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

Sit with Me made me think, made me cry, and often made me nod my head in recognition. Oneika Mays has used her life experiences as an invitation to look honestly at the events of our own lives, from the gritty to the gorgeous. Sit with Me will have you looking at the person next to you differently, more openly and compassionately, and this is good. This shift consequently makes us look differently at ourselves, and this is where true change and transformation begin, individually and collectively as human beings. - Susanna Harwood Rubin, author of YOGA 365: DAILY WISDOM FOR LIFE ON AND OFF THE MAT

Sit with Me illuminates what mindfulness is not--a practice to detach and ignore the world around and in us. Oneika's poignant and personal prose about her experience with the state of the nation's broken carceral system and the need for this system's reconstruction offers the reader opportunities to view mindfulness, not as a savior or through spiritual bypassing, but as a sacred witness to adversity. Sit with Me is a salve for these post-Covid, quasi-dystopian times and reveals the importance of mindfulness as a process, not achievement. This book is a must-read for yoga teachers, mindfulness coaches, and wellness practitioners willing to regularly look within. - Pamela Stokes Eggleston, MBA, MS, certified yoga therapist and Level III Reiki practitioner director, founder, and author

Mays offers no easy answers, but invites readers into a contemplative reflection about the self, community, and how we can make the world a better place for all. - Rev. Dr. Becca Ehrlich, pastor, spiritual director, and author of CHRISTIAN MINIMALISM: SIMPLE STEPS FOR ABUNDANT LIVING

In Sit with Me, Oneika Mays speaks with a clear and resonant voice that echoes through the cacophony of our times offering truth, wisdom, and a deep well of love. This book felt like a gift that I kept unwrapping as I turned the pages - Jivana Heyman, director and author

It is hard to put into words how deeply Sit with Me speaks to my soul. Having spent time yearning to be present, to care for and to love Rikers has changed me forever too, and I have wrestled with the same questions. I am certain this book can and will help so many. - Kimberleigh Weiss-Lewit, MA, and YACEP psychotherapist

This is an essential treatise on metta practice that every modern dedicated practitioner should read and contemplate. - Jacoby Ballard, yoga teacher, social justice educator, and author

'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