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Meet Dina Proctor

  • Broadcast in Lifestyle
Pro Change

Pro Change

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September 2008 found me in the darkest place of my life. Everything looked great on the outside - living on my own apartment in the perpetual summer of Santa Monica, making good money in a stable job - but not even my closest friends knew I was profoundly depressed that I planned my own suicide and was hopelessly addicted to alcohol. I felt like I'd tried everything - moving from job to job, place to place, boyfriend to boyfriend - and nothing worked. Depression groups, individual therapy and medications helped for a short while but I always ended up more depressed than when I started. After awhile, alcohol was the only thing that soothed me, and if this was how life was going to be forever more, I just wanted out.

Quite unintentionally I ended up in an
addiction recovery program for a year that literally saved my life. One of the first things my coach in the program instructed me to do was to sit still and meditate for 20 minutes every morning. Well, I'd never been able to meditate before and I doubted that just "sitting still" would accomplish much of anything. Plus detoxing on alcohol and not having my self-soother anymore made it quite impossible for me. But I had no other option so I tried my best, and though I couldn't sit still for 20 minutes, I found that I could be relatively motionless for about three minutes, and I could do this about three times a day. (This is what evolved into my current 3x3 meditation practice that I teach all my coaching clients.)

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