In celebration of my 100th episode, join me for Part 6 in this six-part book series where I share insights from “The Well-Lived Life” by centenarian Gladys T. McGarey, M.D.
Spend Your Energy Wildly is the topic for Part 6, the final episode in our six-part book series. Gladys’ teaching is that living well is a matter of learning how to steer your energy toward life. I recap the previous five lessons and illustrate how to receive the lessons and love from each moment. I share client stories and moments from my own life tied to the choice of expanding your energy wildly vs. wisely. I end the episode with Gladys’ six-part practice on how to embrace and appreciate the gift of life.
Gladys shares the decision to stop fighting at school in order to make connections. She had to redirect the energy and unconscious patterns created in her family with intention and purpose. We all have sovereignty over our energy. I share a moment from my life when my husband and I were inspired by families in our church to adopt children of our own. I discovered the capacity of both my light and darkness while raising five children, but I had the agency to expand and move toward light energy.
I also illustrate Gladys’ practice on how to embrace life with a series of questions for inquiry so life can grow and expand with you. Can you feel life’s boundless energy moving throughout your body? This message is a reminder to embrace the wildness of life around you.
Listen in to learn Glady’s teachings as a stepping stone on the journey to a life well-lived. Thank you for joining me for this six-part series. I am honored to be with you. Please reach out.
I’m thankful for every extra review during this six-part series. 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.
Dana Frost 00:52
Hi, everyone. Welcome to this week's episode of The Vitally You Podcast. I'm Dana Frost, your host coming to you for the final episode in our six part book series on the well-lived life a 102 year old doctor six secrets to health and happiness at every age. Okay, everybody, thank you for your patience on the two week gap between part five and part six. To be honest, I've had a very full plate in my personal life and I just couldn't hold space and accomplish everything. So thank you. Hopefully I'm modeling self care to all of you listeners. Life brings us opportunities that interrupt our normal flow and priorities.
Dana Frost 01:34
Sometimes you have to let something go to attend to a more important priority. And that's exactly where I found myself the month of November. I want to thank you for the new reviews during this series. I didn't make the goal of 100 reviews but I did get extra reviews and I'm so thankful for each one. So please keep them coming. I want to thank Bala Magoo for this review. Be inspired. You will be inspired and more when you tune in to Dana's insightful podcast. Listeners gain real life wellness tools from a down to earth curious woman Dana that's me, who is generously sharing knowledge to help listeners live their best life. Have a paper and pen handy when you listen you will want to refer back to her words thoughts and inspirations frequently. Ohm Shanthi Dana well ohm Shanthi Shanthi Bala Magoo, thank you so much for that review. Okay, onward, two glasses six secret, which is to spend your energy wildly.
Dana Frost 02:35
Now this reminds me of one of the coaching tools I learned from Dr. Martha Beck and my coach training, which is to create big impossible wild goals big we call them big, big, impossible wild goals. So do you remember when Gladys made a decision as a child to stop fighting at school so she could focus her energy on making friends, which resulted in good feelings that sprouted from being connected to others? Well, she starts the sixth secret by sharing that ever since that child experience, she has spent her life directing her energy toward feelings that are blissful and good. Gladys learned at a very young age that she alone had the power to determine where her energy flowed.
Dana Frost 03:29
According to Gladys living well, is a matter of learning how to steer your energy toward life. And we all have that same power, we actually have sovereignty over our energy, we can choose where our energy flows and allow it to flow. It either is going to flow with intention and purpose, or it's just going to flow wherever it wants to flow. This is what Gladys experienced as a child when she took her propensity to defend herself. This is you know, in her family pattern she she was used to defending herself and fighting. When she took that to school, it didn't work. This was this unconscious pattern in the context of her family. If we aren't intentional about our energy, our conditioned and unconscious patterns will rule where our energy flows.
Dana Frost 04:22
So let's revisit our other secrets and find the point of choice in each one. The first secret find the lifeforce within yourself. And your point of choice here is to find what brings you joy and pursue it as if your life depended upon it. Because guess what your happiness does if you do not find where your energy find what your juice is, and have your actions in your life move towards your juice, your energy will be a depleted energy. So your happiness actually depends upon you finding the juice in your lifeforce. The second and secret is all of life needs to move. So your point of choice here is to find where the energy is flowing and step into the flow, especially when you feel stuck or stagnant.
Dana Frost 05:13
You can intentionally choose to move into any flow of energy. There have been times when I've had to rise against my own stagnate stagnation in order to move with the flow of life. It's important to establish go to activities to flip your energy when you don't want to move or you feel stuck. Find those activities that deliver joy, your juice, what is your juice for me, it's cooking, it's going out into nature. When I feel stuck, and I will the things that I go to, I will move my body I will get out in nature, I will go to my kitchen and cook any one of those activities gets me into a flow. It gets me into an improved mental and emotional space. So make sure that you ask yourself what are the what are your go two ways to move into where life the energy of life is moving.
Dana Frost 06:07
The third secret is that love is the most powerful medicine. Love animates our life force and fear stagnates it. Your point of choice choice here is to choose love over fear and accept the force of love in your life. I want you to hear this your loved simply because you are you do not have to earn love. And depending upon your upbringing, and your unconscious patterns you might struggle with feeling worthy, and feeling loved. And if this is you, I encourage you to open yourself up to curiosity in this area of your life. Ask for guidance on how you can tap into and feel the universal love that is all around you. And inside of you.
Dana Frost 06:56
Now you might be thinking, Okay, how? Well number one, it starts with a simple prayer from your heart. It might sound like this. I am ready to receive and give love in meaningful ways or help myself to feel helped me feel and see how the force of love is active in my life. And you can also start by purposefully expressing love and observing what happens. Activate your own well of love and share it with others and watch how it is returned to you. Your lifeforce is activated by love and fear blocks that love but love is the antidote to fear, emotions that are depleting. Also deplete your lifeforce, and we've talked about depleting versus fueling emotions in the context of Heart Math. I want you to remember Gladys, a story where she's in the cave with her family as a child, and it's pitch black, and their guide matches one lights one match, and the darkness is illuminated. One match illuminates the darkness one tiny spark, it only takes a micro dose of love to move beyond fear. The fourth secret the fourth secret is that we amplify our lifeforce through community. We talked about how being in community and being in service to others helps us heal. And when we look at the Blue Zones, those areas in the world where they have the greatest number of centenarians and the healthiest lifespan or longevity, we see the commonality is this variable of being in community this giving and receiving of life force within a community of others. Okay, are you ready for the fifth secret? Everything is our teacher. A lifelong attitude of being a student allows us to continue growing with a life force that is expanding all around us. Being a student helps us not to be defensive against life and others. We ask ourselves, what can I learn from the situation? And what is my soul trying to help me learn and overcome?
Dana Frost 09:16
There is an original seed of love. While there's an original seed in every energetic transaction, and it's the seed of love or fear. These are polarizing forces in every energy. So it's either you can think of the polarizing forces love fear, forgiveness, versus resentment, peace versus anxiety. Those are just a few. And you've probably heard me say this before feelings follow thoughts or beliefs. The story we tell ourselves become the feelings we experience. And Gladys shares the law of thermodynamics, which states that energy is not created or destroyed, it simply changes shape. So you might Say, Well, what does that even mean? energy changes shape. Let me try to explain it in the way that I understand it.
Dana Frost 10:07
The universe is a force field of energy, and it's all connected and what impacts one impacts the whole, your life force, the energy in you, is a part of that field. And there's polarity in the field positive, negative, masculine, feminine, dark, light, fear, love. Energy can be expressed through emotions, but those emotions start with our belief system. So maybe it's going to be helpful to remember gladness is to patients who both had lupus, one identified with lupus as a primary aspect of who she was, she had her license plate, identified with the word lupus, she focused her energy on the life force of lupus, the other identify lupus as one aspect of herself, but she leaned into the other aspects of her life, she put her energy towards those other parts of who she was, the symptoms were less severe, and the one who chose to identify in the other aspects of her life, to what we see here, where we place our energy will grow and expand the energy we experience, whether it's fatigue, vitality, depression, strength, creation, destruction, is directly tied to where and how we focus our energy.
Dana Frost 11:26
So let me share a few notes about a client case, a woman in her middle age in her 50s, who went through a period of severe mental and emotional health challenges. Now she raised her children as a single mom, and she felt very lonely and leaned on alcohol while using psychotropic medications. And this is a dangerous combination. This caused further deterioration of her nervous system and emotional stability. And she experienced a downward spiral. Yes, she actually had trauma in her life. As you can imagine. adversity and trauma happened to everyone happens to you happens to me. There are different degrees different stages in life, but not one person avoids adversity and trauma. What is unique is how we respond to it. In her case, she was put on stronger medications to manage manage her mental health.
Dana Frost 12:23
And at the time, she, well, let me let me just say, yeah, she was put on stronger medications to manage her mental health and a period of time passes. And she decides that she is going to put her all of her attention on healing and really getting her life back. So not just putting her attention on medications. Okay, so typically, the mental health model from a psychiatric frame of reference is energy is put on medications. Okay, so she's been on medications actually on medications for decades. But in this moment, she decided she wanted to heal, she wanted to do what she could do herself apart from the medications to heal.
Dana Frost 13:09
When she started to direct her lifeforce towards that her own system was reinvigorated. Little by little, she made steps to fuel herself with healthy food instead of m&ms and fast food she connected with her community. She started working out again movement, she leaned into things that she had always enjoyed the downregulated energy transmuted into energy that fueled her lifeforce. It takes energy to make that energy. So this is really powerful. I will tell you, she had to move in the direction of healing. She had to seek me out. So she had to make a decision first inside of herself, she had to make a decision to move in the direction of healing to do what she could do. She had to seek me out. She actually had to make reservations to get on a plane to do an intensive with me, that's a lot.
Dana Frost 13:57
Those are a lot of steps she had to take. She had to get book a hotel. She had to follow through with all of our work. Little by little she was able to decrease medication. Is she still on medication? Yes, she's still on medication, but her life force is reinvigorated. And if you would ask her psychiatrist, they would probably say and they did say to her, Oh, look how well your medications are working. Look how successful the medications are. However, her life force wasn't reinvigorated on the medications alone. My observation is that she had been on medications for years, the seasons in her lifespan, the seasons, where she turned to life and activities that were life giving unhealthy, she flourished. That season, she chose to pleading coping mechanisms, her energy or life force was compromised with depleting emotions.
Dana Frost 14:51
When we turn towards life, there's a snowball effect and the energy transforms from fear or depletion to love and nuclear energy. Remember Gladys says admonition, living well is a matter of learning how to steer our energy towards life. She talks about expending your energy wildly versus wisely. Now, we love wisdom. But Gladys helps us to understand that wisdom is involved in cognition. And we have such an overly dependence on cognition, we actually need to sink down into our heart, find where the juice is, and move towards the juice and a wild way. If we want to find our life, we lose it we find a place to serve and give our life away. And I wonder if one reason, anxiety and depression are rampant is because we are so focused on temporary pleasures. You know, you hear Netflix and chill, we've got the hookup culture, the hookup culture is a passing pleasure. It's a quick fix. Instead of an investment in long term relationships where we learn to compromise we learn to mutually serve one another.
Dana Frost 16:07
It's just a quick fix, and Netflix and chill is a Quick Flicks. Sustainable happiness comes from long term commitment to turn towards life and where energy is flowing in a positive direction. Happiness is transitory it is dependent upon circumstances, sending our energy wildly. The six Tikrit requires a belief and a trust in an infinite amount of energy. If we can only depend on our own energy, our well will run dry, but a belief and a movement towards the living well of infinite energy that flows from love, and allows us to be wildly generous with our life force. Okay, let me demonstrate this from my own life. Well back up to the 90s, my husband and I lived in Minneapolis, and we were a part of a dynamic Methodist Church on Park Avenue in South Minneapolis. And during that time, we were having our first three, our first three children before we left the US, we were so inspired by these families who had biological children and adopted children. This wasn't in vogue at the time, they were adopting children who are mixed race in the southern part of the US and those children were children who weren't wanted. Um, at the time, this wasn't in fashion. And so we just thought, wow, we're really inspired by this. And we think that we would like adoption to be a part of our family.
Dana Frost 17:43
Well, fast forward, we Oops, got pregnant with baby number three, and we decided, okay, we can only handle three children, I think that will be done. Fast forward a little bit more, we leave the US. And in 97, and we move to South America. And in South America, we had household help, suddenly, we did not need to do household chores. And we had a lot of support in the home. And we felt we had more expendable energy. So the question becomes, how do you use the energy you have? This depends upon your belief system and your values. Now my husband and I had a clear vision that to whom much is given, much is required. And we also had that memory of the inspiration from those families in our church back in Minneapolis.
Dana Frost 18:34
We believe that the energy that we have, it's not just about money, but it's about love and time. What do you do with energy when you have time you invested in others, this eventually became a decision to adopt two children. And this felt like a wild expenditure of love. Did it come at a cost? Everything that's wild, there's a cost to it. But there's a belief system that that will rise to support what your needs are, we had a belief system that whatever our needs are, that there would be support to meet us in those needs. And indeed it did. What happens when we expend ourselves wildly.
Dana Frost 19:18
We learn when we expend ourselves wildly, I can tell you that I learned I started learning that oh my gosh, I really have a dark side. And then I learned that I could choose to have my energy flow towards my light side, you see that polarity, I learned that I have polarity in my life. There's light and dark and I could choose to flow and expand move towards a light energy. So we learn and we grow. I discovered that I had greater capacity than I thought I had. We expand we learn we grow we expand not only did I adopt, but at the same time I completed my life coach training.
Dana Frost 19:55
So I absolutely in the midst of extending my inner Did you wildly one I was challenged because I had to see that, okay. I really see light and darkness in myself. Okay, light and darkness exists, I can move to the light. I grew, I expanded my capacity. And I really expanded my capacity because I was now parenting five children. And I realized, okay, I also have the capacity to complete my life coach training. I also saw that my children up leveled their participation as siblings, their lives grew, their capacity grew, they had to step into new leadership roles, one had to share their bedroom with their adopted siblings, they had to share our attention with the two more children, our resources became divided.
Dana Frost 20:44
But we all grew and rose to the occasion, we expanded our capacity as a family. And at the time, we actually had to be frugal, because we were paying for special services for one of our daughters with dyslexia. And we discovered our two adopted children would also greatly benefit from extra services. All I can say is that our resources grew to meet the demands of our family. But if you believe that your nine inch pie never expands, to provide for greater numbers, then you don't have a growth mindset and you, you can expend your energy wildly. But if you believe that that pie that energy, that pie has infinite growth capacity, you can expend your energy wildly love is that way, there's not a limited supply of love.
Dana Frost 21:39
Love expands to fit the portion of love you're willing to receive and give all that life force that is animated by love lives inside of you, if you release it to the flow of life that it offers. When we are concerned with our own self preservation, we save our life and we don't give it away. We limit our capacity to expend our energy wildly. If you remember what the the phrase that Gladys learned from her, her mother, coach powerway name I don't know if I'm pronouncing that right. But you'll remember that. That is it doesn't matter. Just let it go. stream your energy towards life and life will grow and expand with you.
Dana Frost 22:27
Okay, so I'm going to open the book to glasses final practices, which is embrace your life. Okay, number one, consider the activities people in places you've put energy into throughout your life. What has drained your energy? Where can you invest your energy and receive a return? Okay, number two, then try to get out of your thinking mind for a moment and feel. Let your thoughts wander over those same activities, people places in your life but this time, instead of just thinking about them feel them? Does your energy flow freely or shrink back? Do you feel an increase or a decrease in your lifeforce? This is subtle, but practicing the other exercises in this book has prepared you to answer these questions.
Dana Frost 23:20
What does your deepest knowing tell you? Based on what you felt in step two, consciously pick one activity, person or place that brings you more energy? How can you invite more of that into your life? Could you practice that activity more often give that person a call or spend more time in that place? Find one small shift that you could make and move towards it. Thinking of step two again, consider the people places and activities that drain your energy. Look for at least one thing you can just stop doing. The way Barry stopped playing bridge. She's referring to something earlier in the book, pick something small to start your deepest knowing will guide you.
Dana Frost 24:00
What would it take to just give this up? Could you do it with gratitude and love? Step five, then consider the things that are draining your energy, but that you don't want or aren't able to release. How can you change the way that you spend your lifeforce? Can you change the way you think about that person? Can you adjust the way you spend time in that place? Or can you shift the type of energy you put into that activity? Once you've contemplated these things, and perhaps even jotted down a few notes? Open your arms wide and imagine yourself embracing the force of life. Feel life's boundless energy moving out from your heart through your fingertips. Embrace your life in all its joys and sorrows, challenges and learnings, triumphs and surprises and be glad that you have been given the precious gift of life.
Dana Frost 24:55
You can practice this first thing in the morning or just before bed, allowing your Self to embrace the wildness of life around you. And my dear friends, that's a wrap. I want to thank you for joining me for this six part series on happiness and a life well lived. It's been quite a journey. I want to thank you for your patience during the series. I want to urge you if you know someone you think would benefit from this series, please share it with them. And if you haven't done so yet, please leave a review helped me reach 100 reviews so that we can spread this podcast. I am so honored to be with you each week. And I am streaming love from my heart to yours. Thank you so much for being together this week on the podcast.