of our six part series from the book, a well lived life, a 102 year old doctors six secrets to health and happiness at every stage. Before we get started, I want to give you a reminder of my big ask during this series. I would like to reach 100 reviews before we're finished in two weeks. So please, if you haven't left a review, and you enjoyed this podcast, please do so. And you will make me very, very happy. So let's do a quick review. Week one, we talked about finding our juice, and what's finding our juice, it's finding those things that light us up the things that turn us on the things where we lose track of time finding our juice, what is that thing in your life that really makes your heart open up.
Dana Frost 01:50
And week two, we talked about finding the trickle in the dam. In this part two, we talked about that sometimes? Well, we have struggles. And how we get out of a place of feeling stuck is to find where the Energy wants to move, because all of life wants to move. And sometimes it's just a matter of finding that trickle in the dam. And if we go to where life is moving, things will begin to open up for us. And week three, we talked about that love is the most powerful medicine. Ladders talked about love being the undervalued component when somebody is healing. Week four last week we talked about you're never truly alone. Even if you feel alone, you are always surrounded by your angels by guides, you're surrounded by family and friends. But there's two key components to this vulnerability and connected community in order to open the door to never feeling truly alone. And feeling like we're in this web of human connection.
Dana Frost 03:01
We need to be vulnerable with others and we need to be involved in some kind of a community. Okay, so week five this week, our topic is everything is your teacher. And Gladys starts out by giving us a peek into her most vulnerable moment in her entire life. She was 69 years old at that time, and she ended up living I mean, she's 102. Now she lives decades beyond this moment that she describes where she's shuffling around in the Arizona under the Arizona sky in her husband's slippers. And I'm not going to go into exactly what that moment was. She talks about it later in part four, part five of the book, but she talks about hindsight being incredibly clarifying. And in her darkest moment, she did not know what the outcome would be. And yet she had to find the courage to find the lesson in this very dark moment for her. And she admitted that and I agree with her finding the courage is oftentimes the greatest challenge. I'm sure you can remember the most challenging situation that you faced so far.
Dana Frost 04:19
Those situation Marcus and we are never the same. And when I say we're never the same, it doesn't mean that we're worse because of it. It's not bad. It just is but what I have found, when we find the courage to find the lesson, we are more likely to become better and we might more likely to like have a better experience and feel stronger as a person than we are to feel less than I know for certain. And I've talked about some of my hardships but I wouldn't be who I am today. I don't believe I would have the courage to have this podcast. I don't believe I would be the valued friend that I am or the the mother that I And just the intricacies of life, and what's required of us. It's those hard times that really shaped who we are. What was your most difficult challenge? Can you just recall that? Who were you at that time?
Dana Frost 05:17
How old were you? Who were the other people involved in your life at that time were involved in the situation? And what were the feelings that captivated you, that really took over you. Now I have four life events that mark me really like for challenging life events. And at the time of each of these events, at that stage where I was, I feared that they would destroy me. But each one actually helped me to see myself more clearly and solidified my own desires and values. So I'll let you know what those are.
Dana Frost 05:51
The first one, I was 18, and I was graduating from high school and my parents separated, the second one was moving through our adoption process. The third one was my health crisis in 2011. And then then last one was my marriage crisis. And there's a reason Hindsight is 2020. Each challenge that we face, it's this invitation to go into deeper layers of the soul. And I was thinking, you know, we talked about peeling the layers of the onion. And that's something that, you know, if we cook, we understand those layers of the onion, but I was thinking, it's also really like, going into the deeper like your personal world wide web.
Dana Frost 06:35
And going deeper and deeper, you can go down rabbit holes in the world wide web. And it's like your, you've got deeper and deeper layers of yourself that you get to know when you're going through a really difficult time. And our story is there are as unique as we are. And what I have seen, at least for myself and for others is that we tend to have themes that are also unique. And my particular theme that's unique to all of those four things that I mentioned is forgiveness and pure love. Each of those crises, led me to ask what is love anyway? What is love? What was the love between my mother and father that was ruptured? What is love when it comes to a mother's heart with her children, what is love in a committed relationship. So if we just look at a few different ways, the constructs of love we have arrows, which is erotic love, that's a fire that burns quickly. It has a lot of sensory to it, it feels really good. It's igniting, we have storage, I think that's how you pronounce it.
Dana Frost 07:47
That's familial love, and that's love parents toward children. It's natural affection, it's instinct. And we have filial love, which is brotherly and sisterly love would be friendship, love, or pack mentality, those people that you're with your tribe, and then we have agape love. And that's the highest form of love. It is God to human and human to God, it's transcendent love, it's sacrificial love, it's loved. It's not dependent on circumstances, it is the most radical love and we get to experience all those different aspects of love in life. And really, it is in those relationships, those aspects of those different ways of love that we end up having our most difficult challenges. For the most part, even my health crisis was an opportunity to love myself and my body at a deeper level. Okay, so let me just make this a little more practical. In the situation with my parents, the invitation for me to see love, there was just there is imperfection. It was a time when I had to drop innocence and grow up and see positives and others regardless of their actions, and actually looking at, okay, well, they're having their issues, but I actually do feel loved by both of them.
Dana Frost 09:11
So that was just this me needing to take responsibility for myself. It's that launching into becoming an adult. And in the challenge of the adoption, really, there was that forgiveness towards myself first and foremost, because I could see what I was capable of in a negative way in a way that didn't feel good to me. And learning that in those instances, I had to learn to love and forgive not just the parts of myself that I liked, and wanted to show to the world but the parts that were felt dark and I didn't want the world to see. And in my health crisis, that really was learning that life is fragile, and I had a responsibility to own my power where my health is concerned, and taking my body seriously When it asked for it, when it gave me a symptom, it was asking for my attention. And I needed to slow down and take care and actually offer my body, what I would consider to be more of that filial love, you know where me as the adult taking care of my body and caring for myself. And it was in my marriage crisis that I really learned next level forgiveness, and learning to keep my eye on the prize.
Dana Frost 10:31
And we're going to talk a little bit more about that. But that long term relationships don't always sparkle. And it's possible to find your way back to priorities. When there's been a rupture and a relationship, we you can go back and you can look for this as finding the lessons in these difficult times. That if we look for the lesson than we ended up not becoming stuck as the victim. And so let's see what I wanted to say what I want to make really clear is when you're in a difficult situation, and you're looking for lessons, it's important to think about what were the original priorities? And where can you focus your attention on the original priorities. And so I was able to, in all these situations, redirect my energy, away from the pain to getting help. So for example, when I was a freshman in college, I was able to find a counselor who helped me understand the situation that I was in, and my relationship to my parents separation. So let's go to the adoption. During the adoption, I hired a life coach.
Dana Frost 11:39
And that was really effective. Other times during the adoption, I was able to find the help of a therapist in my health crisis, I was able to find Heart Math and learn more about integrating my soul with my body with my heart rate variability with my thoughts. And so one of the ways to find a lesson is to look for different modalities, people things to support yourself. In my marriage crisis, by turning my attention towards my family towards our children, we were able to remember why we were another reason why we were together. And I think I mentioned this in terms of life needs to move, I found movement in the life force of my children during that time. And it also helped me to see that it's never just about us, whatever we're going through, it's bigger than we are the answer to your situation, the ripple effect, it goes out, and it impacts everybody in your environment.
Dana Frost 12:44
And so this is one of the reasons it's really important to do our work so that we make decisions based on all the information we have in terms of this web of connectedness that goes back to you are never alone, it was never just about me, it was never just about my husband, it was never just about my mom and dad. Because we're all connected, what impacts one impacts the others. And so it's really important. I don't see wrong or right decisions, I made the decisions that are right for me. But what I do believe is true is to make decisions from a place of being grounded and informed about who you are and what your priorities are, and what your long term goals are and what your desires are. Gladys talks about not fighting against the things that happened to us. And this is part of what I mentioning in terms of my own growth is getting the help instead of fighting against getting myself help to see to broaden my perspective. She talks about not fighting against the things that happened to us.
Dana Frost 13:48
And she talks she shared that she was had older siblings who were boys and she grew up in a big family. And she learned to fight and she really had no problem fighting. She grew up with those boys, they wrestled with her. She brought those tendencies outside the family to school and to her social environments. Well, who wants to be friends with someone who is fighting, she realized she had no friends, because she was always resisting and working against other people and trying to defend herself. And she recognized she had to adjust herself if she wanted to make friends. And so she looked towards her mother, who seem to not have conflict with others and what she saw her mother was operating from a place of curiosity when it came to differences instead of argument. Her mother used inquiry and curiosity to understand the situations around her.
Dana Frost 14:43
And Gladys said this became a valuable lesson throughout her life when she learned to stop fighting. At school she gained friends and her energy just really flipped in terms of how she engaged with the world. She became open instead of wanting when you resist something there tension and friction and constriction. If you don't resist, if you don't resist life, the constriction releases and there's flow and then you can move into how life wants to move. She also shared a really interesting story about a well known psychotherapist with whom she collaborated with in the area of therapeutic hypnosis. His name was Dr. Milton Erickson. And he fought polio as a child, and he literally remembers like this energy of fighting polio as a child, and he ended up discovering that he could use his mind for his own healing. It used muscle memory stored in his unconscious, to teach his paralyzed and atrophied legs to walk again.
Dana Frost 15:44
And throughout his lifetime, you use this power of inquiry with his body, and the disease of polio when it would flare that polio living in his nervous system when he would flare he would use inquiry and ask it what did it have to teach him about his mind, by focusing what he could gain from polio, he stopped fighting against it and started learning from it. And it became this huge body of work in his life, a life without challenges. A life without the opportunity to grow is an atrophied life. Each challenge is a stepping stone towards deeper competencies. And if we miss a lesson at one stage, guess what it's going to keep showing up for us, because life wants us to grow. God has had one suggestion, when you're in this place, and you don't know the lesson you're supposed to learn. She encourages you to go to your dreams and your unconscious mind.
Dana Frost 16:44
And I find this to be a very, very valuable place to go. I can tell you that. Whenever I have dreams, I do jot them down. I don't have vivid dreams often. And so in my master coach training, I was taught how to interpret dreams in a very easy way. And I'm going to share that with you. But I will tell you, I woke up one night and I had this very vivid dream that my bedroom so we had a three story house at that point, my bedroom was on fire and nothing else in the house was on fire. It was a wild, super vivid dream. I'm like, Why isn't anything else in my home on fire? It's just my bedroom. So when you have a dream, one way to get to your unconscious mind and what the significance of your dream is? This is what you need to do you list your symbols in the dream now, so write them down. 123 What are the symbols in the dream?
Dana Frost 17:35
Give each symbol three adjectives? Hot, isolated, destructive. And then you ask yourself, what area of my life does this symbol represent? So you look at the adjectives, the symbol now is on the side. But you look at those three adjectives that you've written down, what area of my life do these adjectives represent? And then this is where you go to your intuition. What is my lesson? And so you put the symbols, the adjectives of the symbols together the area of your life that they've done. And you ask, what is my lesson, and when I've done that, for myself, and for my clients, it's just fascinating, the information that comes forward, so I would encourage you to seek insights from your dreams. So Gladys shares this chapter, let's see it is in the impossible moments, Gladys shares her most difficult moment, and we'll go back, this is how she opened this part five, when she was walking around, and her husband slippers, what happened to her she was 69 years old.
Dana Frost 18:41
And this was the most difficult thing that happened to her at age 69. After having a robust having all these children with her husband and having this robust, shared career, her husband served her divorce papers. And basically, I'm leaving, and he had already notified their children, their family members, their work colleagues. And so this was her personal devastation. And I don't want to really you can read the book, what she shares about it, I feel like it's sort of her story to tell. But I want to read you something that her daughter said to her. It is on page 187, if that's significant to you, shortly after Bill left my daughter in law, Bobby, who is a minister told me, this is the part of the tapestry of your life. If you look at it too closely, you'll only see the individual threads and knots.
Dana Frost 19:31
That's the backside of the tapestry. But as you move on, you'll begin to see the whole picture. Hindsight, right. So when we get my OPIC and we are myopic when we're in the middle of a crisis, we're right there in it we have all the feelings I can remember. Tremendous grief that felt like my it felt like the Earth had opened and swallowed me at one point in my life and if we are myopically focussed on that over a lot, we have to feel it. So you're in it, you feel a bit if you stay myopically focused on that, you really miss seeing what that 2020 vision is. And she talks about, which I thought was really interesting that her marriage was this death of her identification. And she talks about outdated identifications that cause pain, when we might have an over identification with a role replay over identification in a relationship or who we are in a relationship, we may be so identified that and when it dies, we are crushed.
Dana Frost 20:36
And yet what Gladys would say as she could, she's 102. So she lived decades after this divorce. What she saw is that her identification working under her husband actually was squelching our true calling for something far greater than being Bill's wife and, and having this collaboration where he was the leader, she actually needed to be released to be let go to be the leader. As a professional woman, I thought this was just such a powerful story. She talks about seeing life as the teacher makes us a lifelong student. So when we let go of these identifications, we actually become the student and we are a lifelong student, we're willing to learn and grow. She also talked about I thought this was really interesting, because I'm working with people who have health issues to patients she had you had lupus, which is a chronic disease. And both of them had the symptoms of lupus, but one was really able to act continue to activate and her life and the other one was stalled.
Dana Frost 21:43
And the one who could activate Gladys asked her so what's different about you? And basically, this woman said, well, there are so many other aspects of who I am, I'm not just a person with lupus, I've all all these other areas of my life. So she didn't place her identification so firmly in lupus, that she forgot all these other things that she had. And when she focused on these other aspects of herself, she also wasn't as identified with the pain of lupus. The other person who really identified with lupus, and the pain, the symptoms of lupus actually had a license plate that said, lupus. So you can see that identification, what you identify with will grow and expand. So it's really important to understand, in the areas where we are challenged, what are we identifying with? are we identifying with and who we are, is that victim? Or are we so are we identifying with, with the growth of who we are the student of who we are.
Dana Frost 22:45
That leads me to this idea that life is meant to be lived in all circumstances. And life wants to move just as we talked about, I can remember when I was going through a difficult time, and I had this visual where I would put my emotional pain on a bookshelf, leave it there so that I could go see a client or so that I could go do the other aspects of who I am. That time I wanted to meet professionals in Chicago. And so I would just put the pain on a bookshelf, and I would go out and I would enjoy who I was as a life coach. So really important to not get stuck in over identifying with those pain points, and finding the teacher in all things. So Gladys, I want to come back to the lattices process for finding the teacher. Okay, here we are finding the teacher and she says it's not always easy, and it's not always easy, and it's really important to be kind and gentle with yourself. This is one of my lessons, in my challenges is gentleness and compassion towards self. Okay.
Dana Frost 23:51
To ease our way in, we'll start with a more comfortable memory. Think back to an event that taught you a lot in your life, an easy lesson or a moderate one. But don't choose a hard lesson near choose something that doesn't activate a strong emotional reaction. Then let your mind run through the lessons you learn from that event and the positive things that came from it. Really feel and the positivity. Let it pour over you like the sunlight. You're gathering strength for the next exercise. So allow yourself to bathe in positivity first.
Dana Frost 24:23
When you're ready, allow your mind to wander to something that is hard in your life right now. It may be related to physical health, emotions, relationships, finances the world around you. Pick something tough foe something that feels unfair and undeserved. Next, begin to consider this difficult thing from all angles. Start asking yourself such as What could this mean for my soul on a larger scale? What could I be learning here? What wisdom Could I get from this extremely challenging experience? How could it shift my relationship in the past, the future and my life today? What could Be here.
Dana Frost 25:01
What could it be here to teach me? Imagine yourself years from now looking back on this challenge, what you might have learned from it and even how it might have helped you grow and change leading to a richer life. Though at times it's hard to push through pain or distrust. Right as there are gifts in the pain, then ask for a dream to help show you what you aren't seeing. Go to sleep and let your subconscious inform the process and proceed to Step six. Once your dream has arrived. Record your dream as soon as you're awake, that you get all the details even the ones that don't make sense. Number six, consider what you recorded about your dream. How might you interpreted How might the different characters locations, phrases, actions, and or events from the dream help you understand your challenge?
Dana Frost 25:45
Number seven, whatever answers you find, send them gratitude. It doesn't mean that you're grateful for what is happening. It means that the fact that you can find one small part of it that is positive is a miracle, no matter how insignificant it might seem. Be grateful for any lesson you find and be able to yourself for being brave enough to seek it out. After you have finished, place your hands together, palms touching thumbs against your heart. It's this right here. It's palm together. These are namaste prayer hands, and as a universal symbol for gratitude. And she says in Hindustani, Namaste literally means I vow to you. And in this exercise we are bowing to life as a teacher, I like to think of namaste as the light in me sees the light in new, the student in me sees the student in you, the student in me knows that we can all grow the student in me knows that when I'm impacted with a challenge, you can feel that and when you're impacted by a challenge, I can feel that because there's this human web of connectedness that keeps us connected, if that sounds so silly, but we are all connected.
Dana Frost 27:01
And we all have the capacity to find the lesson in the challenge. Thank you so much for being here. I would love to hear anything from you. If your find your teacher, and something that's happening in your life, please let me know. I love to hear the stories. I want to thank x 39 and x 49 patches for sponsoring this podcast, x 49 and x 39. Open energy pathways in your body so that you can be stronger. You have greater stamina, you have clear cognition improve sleep, so you build muscle faster with less recovery time.
Dana Frost 27:40
My skin is definitely Aging Backwards with these patches. So I'm all about the patches. You will find a link in the show note. Next week. Our final week is week six. And the topic is spend your energy wildly. leave a review if you haven't helped me hit 100 Reviews. Thank you so much for joining me today on the Vitalina podcast. As always, I am streaming love from my heart to yours.