Oneika Mays, On Her New Book, 'Sit with Me: A No-BS Journey to Mindfulness and Meditation'

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This is Play Cain Extended, an extended version of my radio show on Series XM Urban View Channel 1, 2, 6, which airs Monday through Friday from 12pm to 3pm.

This book is a really powerful book. It is called Sit With Me, a No BS Journey to Mindfulness and Meditation.

Listen, we need that in this moment. We really, really, too need that in this moment.

Let's bring her on. She is the author of the book that just dropped this week, so Happy Pub Week. Onika Mays, how you doing?

I'm doing well. Thank you so much for having me on.

Thank you for being here. Listen, I wanted to have you on because over the years, I've given a side eye to mindfulness and meditation.

But last year, when my best friend died, and I got a sofagitis, which I'm thankfully healed from, I really had to sit with myself, if you will, and lean into mindfulness and meditation.

And it's not a joke. It really is helpful. So for folks who may be like, I don't know about that. It's kind of hokey.

Tell them why your book Sit With Me really is a beautiful, wonderful guide.

I love your whole story, and I'm sorry about the passing of your friend. And I actually, I got into mindfulness because of, I lost somebody as well unexpectedly.

And a practice of sitting with yourself is really powerful because it's not about trying to be happier. It's not about finding joy.

But when you are able to be with whatever is happening in the moment, it allows you to respond to what's going on in your life with tenderness, with some grace.

And it can be really transformative. Your life doesn't change necessarily, but the way that you respond to life happening definitely does.

The way that you respond, absolutely. And I feel like even right now, we need that in this moment where everything is so over the top and everything going on right now in the country.

How can this book help people who might have stress and anxiety just living the day today, where we are politically and socially?

This is such a great question. You know, I even wrote about this in the beginning of my book. I wrote my book last year right after the election.

And I had talked about like if the fighting starts, you know, we won't be able to see each other and each other's eyes.

And the practice that I really write about in the book called loving kindness is this concept of offering well wishes.

And it's this expansive, unconditional love. So it's not this like woo woo kind of love.

But it's really deep and intense in the way that like Bell Hooks talks about love. It's an action word.

And we start with ourselves and we extend it out to other people. So to some people we love, to people we don't know.

And even people we're in conflict with. And I think it's important right now because while we don't have to agree with what's going on.

And especially around people that we're having a difficult time with when we can let go of the energy around people who are causing harm.

I think it can allow us to love ourselves more so we can make decisions about how we want to make change in the world.

And that starts with ourselves. We become an example for other people to see what the world can actually be like.

Now tell folks a bit about your journey because used to work at Rikers Island. And so I would assume that what you saw there really contributed to where you are today.

So tell folks a bit of your journey and how you got into mindfulness and meditation and some of those early triggers.

Yeah, I found yoga and mindfulness when I was actually working as a bookseller for a long time. And then I left it.

And then when someone in my life died and I was sort of repressing my grief, I found myself called back to yoga and meditation.

And when I became a yoga teacher, I was really grateful to be teaching a lot. And I wanted to serve and I found myself volunteering at Rikers Island after having a conversation with a family member because I come from a family of activists.

And what I found when I started working at Rikers full time, it was different volunteering than when you go there every single day.

I was a full time employee. I was sitting with about 10 people a day individually five days a week.

And it changed my perspective because I was in an environment that was that was violent, not just physically violent, but psychologically violent.

And you know, you're working inside, you know, the belly of white supremacy. And what I found was that I didn't have to like people to love them and that shifted a lot for me.

It shifted the way that I saw the world.

Now, I was looking at your bio and I can't find the exact quote, but I saw something here.

I want to make sure that I have this because the journey is so important.

You had over 15 rejections for this book. Talk a little bit about the journey of getting this published.

I can relate to that.

Yeah, I wrote four different proposals for this book. So I have like 80,000 words down before I was even like trying to find an agent.

And then I found an agent with my last proposal and we got 15 really lovely rejections. I mean, everybody was really kind.

And after the last rejection, it was from an editor who I knew and who said she knew me and she wanted to like the book, but she felt like something was missing.

I'm not suggesting that you change your proposal because of something someone says, but I think in the back of my mind, I felt like something wasn't quite right with the proposal.

And I had this moment where I was saying to myself, am I making this too complicated? I'm known for teaching in a way that's really approachable and taking like, you know, heavy concepts and making them digestible.

And I said, I need to approach this differently and I need to write this book the way that I teach.

And I changed my proposal. I did a different introductory chapter. And then we went out with that proposal. I actually got a meeting with who is now my publisher at Harper one that same day that we went out.

I love that. I love that. And you know, it's interesting because some of these publishers think that they know your audience better than you do.

But it is, it is important some time to take feedback and try to finesse things and make it work a certain kind of way. So I love that.

So again, the title sit with me a no BS journey to mindfulness and meditation. Talk about that BS part. What does no BS mindfulness really mean to you?

I don't like dogma. I don't like this idea that wellness practices have been co-opted by so many, you know, so many different places. And I believe in representation.

And I think it's important that we don't have to make this harder than it needs to be. And you don't have to buy a lot of stuff to get well.

And wellness isn't about like wind down Wednesdays. It's about, it's about healing. It's about being in community with people.

And it can just be as simple as finding a place to be with yourself. And you don't need to spend money to do that. And it doesn't need to be complicated.

And I am from a firm believer in that.

Now, a lot of people say they can't meditate. And this is hard for me as well, because their mind won't shut off.

So how do you reframe what meditation is actually for? What's the, what are some small doable ways that you can do it?

Because people say, I can't do it. I'm trying to do it, but my mind is just running everywhere.

This is the number one thing that people say when they find out that I'm a meditation teacher. My mind is too busy.

Meditation by definition is about concentration. So you're concentrating on something. Meditation is not about emptying your mind.

It's actually about making peace with what your mind is already doing.

So if your mind is active, there's no need to push back or fight against that. It's recognizing, hey, I'm thinking a lot.

And why wouldn't you be thinking a lot with everything that's going on?

So there's a practice that's called mindfulness, which you can do as a meditation, which is about paying attention to what's happening in the moment and not trying to change it and not trying to manipulate it.

You can do that as a meditation practice, but you can incorporate mindfulness into things that you're already doing.

And that's, I think, the best way to make this an easy practice.

So let's say you're washing dishes. You can wash dishes and allow yourself to really pay attention.

How is the soap hitting your hands when you're putting soap on your hands?

What does it feel like when you're washing an actual dish or how does the water feel when it's hitting your hands?

Do you notice if you're thinking about different things when you're doing that?

That is all a practice of mindfulness.

You can walk and be mindful. You can eat with intention.

Those are very easy ways to incorporate mindfulness into things that you're already doing.

You don't have to find a whole bunch of different time to set aside to have a mindfulness practice.

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What are some of the mistakes some errors that people make as they are trying to go into a mindfulness or meditation journey?

The biggest mistake that I made, I found meditation when my life fell apart, and it was helpful.

It was so powerful because I felt this instant transformation because my life really had bottomed out.

And then when my life started to feel better, I stopped practicing.

So consistency is key.

Having a practice isn't just about when things are bad.

We also practice when things are going well, or nothing's going on at all.

And we know this about doing anything consistently.

If you're working out, you don't just work out like once in a while, you work out consistently to see the benefits.

So it's not just something that can help you when you're feeling bad, but it's also a preventative practice.

And it's practice.

So when life comes at you, you've been practicing mindfulness.

So you're like, oh, this is happening.

And I'm responding differently than I would have in the past because I've been practicing mindfulness consistently.

And where does, or maybe it doesn't, spirituality come into place.

If somebody's listening and they are Christian or they are Islam or they practice Europe, where does their spirituality come into place with this?

People's spirituality and their faith can always have a place with a mindfulness or meditation practice.

And I think so many different faiths have a version of meditation.

I can't remember the person who said this, but they say that prayer is when you talk to God and meditation is when you listen.

And I think that can apply to anyone that when we're silent and we're really listening.

And whether your practice is just like talking to your ancestors and listening to your ancestors, we can do that when we're quiet.

Now, in the book, you talk about communication and forgiveness, which I think is really, really important.

How have you seen meditation change people when they have to show up for like difficult conversations?

That's really people struggle with that all the time, right?

And maybe it's confronting somebody.

I don't mean confronting in a bad way, but just saying what's on your heart.

And you know in advance, this is going to be a really hard conversation to have that they're not going to hear me.

They're going to shut me down. They're going to gaslight me.

How do you connect that mindfulness to those kind of conversations?

You said something really important that confronting somebody doesn't have to be such a bad thing.

And I think particularly here in the United States, we are so programmed to think that any kind of discomfort is something that we should be avoiding.

And when we're in conflict with someone, the things that we can control are what's happening inside our body and noticing our responses that are happening inside our body.

And remembering that we can be our own safe place and how somebody reacts to what we're saying doesn't really have anything to do with us.

And we can control how we're responding to a situation.

And the way that forgiveness I think plays into this, forgiveness is a really powerful tool.

And I think it gets a bad rap because we think that forgiveness means letting somebody off the hook.

But what we're letting off the hook is the energy around the situation and we're separating ourselves from the energy around the situation.

So if we've caused harm to somebody when we're forgiving ourselves, we're letting go of that energy around the situation.

It doesn't mean that we're not holding ourselves accountable for the harm that we caused.

If anything goes in reverse, if somebody has hurt us, we're not saying like, I'm okay with what you did to me, but I'm letting myself be free from that energy of being hurt so I can be free.

When do you know you're doing it right? I've heard so many folks saying, I don't know if I'm doing this meditation thing right.

I don't know if it's working. When do you know that you're doing it right?

You know when your body, when you feel yourself being settled after a situation, something that I always notice, and I know that my practice is really working when there's a situation that that I thought was going to be particularly heated or was heated.

And I realized that my body doesn't feel really tight. I'm not stewing or ruminating on a conversation after it's happened because I was really present and in my body.

I wanted to say, and I wasn't attaching old stories or a lot of energy.

I stated my piece. I said what I wanted to say. I regulated my emotions and I left the situation feeling like, okay, that's the way that that needed to go or that didn't go the way that I needed to go, but I know that I can take care of myself.

That's when I think you know that you're doing it right.

And that's the thing because that that catastrophic thinking can be very addictive in some ways.

Going to the tragedy, going to the worst case scenario, it can be a strange way, an emotional roller coaster on your spirit, on your mind.

And I know it's hard like I said earlier to shut your mind off and you can't use it's hard to not think certain thoughts when you're scared when you are presented with something new with the whole what ifs right.

But do you agree that there's sometimes an addiction to this catastrophic thinking?

Yes, and the rumination, the playing things over and over and over again.

Ticknot Han who was an incredible, an incredible teacher and actually worked with MLK a lot on this idea of meditation talks about mindfulness and says that we live, we tend to hang out in the past and

we're being ruminated over things that happen or we live in the future about things that are going to happen, but our life is actually happening right now in the present.

And if we can remember that, we can make choices that are calm and that's how we learn how to respond to situations.

And we have to remember that when one thing is happening right now, that's the only thing that's happening right now.

Not the thing that's happening that's going to happen or the thing that happened in the past.

And that can give us a lot of freedom and we feel space and we don't feel so tight and constricted.

Yeah, I have a friend that always says, don't focus on future oriented thoughts.

Now you could, you want to plan and prepare for life, but obsessing over future oriented thoughts that you that you know you can't control is a recipe for emotional and spiritual disaster.

So yeah, I love that.

Absolutely.

When you think of the long term impact of your book, sit with me, I get this a lot with burned out master's house.

What kind of transformation do you hope readers will experience?

I don't know a year from now or even a decade from now with your book.

I hope that people realize that they can be the safe place that they're looking for.

I think particularly in the wellness world and like in the yoga and meditation world, you hear a lot of people talking about like safe spaces.

And I'm not actually not a believer in safe spaces.

I don't I don't think there really any safe spaces and the safe space that we're looking for is inside ourselves and it starts with us.

And a lot of ways that can sound corny and trite, but I think it's true are our freedom begins with us begins with our practice and then we can we can ripple that out.

And that's how we build community and if people walk away with anything, I think if I would like for them to realize that they don't even have to like every part of themselves to love themselves more.

And that is really powerful and that's a way that we can be free because when we do that, we can start to realize that we don't have to like people to love them unconditionally either.

Doesn't mean you even have to be in community with people that you don't like, but you can be free when you realize like I don't have to like everybody that there's a lot of judgment that gets caught up in that.

So I'd like people to find freedom inside themselves.

And I love that and there is a freedom of saying that, you know, I respect this person, but this person cannot be in my life right now.

There is a freedom in that that this just is not doable for me and it's not safe for me.

And I think you have to really do work to protect your safe space and also make sure that you recharge your safe space like what are the things that you're doing to make sure that your space is protected.

And a lot of us are not recharging. We're just going and going. That's why sometimes say, you know, turn the news off. Do what you can do to recharge because all this is going to drain you and whether it's your family or what you see on the news.

It all can just can just steamroll your heart. And so you got to really protect that. And if that means certain people can't be in your life, that's okay too. And you shouldn't judge yourself for that.

Absolutely. And on top of that, when we stop somebody who's been hurting us and we say like, I have to love you from a distance, you're actually helping that person as well because you're stopping them from causing harm.

And that's a powerful thing. And I don't think people think of it that way that we are we are interconnected and we're in relationships with people.

So when you're saying, you know what, I'm going to stop you from causing harm because I'm not going to let you cause harm to me anymore either.

There's a byproduct of hope that you're giving to that person too.

Yep, a byproduct of hope. I love that.

Thank you for listening to Claycane Extended. If you want to hear more, tune into my show on Series XM Urban View Channel 1226 from 12 p.m. to 3 p.m.

You know the deal, y'all. I never really gone.

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