MENTOR is NCHPAD’s 8-week program focused on physical, mental and emotional health for individuals with an existing disability or a recent diagnosis. We recently sat down with MENTOR participant Quatrina Thurmon, who shared what she loved about the program and how it helped improve every aspect of her life.

Watch her story or continue reading below the video.

MENTOR taught me how to live life again, because I’ve been through so much. I’ve had a traumatic brain injury, two open heart surgeries, two heart attacks and two strokes. To go through what I’ve been through recently with a bunch of deaths in my family – close loved ones – to taking care of my mom, and also trying to take care of myself, too. It’s been a journey, but I’m still here, I’m still pushing and I’m still striving. And I can truly say that being in MENTOR has really helped me get focus and stay focused. But at the end of the day, I’m me!

MENTOR taught me how to redirect my life because MENTOR is about mindfulness. It’s about your emotions. It’s about nutrition, getting myself back to exercising, getting myself back to sitting down and thinking – and thinking about what I’m thinking about. With the mindfulness, it helped me to stay focused and helped me to think about who I am and what I am. It helped me to really get to know myself even better.

And I had to be committed to the exercise program. And at first I didn’t want to do it, but because of my commitment to the program, I had to do it which helped me out in the long run.

The nutrition part taught me how to really read the labels and know the good carbs from the bad carbs. Because, you know, all the time we think we are cooking healthy, but we’re not cooking and eating healthy, the right way.

Overall, again, like I said, I learned how to love me. It’s very important to love yourself, because if you don’t love yourself, how can you expect someone else to love you? And that’s what’s wrong with the world today. We don’t have enough love.

I really would recommend the MENTOR program to anyone that’s willing to go through it. At first, I was very hesitant, and I thought it was very time consuming. But as I got into it, and I realized it was to help me. And I realized that people who were in the club with me, we shared a lot of testimonies and stuff, I realized it helped them, too.

So if you have the opportunity to get into MENTOR, run for it. Run for it because it’s going to help you in the long run. It’s going to help you in every aspect of your life: mentally, socially, physically, emotionally, it’s going to help you.”