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http://www.blackenterprise.com/lifestyle/importance-meditation-work/
Having one of those days when you’re buried in paperwork while your boss piles on a list of unrealistic demands and a difficult co-worker manages to get on your very last nerve? If so, then it may be time for you to step away from your desk and take some time to meditate.
Quentin Vennie (Photo by Daryl Taylor of D. Taylor Images)
We’ve all had tough days like this while working on the clock. However, we don’t always deal with the stress of challenging situations and people at work in a healthy way. That’s why Black Enterprise invited entrepreneur, wellness expert, and author Quentin Vennie to stop by our office in New York City to share advice on how and why we must meditate.
Mindfulness at Work
Vennie explained why it’s imperative for everyone, especially working professionals, to give themselves a mental break and practice mindfulness.
“So often throughout the day we’re faced with so much adversity, so many things, so much stress, [and] we’re trying to multitask,” he said. “Sometimes I think it’s important to just take yourself outside of that. Focus your attention on one thing and move forward from that point.”
In a nutshell, here is why Vennie says mindfulness is crucial for success:
- We are what we think
- You can’t be faithful and fearful at the same time
- Focus on what you want to accomplish
- Gratitude is the best mechanism to defeat depression
Vennie also talked about using meditation as a tool to overcome affliction. Watch the full interview below.
Overcoming It All
Vennie, who says meditation has personally helped him overcome drug addiction and severe depression, was also recognized as a 2017 BE Modern Man of Distinction, where he shared his story. Here’s an excerpt:
I was born and raised in a single-parent household on the west side of Baltimore. My father was a heroin addict, and by the time I was 12 I had been shot at and spent more time visiting prisons than most of the people I was close to. Despite spending a lot of time in my old neighborhood in West Baltimore, I went to predominantly white schools in the suburbs of Baltimore County. I experienced racism, discrimination, prejudice, you name it. I was diagnosed with acute anxiety and mild depression when I was 14, and then diagnosed with severe generalized anxiety and panic disorder, and mild to severe major depressive disorder, at 26. I endured a two-year addiction to my anxiety medication, survived an accidental overdose and two failed suicide attempts, but was fortunate to discover a wellness system that saved my life (yoga, meditation, and fruit/vegetable juicing). Not only did it help me get off all medications, but it also made my anxiety and depression easier to manage.
I started telling my story of my battles with anxiety, depression, and addiction in 2012 when I first started my journey into sobriety, and on May 30th of this year, my first book, Strong in the Broken Places: A Memoir of Addiction and Redemption Through Wellness was published in the U.S. and Canada, and published in Australia and the U.K. on July 1st. I was able to successfully turn my trial into a triumph that has positively impacted people worldwide.
Now, it’s time for you to meditate with us! Follow along with this 14-minute meditation session guided by Quentin below.
Having one of those days when you’re buried in paperwork while your boss piles on a list of unrealistic demands and a difficult co-worker manages to get on your very last nerve? If so, then it may be time for you to step away from your desk and take some time to meditate.
Quentin Vennie (Photo by Daryl Taylor of D. Taylor Images)
We’ve all had tough days like this while working on the clock. However, we don’t always deal with the stress of challenging situations and people at work in a healthy way. That’s why Black Enterprise invited entrepreneur, wellness expert, and author Quentin Vennie to stop by our office in New York City to share advice on how and why we must meditate.
Mindfulness at Work
Vennie explained why it’s imperative for everyone, especially working professionals, to give themselves a mental break and practice mindfulness.
“So often throughout the day we’re faced with so much adversity, so many things, so much stress, [and] we’re trying to multitask,” he said. “Sometimes I think it’s important to just take yourself outside of that. Focus your attention on one thing and move forward from that point.”
In a nutshell, here is why Vennie says mindfulness is crucial for success:
- We are what we think
- You can’t be faithful and fearful at the same time
- Focus on what you want to accomplish
- Gratitude is the best mechanism to defeat depression
Vennie also talked about using meditation as a tool to overcome affliction. Watch the full interview below.
Overcoming It All
Vennie, who says meditation has personally helped him overcome drug addiction and severe depression, was also recognized as a 2017 BE Modern Man of Distinction, where he shared his story. Here’s an excerpt:
I was born and raised in a single-parent household on the west side of Baltimore. My father was a heroin addict, and by the time I was 12 I had been shot at and spent more time visiting prisons than most of the people I was close to. Despite spending a lot of time in my old neighborhood in West Baltimore, I went to predominantly white schools in the suburbs of Baltimore County. I experienced racism, discrimination, prejudice, you name it. I was diagnosed with acute anxiety and mild depression when I was 14, and then diagnosed with severe generalized anxiety and panic disorder, and mild to severe major depressive disorder, at 26. I endured a two-year addiction to my anxiety medication, survived an accidental overdose and two failed suicide attempts, but was fortunate to discover a wellness system that saved my life (yoga, meditation, and fruit/vegetable juicing). Not only did it help me get off all medications, but it also made my anxiety and depression easier to manage.
I started telling my story of my battles with anxiety, depression, and addiction in 2012 when I first started my journey into sobriety, and on May 30th of this year, my first book, Strong in the Broken Places: A Memoir of Addiction and Redemption Through Wellness was published in the U.S. and Canada, and published in Australia and the U.K. on July 1st. I was able to successfully turn my trial into a triumph that has positively impacted people worldwide.
Now, it’s time for you to meditate with us! Follow along with this 14-minute meditation session guided by Quentin below.
I’ve been thinking about a lot about sisterhood, fam. Or maybe Sistahood, that bond that Black women form beyond blood relation. It can include friendship, but sometimes not. I know I’ve given that strong sister love and attention to a woman I didn’t but barely like, because she needed it that minute. I’ve received a moment of Sistahood from strangers on public transit. Sistahood is #YouOKSis as much as it is girl weekend get-aways. Sistahood is the way we believe and believe in each other before everyone else does, and after everyone else has moved on. I’ve been thinking about how we express Sistahood, how we experience it, and how we (and others) represent it in media. Thinking about how it is a concept we love but how the work of it…well sometimes that’s a lot.
Maybe I started this train of thought after I watched Step, which is mostly about Black girlhood coming into Black womanhood in the shade of poverty and institutional neglect, but it is also about how a group of Black women — teacher, coach, principal, counselor, mom — teach Black girls about Sistahood, how to be sisters to each other, and how that can lead to success. Believing in themselves isn’t a magic remedy in Step, but it is part and parcel of each of the girls comes to support the others. This happened, is happening right now with each of us in different ways.
But Step wasn’t the first movie this year that centered the special Sistahood relationship. I remember speaking to an Asian American friend about how much she and her friends liked Girls Trip and how inspired she felt, how it called her to identify even more closely with her “sisters”, none of whom are Black. A comedy of our sisterhood can demonstrate to non-Black women how it is done. Which takes me back further this year to Hidden Figures and how in so many of the reviews of a uniquely Black women’s story, the moral was made to be about “all women.”
Black women are certainly women, but is Hidden Figures about all women equally? I encourage all women to feel inspired by the movie, but the inspirational theme succeeds in part because they are Black women who believe in each other, not *in spite* of the fact that they are Black. There’s more thoughts down this track. My mind wanders back farther, to the video that makes the internet rounds regularly in which a white guy is singing about how when he’s feeling down, he thinks of Black women hugging. You’ve seen it:
It is all some kind of trap, isn’t it? That when we are funny and successful we are a universal example, but when we are serious and angry and not at all respectable we are a singular icon of dysfunction. Beyonce when she is dancing alone on stage is sexy, but Beyonce when she is wearing black surrounded by her sisters setting shit on fire, the mainstream has a problem. How hard is it for people, sometimes yes even us, to see that both have a place in Sistahood.
There’s more, so much more.
Books too. We’ve always featured in our own fiction of course, but it all feels like it is bold outline to me right now. I just finished reading Who Fears Death by N. Okorafor and I’m sucked in by Onyesonwu’s relationship with her 3 class/age mates, Luyu, Diti, and Binta. What starts out so reluctantly results in the kind of secret sharing that friendships are built on, up until they all agree to travel together into the unknown. It is a trip of faith, of believing that Onyesonwu can do what she says she can do, and that the other girls can help.
It is the most poignant kind of story, one of diversity within the group that leads to unity. Is that universal? Isn’t that every friend novel ever? But the specific details of that friendship (details omitted for those of you who haven’t read it) are uniquely Black and African and to ignore that is to erase what makes that story soar. The 4 of them are a Sistahood and that carries with it some hard conversations, some serious truth, and each of them believing in the others in times of pain.
In the last year, Marvel Comics, perhaps in spite of itself, has delivered new presentations of specifically Black Sistahood — all written by Black people. While romantic love played a significant role in Coates’ and Gay’s World of Wakanda mini-series , Sistahood is there too in the way that Ayo and Aneka lead their fellow Dora Milaje to raise their voices and determine their own destinies. Breaking out of a mold that may be privileged but that is none the less restrictive is serious work and in World of Wakanda, a group of Black women break that mold together.
The risks the Dora Milaje take for each other, turning away from Black Panther only to help save Wakanda itself — that took serious belief in their cause, and in each other. Their relationships are built on confidence, and it makes them almost unstoppable. Then there’s the growing friendship between Ororo and Misty in Black Panther and The Crew, the fruits of which we can only imagine (the series has already been cancelled). Or write fanfiction about, depending on your talent. (Yo, if you’re writing Ororo & Misty fanfic … I AM HERE FOR THAT.)
Looking at the media representation swirling around us right now, I’m not the only one with Sistahood on her mind. This list of pop culture references that feature Sistahood as a key component in the past year only touches the surface. I haven’t gotten to Queen Sugar or Bitch Planet or Alice Isn’t Dead. Black women and our love of each other has always been everywhere and overlooked but now we can’t be ignored. We won’t go away.
I know why all of this is on my mind.
Image from The Seattle Globalist, June 2015
We’ve always been under siege, but in this historical moment, believing in Black women feels more necessary AND we’re reaching a point in representation, both as creators and consumers, where we can put that concern, that need, into our media. Now connection isn’t Sistahood, and our representation in pop culture still lags, but steps are being made. Accurate and empowering representation shows us our own diversity at the same time that it demonstrates that diversity to non-Black people.
Looking back over the media of the recent past, our Sistahood is getting the stage it has always deserved. It is up to us to keep pushing our representation forward and of course, to keep believing in Black Women.
Opening image courtesy of #WOCinTech/#WOCinTech Chat.
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