Rebekah: Hey guys.
It’s Bex here and I’m here with my very good friend Quentin Vennie from QuentinVennie.com
and he is gracing the Bex Life farm with his presence today to bring us all kinds of wisdom
and insight.
We did some meditations for men.
It has been an awesome day.
Quentin: Yeah.
Rebekah: Now we’re going to talk about anxiety and how you cured your anxiety or you managed
your anxiety with just three easy steps that I think are awesome.
I get excited.
So the first one – and I pulled this from a Mind Body Green article that you did.
You are such a prolific writer.
I want to like make videos about it all, but let’s stay focused.
Quentin: Thank you.
Rebekah: The number one thing you did was you made meditation your medication.
I love that.
Quentin: Yeah.
I mean I ended up with a 2.5-year addiction to anti-anxiety medication.
I found that what the medicine did for me is the same exact thing that meditation does
for me.
It calms my mind.
It brings me to a place of comfort, to a place of peace, of serenity.
I didn’t need an external factor to do that.
All I needed was time and myself.
Rebekah: OK.
Quentin: And so now anytime I have any kind of anxious moments or if I feel the onset
of a panic attack, I will find that place of stillness and I will concentrate on my
breathing and I will calm my mind.
It helps – it works every time.
Rebekah: So meditation just isn’t a – like a spiritual endeavor.
It’s a tool that you can use for all different kinds of things in life.
I love it.
The difference for me is – we share a history of anxiety and I was also on anti-anxiety
medications.
The difference for me is the medication was kind of stifling or kind of numbing who I
was or trying to quiet it, where meditation wakes me up to who I am and allows me to get
deeper and remove the anxiety that surrounds that.
So I love it too.
I’m a big fan of meditation.
Number two, you accepted your worst case scenario.
I love this because I use this all the time.
Quentin: It’s like for anybody who suffers through anxiety – you know, I work with
people all over the world that go through the same thing.
It’s like, oh, I feel like I’m having a heart attack.
I’m having chest pains.
I can’t breathe, blah, blah, blah.
I think I’m going to die.
Well, the reality is that that’s the destination for everyone.
All right?
If it’s your time –
Rebekah: Bummer.
Quentin: I mean it’s just – it is what it is, right?
Rebekah: You might die.
Quentin: If it’s your time to go, what can you do about it?
Rebekah: Right.
Quentin: I accepted that I’m going to die one day, right?
But it doesn’t have to be in this moment.
However, if for whatever reason it is, I’m OK with that.
Death was my worst case scenario, right?
It wasn’t my worst case scenario because I was afraid of death.
It was like I was afraid of what would transpire before I died.
Rebekah: Well, that’s the most extreme thing that could happen, and we bring it back a
couple of happy notches here, and bring it to the worst case scenario in any event.
I think about that a lot.
Like, I’ve been in a place where I didn’t have a home.
I’ve been in a place where I couldn’t pay my bills or I didn’t know how I was
going to eat next and most things that I worry about day to day would never bring me to that
place.
Am I going to be healthy at the end of this?
Are my kids going to be safe?
Like, really putting things in perspective is what this is about.
What is the worst case scenario and can you live with that and accept that and then move
on?
It will relieve a lot of the anxiety.
Quentin: You said it better than I could.
Rebekah: No, I think that – yes, I did.
No.
No, I didn’t.
No.
I mean all perspectives are so important and you are coming from this place of big extremes
and – but now, like look at us.
We’re sitting here.
We’re safe.
We’re happy.
We’re well taken care of.
Quentin: Absolutely.
Rebekah: And there are still so many things that can come up in our day that give us a
lot of anxiety.
How do we manage those?
Because it’s the little things that add up that make you super unhealthy.
Quentin: Yeah.
Rebekah: Not just the big events.
Quentin: Yeah, totally.
I mean what inspired me was that big event.
Anxiety was – death by anxiety essentially was what was worst for me.
Rebekah: Because you do feel like you’re dying when you’re having an anxiety attack.
Quentin: Absolutely.
Rebekah: All right.
This one, I have no idea what you’re talking about.
So I’m going to be honest.
I didn’t read the whole article.
I just took out some points.
It’s keeping it real, right, in 2015?
Quentin: [0:04:39] [Indiscernible]
Rebekah: OK.
I created my own lane.
What does that mean?
Quentin: It means that I stopped trying to follow the path of everyone else to find happiness
for myself.
Rebekah: OK.
Quentin: I found it the best way I knew how to, which was sitting down and actually accepting
myself for who I am.
Can we be real here for a second?
Rebekah: Always.
Quentin: Let’s be 100 percent real.
Rebekah: We’ve been totally fake up until this point.
Quentin: Yeah, it’s like – but the reality is I’m not supposed to be here, right?
Like, when you look at society and you look at the way that minorities are demonized and
treated and looked at in society.
Coming from a place that I come from, I come from Baltimore.
It’s like the heroin capital of America.
It’s the fourth most dangerous city.
Like, I’m not supposed to be here having this conversation with you.
Rebekah: Yeah.
Quentin: By society standards, I’m supposed to be a drug-addicted, no-good father of 70
kids.
You know, or I owe hundreds of thousands of dollars in child support.
Like, this is – that was supposed to be my life.
But it’s not.
I stopped attaching myself to what everyone else thought success looked like.
I stopped attaching myself to what everyone else thought that happiness looked like.
I found it for myself.
So I said, “Screw the statistics.
Screw society.
Screw everybody else’s opinion.
I’m going to do this for me.”
I took back who I was, from everyone else.
I stopped caring about everyone else’s opinion.
I stopped with all of it and I said, if I’m going to survive this – because this was
brought up because of my anxiety.
Rebekah: Yeah.
Quentin: If I’m going to survive this, if I’m going to make it in this world, I have
to do me.
So essentially, it’s be you.
Be 100 percent who you are.
Stop trying to be everyone else.
Be authentically you.
Create your own lane, whatever that lane may be.
Be that and live it.
Rebekah: And you know how to find out how to be you?
Quentin: I’m sure you’re going to tell us.
Rebekah: You know I got to start laughing.
Meditation.
No, I think – that is true.
I mean just, again, checking in with yourself constantly, reminding yourself of who you
really are and not who you’re expected to be or how you’re perceived.
We’ve had this conversation a lot like in this health and wellness world and how you’re
not supposed to be there either.
We were watching a video for my friend John Joseph earlier, who’s a complete maniac.
I love him.
You should Google him if you want to find out more about him and his amazing book Meat
is for Pussies.
I only say that word when I’m talking about that book.
And how he’s allowed to get away with so much by virtue of the fact that he’s a white
man, and if you were to say those same things in the video that he says or in a book that
he says …
Quentin: I will be angry black guy.
Rebekah: Probably, probably.
But there’s still a way to get your message across by creating your own lane and saying,
“You know what?
I don’t need to live within your rules or your standards.
I’m going to make a way for my voice to be heard and for my mission to be fulfilled.”
Quentin: That’s exactly it.
Rebekah: I love it.
Just so you know though, you can be the angry black man in any of my videos if you want
to.
I welcome it.
I think it’s so much fun.
Quentin: Yeah, I think it will be cool.
It’s maybe a good offset.
It’s not going to happen.
Rebekah: Please don’t comment on that.
Quentin: It’s not going to happen.
Rebekah: Don’t comment on that.
Thank you so much.
I know it always – it ends in laughing.
It has to, right?
Quentin: Yeah.
It has to.
Rebekah: It’s all funny.
Quentin: Yeah, it’s all fun.
Rebekah: It’s all fun.
Quentin: Being healthy, being happy shouldn’t be work.
Rebekah: It shouldn’t be work.
It shouldn’t make you miserable.
It should make you feel light.
It should make you feel free.
It should make you feel empowered.
So that is our wish for you today.
We want to hear all of your feedback in the comments below.
I love when you tell me exactly what you think.
Don’t worry about my perception of your comments even though sometimes they make me
cry.
So leave those below.
We will answer them and I will see you soon in another Bex Life video.