Sit with Me - by Oneika Mays (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

"I spent over a decade volunteering and working at Rikers Correctional Facility as their first-ever Mindfulness Coach. It was the most powerful and challenging work I would ever do. This is what I learned..."

Oneika Mays will help you heal, improve your communication skills, process forgiveness, discover self-worth while teaching you lovingkindness meditation.

Sit with Me invites readers to learn how to:

• Incorporate metta, meditation and lovingkindness into your life and discover how to deepen love for others
• Expand your circles and mind
• Authentically contribute to personal and societal healing
• Build bridges to unite people, and learn how to be a better human

After spending over a decade volunteering and working at Rikers Island Correctional Facility, Oneika saw what happens to people who feel like they've been tossed aside. And before Rikers, Oneika spent two decades as a B&N bookseller offering new worlds to seekers and language for exploration. She has a gifted ability to take big ideas and distill them down into understandable and relatable learnings allowing her to show up as a conduit for transformation. Oneika is your teacher, your auntie, your friend, and an intuitive soul here for the work of personal collective liberation.

Sit with Me is a gift to those who feel disconnected or lost, but know they want something to change. If you've ever felt left out, forgotten, judged, misunderstood or mistreated, this book is for you.

"Loving everyone is essential; liking them isn't necessary. This book is both a love letter to presence and a field guide for finding your way back to it when you've wandered far from home."

Review Quotes

Sit with Me is one of those rare books that doesn't just ask you to read. It asks you to reckon with yourself. Oneika Mays has given us something real, something necessary, something that reminds us that healing isn't lofty or distant. It's gritty, tender, and within reach. This book, this meditation, this prayer is for the ones carrying shame, the ones searching for wholeness, the ones who have been told to give to everyone but themselves. It's for those of us who know we can't be free until we learn to sit with all of who we are. - Darnell Lamont Walker, Death Doula and author of Never Can Say Goodbye

'When we can look past our need to like one another and get down to the business of loving one another, ' writes Oneika Mays, 'that's when the real work of building a better world can begin.' In her new book, Sit with Me: A No-BS Journey to Mindfulness and Meditation (HarperOne), Mays discusses her path as a practitioner of metta, or loving-kindness. She tells the story of her time as a meditation and yoga coach at New York City's notorious Riker's Island jail complex, where prisoners are often treated as if they don't deserve peace, comfort, quiet, or love. Part memoir, part meditation guide, Mays uses her experience at Rikers as a reference point to explore the benefits of a loving-kindness approach. Whether you're a practiced meditator or a novice, whether you've been incarcerated or not, this book will speak to you as a human being who's worthy of love. - Jessica Little, LION'S ROAR