Picture the end of a session. The timer chirps, eyes open, and for a half-second the mind is blank, a little unmoored, before the grocery list and the dog's overdue bath come rushing back. Most beginners would read that half-second as proof they failed. Dina Proctor, creator of 3x3 Meditation and author of Madly Chasing Peace, reads it the opposite way. In a five-minute video posted to her channel in February 2017, she takes up the question she says comes up most often with people starting out: how do I know I'm meditating right? Her answer does not rely on a scorecard of stillness or silence. Meditation, in her account, is not a task you check off and forget but a state of being meant to run through the rest of your day, and the sign you have reached it shows up at the moment you stand up again. Her argument borrows from athletes, singers, and performers in full flow, and it reframes the whole practice around focus and ease rather than effort.
Proctor frames the question as a matter of wanting to reach the right place. She says it "comes from a place of wanting to make sure that you're accessing that deepest part," the part of you that is doing what you are meant to do while sitting in meditation (0:17 to 0:27). That is a generous way to put it. Beginners rarely ask whether they are comfortable or whether their posture is good. They ask whether they are touching something real, and the fear is that they are missing it.
She also admits the question was hers too. She says it "came up really frequently when I first started meditating" (0:10 to 0:14). That detail matters. Her answer is not offered from some distant height of mastery but from the same uncertainty every new practitioner feels on the cushion, now refined into a working test.
The core of Proctor's approach is a distinction between meditation as an event and meditation as a condition. She describes the checklist mentality almost comically: "oh I went to yoga class this morning, oh I had breakfast, oh I took a shower, oh I meditated" (0:35 to 0:50). In that picture, the session has a start time, an end time, and then the practitioner goes about the day without another thought. Proctor says that is not how it works for her. Meditation is "not compartmentalized like that" (0:50 to 0:55).
She does still use the scaffolding most people use. She says she generally sets a timer and "kind of set[s] aside a time for that" (1:32 to 1:40). But the timer is a container for a purpose larger than itself. Her stated aim is "to access that inner space of knowledge of flow of peacefulness" so that it does not stay locked inside the session but "penetrates and permeates" awareness as she moves through the day (1:44 to 2:00). In her words, meditation is "something you bring throughout your day" and "a state of being" (around 1:27 and 2:25).
This shift matters for anyone who has ever felt like a failure because their twenty minutes on the cushion did not produce a deep silence. If the goal is a state you carry, then the question becomes less about what the session felt like and more about what the rest of the day feels like as a result.
Proctor's central analogy is athletic, and it is a good one. Think of a basketball player, she says: the gym is where they practice free throws, and the game is where they use the muscle they built there. The reflexes and reactions drilled in the gym show up on the court without being summoned as separate acts of effort. Meditation time, in her framing, is the practice. The rest of your life is the game, and that is where you "call on the skills that you honed" in the session (1:04 to 1:30).
From a musician's seat, the analogy holds even better. Anyone who has watched a great singer or a guitarist deep in a solo knows the strange paradox of the moment: the performer is working hard and yet not experiencing effort. Proctor makes the same observation. When an athlete or performer is at their best, "there's not a sense of effort to that it's a sense of ease it's a sense of effortlessness" (around 2:17). She adds that "everybody kind of gets chills and gets goosebumps" when someone performs at that level. Even while highly active, the performer is accessing a state of flow and inner guidance, which is precisely what she says meditation trains you to carry.
"It's a state of ease and a state of flow." (Dina Proctor, YouTube video, February 2017, around 1:30)
That phrase is the hinge of the entire piece. Ease and flow are not the rewards of a difficult practice. They are the qualities the practice is trying to make familiar.
Here is where Proctor gets concrete. She lays out what the test looks like across a single session. You sit down with a mind full of errands: you need to go shopping, get the laundry done, pick up the kids, bathe the dog. Perhaps you are annoyed at something, or overwhelmed, or frustrated that things are not going right. Then comes the transition, which she describes as the part where you "switch gears," settle in, quiet down, and let the mind empty. You spend "a couple of minutes or longer" in that empty state (around 3:25 to 3:40).
Then you come out. If, in her words, "it takes you a second to remember" what you were thinking about before you sat down, she says that is the indicator. You have accomplished something, because the mind has moved onto a different track. She puts it this way: "you have changed the brain you know on the train and the brain on the tracks has switched tracks" (around 3:50). The image is a train changing lines. Whatever the neuroscience of that metaphor, the practical instruction is clear: pay attention to the seam between the cushion and the kitchen sink.
Notice what the test measures and what it does not. It does not ask how peaceful the session felt, how many thoughts you had, or whether you held your posture perfectly. It asks about the gap afterward. That makes it a self-report, and Proctor offers no outside measure. But it is a usable one. A beginner can notice, day after day, whether the old agenda floods back the instant the timer goes off, or whether there is a small, fresh pause before it returns.
The second half of Proctor's answer describes what the test is pointing toward. She calls it "a state of exclusivity of your focus," a sense of being "deeply and sent deeply centered and plugged into that inner... source of power, peace and wisdom" that she says everyone has access to "at any moment" (around 4:25 to 4:40). In that state, everything else fades. You "kind of forget about it," and your attention narrows to the one place where you are meant to be.
She connects this to ordinary, non-meditative experiences that most people recognize. The artist "in the zone," the person helping someone else, the worker so absorbed that "time is flying" are, for her, examples of the same thing she is describing (around 4:15 to 4:25). The difference is that meditation trains you to find that state on purpose rather than by luck. It is the musician's oldest discovery: the best passages happen when you stop forcing them.
She ends by saying she likes to think in analogies, and that when something works for her she likes to share it "because maybe it helps you too" (around 5:00). That modesty is worth taking seriously. Her framework is less a doctrine than a set of working images, the gym and the game, the train changing tracks, the performer in flow, each offered as a handle for a quality that is hard to describe directly.
If the question "how do I know I'm meditating right?" has been nagging at your practice, start with Proctor's own five-minute video. It is short enough to watch twice and rewards a second listen for the way she moves from checklist to state of being. Then try the come-back test for a week. Keep a loose note of what you were thinking about before each sit, and notice whether the return to that thought takes a moment on the way out. You are not grading yourself. You are simply watching for the seam.
For a longer look at her approach, her book Madly Chasing Peace is the natural next step, since she identifies herself as its author in the video. And if the basketball and performance analogies struck you, consider the practical version of her argument: treat your sits as practice reps and your ordinary days as the game. The aim, as she frames it, is not to get better at sitting still. It is to bring that stillness, and its ease, back onto the court.
