For Mental health Awareness Month this May, Billboard is teaming up with Lazuli Collective's Brandon Holman on a series of articles focusing on mindfulness and professional development for executives, creatives and artists in the music community.
Today's chat is with Kenji Summers, an advertising executive turned certified mindfulness trainer. Summers is a self-described “black guy who does too much” and is on a mission to help broke hip-hop-raised professionals learn mindfulness techniques to reduce stress and avoid burnout. Through meditation groups, Summers uses his deep love of music and hip-hop to help people find peace. Here, he explains how landing his dream job made him realize he didn't have a deeper connection with himself and how Kendrick Lamar Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers he brought his meditation club.
I grew up in Brooklyn in the 90s, specifically in a neighborhood called Bed-Stuy. I was between where Biggie lived and where Jay-Z grew up. At the time, my aunt Gerrie [Summers] was its editor-in-chief Word Up! magazine. So, in the house where I grew up, I listened to the sounds of hip-hop, the culture and especially the album, Life after death Biggie's double album. It was the first time I heard a whole album.
I remember sitting in my room after expropriating or borrowing the album from my aunt because she was getting it a few weeks earlier. I had my eyes closed and watched it and saw all the stories that Biggie rhymed about – as much detail as I could at 10. What led me to it was a love of music, particularly hip-hop, and a desire to learn more about what my aunt was doing. Seeing how people could paint these pictures, I wanted to spend more time understanding how people do this.
Ultimately, this led me to wanting to work at the intersection of music and messaging or art and media. Once I realized there were careers in this space that weren't just rappers, the person I looked up to was Steve Stoute. He had gone from working as a record label president and managing artists like Nas to starting a branding consultancy and advertising agency.
I started taking more advertising classes as I graduated from university. I found mentoring and found people who were black and people of color in advertising. Having these early experiences in music, I thought that maybe there was a way to bring my culture to this branch of art and copying. I worked for a few years in advertising, trying to get people to buy things they didn't need and often believing things they didn't really understand. I saw it as both a gift and a curse.
In advertising, I had to go to work every day and it was often very early or very late at night and I worked weekends. I would find myself smiling and the ideas flowing and then you would put me in a meeting with my managers or the client and the words wouldn't come out as smoothly. I stumbled over my words, repeating words I didn't need to because I wasn't sure if they were landing. I was stressed. I was disturbed.
I started researching. I started going to specialists, primary care doctors and neurologists. It was a neurologist who said, “You might have anxiety. Actually, I know you're stressed.” He said, “It's not your brain. Your brain is working fine. It's your mouth.” The neurologist sent me to another man in his office, who I now know was a mindfulness teacher, and he said, “Okay, let's sit down. Let's start at the bottom of your feet and bring your attention to that part of your body.”
Man, I couldn't focus on it. I wasn't trying to hear it. I was like, fix me. Give me a pill. Be in healing, whatever you are dealing with. I don't know what this woo-woo is. [Instead of mindfulness], I wanted to stop drinking alcohol because maybe that's the point. I started drinking kava. Maybe I should start going to therapy. My dad is a therapist, so maybe therapy was the theme all along. It was cool. It helped, but I found that I was out of touch with myself and I didn't have the words to describe that I was out of touch with myself.
I was working at my dream job. I was working at Nike, which brought hip-hop and advertising together. They are the best storytellers in the game. Working at Nike exposed me to the mamba mentality. There was something called mindfulness behind the mamba mentality. I found out it was this guy that Kobe was [Bryant] collaborated with George Mumford. I was surprised that he also worked with Michael Jordan. I started reading as much as I could about George Mumford. I read this book called The Mindful Athlete: Secrets to Pure Performance. I started listening to my story in his story and he was talking about recovery. I realized, there are layers to it. To this day, I still go through these levels and levels.
Around 2018, I was let go from Nike and I was in my practice, meditating every day. When I started thinking about a mediation club, I don't want to just meditate in silence. I have participated in these environments and always felt like something was missing, like I was leaving a part of myself out. I thought about Sufism and I was saying that they don't leave it out. The music is very spiritual. So music had to be at the forefront of the mediation club. I started thinking about it through Kendrick Lamar's latest album Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers. The song “The Heart Part 5” that was released while I was on retreat. I heard it on repeat. It was a mantra. There's a period, early in the song, where he just stops the record, the music continues and he just breathes.
[During COVID isolation], I started doing the mediation club over Zoom. We just heard several songs from Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers as mediation. As I did with Life after death when I was a kid. When the song ends, grab whatever space you want to grab. I just ask that you deal with it with dignity. You can sit down. You can lie down, just let the spine be divine. Let it line up. Then, what I think really brings it home, is that we need to talk about your experience. It may be different. Then I started to see how I could use my credentials to hold that space, to keep the container open for people to be vulnerable.
I'm lucky to be able to get a text message from George Mumford on Wednesday morning. But I also know that if I get it, I have to give it away. This brings me to the life I am in now. It's nice that I had the opportunity to be helped, but now it's time to turn the block and help others who may not even know there is a way out.
from our partners at https://www.billboard.com/culture/lifestyle/mental-health-kenji-summers-mindfulness-through-mamba-mentality-kendrick-lamar-1235683443/