Hi everyone, Sophia Bush here. Welcome to work in progress, where I talk to people who inspire me about how they got to where they are and where they think they're still going.

Today on work in progress, I am honored to share a conversation with a true spiritual warrior. She is wildly inspiring, a model of resilience and a deep well of wisdom. Dr. Edith Eager.

Dr. Eager is a highly sought after psychologist author and keynote speaker who survived the Holocaust as a teenage girl and went on to thrive despite the trauma that she endured.

Edith, as her friends affectionately call her, obtained her doctorate in psychology and learned to use her imprisonment at Auschwitz as a powerful analogy for the prisons that so many of us create in our own minds.

Her mission is now to inspire others to discard their limitations and find renewal and freedom within themselves. After becoming a New York Times bestselling author with her memoir, The Choice, Dr. Eager wrote a hands-on guide to overcoming your trauma that just came out this past fall called Gift, 12 lessons to save your life.

Somehow between her busy clinical practice in Laoya and her many speaking engagements, this energetic 93-year-old made time to sit down for a chat with me.

In my conversation with Dr. Eager, we discussed the power of thought, how the most obnoxious person can be your very best teacher.

Why the question, how are you doing, is a stupid question, and how love is what you do rather than what you say? Dr. Eager also shares her harrowing accounts of arriving at Auschwitz, being forced to dance for Joseph Mengele and how she found the spirit to survive it all within her own mind.

Dr. Eager is truly one of the wisest people I have ever had the pleasure of sharing an audience with. I really hope you enjoy this conversation.

Dr. Eager, I'm so fascinated by your story. I think you found a philosophy. You found your way to this hopeful sense of being through one of the worst periods in human history, seeing some of the worst of what humans can do to each other.

The decades that you've lived through have been so full of trauma and violence and also movements and possibility.

You've seen the most incredible periods of our modern human history, and I'm very curious for the listeners who don't know your story. If we can go back to the beginning, I have this beautiful photograph of your family in 1928, you and your two sisters, your mother and father.

I wonder if you can tell me a bit about your early childhood. I know that you were born in what we would now consider Slovakia.

Yes. I was born in Czechoslovakia. My city was part of Czechoslovakia from 1918 until 1938.

Before that was the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, so my mother tongue is Hungarian. I was born as the last third girl in my family.

I was blind for it when they took me for a walk because I became cross-eyed when I was three. So my sisters sang songs about me. I'm so ugly and puny and never find a husband.

Today I tell you, especially in schools, don't allow anybody to define who you are because you have planted that seed and you want to hope for the nurture yourself and find your own truth.

My mother also looked at me and said, very seriously, I'm glad that you have brains because you have no looks. So today you talk about how I have come where I am now and turning excitement into excitement.

This is what the gift is all about, that even in hell, Auschwitz was hell. I was able to realize that I still can move beyond the body and the mind into the spiritual dimension.

And believe me, during the day I didn't know from one minute the next, whether I'm going to the gas chamber or not, but you know what, the night time I was dreaming and I was in the opera house and I was at the Olympics.

My night time was absolutely keeping me moving. This is just temporary. Yes I am. Yes I can. Yes I will. That I never ever allowed the enemy to murder my spirit.

So that's what I bring you today and my daughter calls it the E.D.ism. One of them is are you evolving or are you re-warving?

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