Oneika Mays on Mindfulness, Loving-Kindness, and Writing ‘Sit With Me’

[00:00:03] Hi, I'm Dr. Russell Thackeray and welcome to Resilience Unravelled, a podcast with new ideas, new thoughts, and new thinking about resilience. Guests with remarkable stories, products and services that can really power up your own mindset and resilience. You can also go to our site for more information, to ask questions, or to access some of our resources at resilienceunravelled.com. Let's get started.

[00:00:32] Hello and welcome back to Resilience Unravelled and welcome to my latest guest. Someone said it would be splendid and a most fantastic pair of glasses. We've just been talking about those. My guest is Onika Mays. Hi, Onika. How are you? I am doing really well, Russell. Thanks for having me. Yeah. So where in the world are you? I'm in Jersey City, which is right across from Manhattan. I can see One World Trade Center from my roof deck. So I'm very close to the city. Oh, really? The city with the new mayor?

[00:01:02] Yes, it is. How is that going? It's, I think it's pretty exciting. He has done some really incredible things already as far as taking care of the folks that he said that he would take care of. So I think that's really great. There's some folks who I don't think are as thrilled about having him. But I think any sort of shakeup is necessary with any institution. So I love to see that we have a mayor who's, I think he's 34, 35.

[00:01:28] It's very young, isn't it? And different. It's quite nice in these current times to see that New York still is a bastion of difference, which is relaxing. We're trying. We're trying. There are some people who are pushing back, but I can't hope. I do. I have hope. And I think things like having elections with people like Mom Donnie elected just let us know that all hope is not lost. And I think we need to remember that. Yeah, very good.

[00:01:54] Look, before we get sidetracked or I get sidetracked into one of my favorite subjects, why don't you tell us a bit about you? So it's so funny. People don't really ask me that. They ask me about what I do. So I'm, I really like this. I'm a reader. I love to read. I've been reading since I was a kid. So I love books.

[00:02:12] I am a daughter. My mom is still with us. My father died about six years ago. I'm a sister. I'm an auntie. And spending time with my family is just incredible. I live in New Jersey with my partner, Andrea. We've done that for about seven years. And we have a little pit bull and her name is Jet, named after Joan Jett, the rock star. And so she's the rock star of my life.

[00:02:40] And I love music. Music has been such a big part of my world. And I don't have a, I don't have a musical bone in my body. I can't carry a tune, but I like to think of myself as a musician's musician. Yes. The audience member that appreciates it and pays. Yes. Yeah. Yes. Really important. Yeah, it is really important. Yeah. So I really love music too. And the arts have always really just appealed to me, all sorts of arts. So why is that?

[00:03:09] I love the idea of having someone take you somewhere or to tell you a story. I think I'm a natural storyteller. I've always loved to tell stories. I've always loved to listen to stories. And seeing the world through someone else's perspective is always fascinating to me. Did your parents tell you stories when you were a child? They did. My mom actually used to read me stories from Ms. Magazine. Ms. Magazine used to have kids' stories and she would read them to me as a kid. And I didn't find that out until

[00:03:38] actually just a couple of years ago she told me about that. And I thought that was really fascinating. And I tried to track them down, but I couldn't find them. So I was an only child for about eight years. And whenever I was bored, my mother would tell me to go read a book. So I think that's where my love for stories started to come from because I was surrounded by books.

[00:03:57] You know, I find that fascinating because I think it's almost the greatest gift a parent can give, isn't it? Is to inspire that love of reading, learning, that losing yourself in something which is between the covers of a hardback or a softback. Really great, isn't it?

[00:04:12] It's really magical. There's nothing like it. And you can go anywhere and you can be anyone. You can do seemingly impossible things when you have a book in your hands. And I'm so grateful that I had that journey my entire life. It's something I've never been without. I can't even remember discovering reading because it's just something I've always been doing. And I still love some of my old favorite kids' books. Like The Phantom Tollbooth is one of my favorites.

[00:04:37] It's Where the Sidewalk Ends by Shel Silverstein. His book of poetry is something that I refer back to again and again, even now. And it's funny, isn't it? Because it's almost as if the education process beats the love of reading out of people, isn't it? Because I remember going through, we have O's and A-levels over here different to you. I remember having the poetry of John Donne and The Metaphysics and George Orwell and such and Evelyn Waugh as Alex, which are great, really interesting.

[00:05:06] But for O-level, we had The Canterbury Tales and such and it was drummed into us and it became torture to read them. And I think if you become a free spirit, spirit as independent reader as a child, it's quite hard to be rolled in to guide it into your reading. It's quite nice just to have the freedom to play, isn't it? Because it's the ultimate play. It really is the ultimate play. And now that you're saying that, I'm thinking about teachers who really inspired me and they were few and far between.

[00:05:34] But the ones who did were ones who just took me away with books or the way that they presented them. I had a teacher in high school and the way that she presented books that we read, it was magical and freeing. And I think I knew I was going to like her. I actually got detention. I got in trouble in class. And after class, I looked at her seating chart because I had to clean the chalkboard and I saw that she had my name phonetically spelled. Oh.

[00:06:04] And I jumped back because for a long time I was like the only black face in a room. And so when I saw and people mispronouncing my name all of the time. And when I saw that she had phonetically had it phonetically spelled out, I asked her why she said, because I want to make sure that I get people's names right. And it just said everything about who she was as a teacher and why I still think about her now so many years later. Good teachers really do stand out.

[00:06:32] It's interesting, isn't it? Because we, I remember talking to someone about cortisol reduction as part of the stress process and looking at the evidence that showed how much cortisol was reduced reading a book of fiction as opposed to reading a work of nonfiction. And it's really quite fascinating that the evidence shows that reading nonfiction is, is most, let me put it the other way around.

[00:06:53] Reading a work of fiction is really good for you because actually, and of course you'll know this, you enter a sort of meditative state and your body settles down and cortisol reduces. And that imaginative play, workplace, stimulates the sympathetic nervous system or such like. So it's, it's not only enjoyable, it's actually practically good for you as well, isn't it? If we subscribe to the view that meditation is good for you, then, then reading is very good for you.

[00:07:17] I wonder where you stand on Kindles though and reading devices, because I've never found, I've never enjoyed reading from those things as much. It's okay. It's interesting. I've been on a journey with that because I worked in bookstores for a very long time, for almost 20 years. So I, and when I worked in bookstores, I started in 1994. So having a book in my hand was the only way that I felt like you were reading.

[00:07:43] And when they introduced e-readers, I was like, oh, I'm never going to get one. I'll never do it. I'll never do it. But I was somebody who carried around four or five books with her at any given time. At the time I was working in Manhattan and always on a train. So I always wanted to have something to read and I like to jump between things and carrying around a lot of books would get a little cumbersome.

[00:08:07] So when the company I worked for Barnes & Noble, when they introduced a reader, I got one and I, and I enjoyed it. And I don't read on a reader now. I actually read on my phone, believe it or not. Wow. I do. I do. I write on my phone as well. I get caught up in a story and it doesn't actually matter how I'm doing it. I think my mind just is just connected with the words that I'm reading.

[00:08:33] Although I have to be careful because I can get eye strain when I've been writing or reading both for a long period of time. And I read, and when I'm in bed though, I read books. Yeah. Actual books. Yeah, they're good, aren't they? Oh yeah. Fascinating. And there is some really fascinating research again that shows that learning retention is so much higher from physical books, especially nonfiction. I knew you were going to say that. I knew you were going to say that. Yeah. And we're going to talk about your book later on, which is absolutely fine. But this is not an episode actually about books, is it?

[00:09:03] We're going to be talking about meditation. Because I believe in the midst of all that we've talked about that, you're actually a meditation specialist. So tell me a bit more about that. I'm a meditation teacher. I've been teaching meditation for a while now. I think I first was introduced to it over 15 years ago and I've been teaching it for about 10. And I am also a yoga teacher and a licensed massage therapist. And I started teaching meditation because I got hurt.

[00:09:31] When I was doing yoga, I was doing a lot of physical asana practice and I hurt my shoulder because I got a little addicted to yoga. I felt so good. And instead of recognizing why I was feeling good and using those practices to help me in real life, I would just keep going back to a yoga class because I was chasing that dopamine high I was getting from yoga. And then I hurt my shoulder. And so I couldn't practice. And instead, I started to dive deeper into meditation where I had this revelation.

[00:10:00] Oh, this is what yoga is all about. It's about this sitting. It's about being with your mind. Even the word yoga comes from the Sanskrit word yug, which means yoke, for to pull together. So you're pulling together everything, who you are in your environment around you. And it opened up a whole world to myself. I was somebody who always used to feel really uncomfortable in their skin for a lot of different reasons.

[00:10:25] And mindfulness helped me feel okay or even feel okay when I didn't feel okay. And that was even the bigger deal. Yeah. It is an interesting point there because a lot of people don't feel good in their skin when they're doing meditation or they're doing practice. Because for a lot of people, the perception is that it's awkward, it's stilted, it's contrived in a way. So I wonder what you'd say to those things. So I don't meditate to feel great. I meditate to be with whatever's happening in the moment.

[00:10:54] So if it is to be awkward and stilted, I have tools to deal with being awkward and stilted or uncomfortable. And that was a game changer for me. Mindfulness, I think if you're just looking at it as this idea of how do we pay attention to what's going on and have a clinical approach to it, it can be really awkward. And I don't sit still. I'm always on the move. And so this idea of stillness didn't feel comfortable to me.

[00:11:21] But as I kept studying and reading and practicing, I recognized that the stillness wasn't necessarily a physical component, but it's a stillness I found inside myself. And that came through this idea of looking around at what I'm thinking or what I'm feeling, what I'm physically feeling, what I'm emotionally feeling and saying, okay, this is what's going on right now. And okay, this is happening. This is what you're feeling. And giving myself a chance to pause if I felt like I was going to react to something. And that was really empowering.

[00:11:51] But the added component of compassion, of tenderness and kindness is truly what shifted. Because I think with mindfulness, sometimes it's not always explained that we should have a sense of gentle non-attachment to what's happening around us. And that, I think, can make it feel still.

[00:12:10] But if you talk about a sense of kindness or tenderness to yourself while you're doing all of this, that makes my body relax a little into the moment and say, okay, this is happening. You don't like it. But can you be with this? And I start to ask myself questions with a friendly curiosity. So before we get into that, it's really interesting that you used the word kindness and tenderness. So are you using those just as synonyms or do you actually mean something different by each word?

[00:12:40] Kindness. I'm even saying kindness from a Buddhist perspective here. Having a sense of ease, spaciousness around something. And tenderness, I mean with love. Yeah. Affection for yourself. So are you saying that this might be a false leap? Are you saying that people who don't have affection for themselves might find meditation difficult because you needed to have it to start off with? No.

[00:13:08] I think once you keep practicing, even in the moments that you don't have it for yourself, you're okay with that. Okay. So do you find in the teaching that you do that it sits differently with different people? Do you think is there a gender approach that makes meditation more acceptable to others or a cultural approach or something? Or do you think it's just anything? That's interesting. I think the cultural approach matters.

[00:13:36] I think because I'm a black woman and queer, I teach through that lens, even with what I've studied. And I think because of that, I have certain experiences that feel universal. Can I ask you what you mean by that? That gives you a different lens? Just feeling othered or feeling like I didn't belong. Those are universal feelings I think that people can relate to. So I bring that when I'm teaching, that idea.

[00:14:05] So when I was teaching in environments with people who didn't look like me or majority white audiences, that idea of feeling othered or we can all relate to. But I don't know if we always talk about it in those exact terms. We don't say the term feeling othered or a lot of people didn't who didn't look like me when I was studying meditation. There is a distance, a sense of when people talked about not attachment, it was we were almost too clinical about it.

[00:14:33] And I don't approach mindfulness from that perspective. I think we do need a little bit of kindness and ease and that tenderness that I mentioned before. Yeah. Especially for those who don't feel like it's for them. See, that's interesting because I know we're social animals and we'll come back. I'm sure people are going to talk about that. But actually being othered, and again, I just want to explore this idea. I'm not saying it's right. It's part of being in the out group, isn't it? And actually it is learning to cope with that. It's learning to be comfortable with that idea.

[00:15:03] Because surely being othered, part of it is if you're comfortable in yourself. That does matter so much. I think that's an interesting question. I don't necessarily think that it matters, but I think recognizing that we are all connected in some ways does matter. But it doesn't mean that I would try so hard the way that I used to when I was younger to be part of a group or to say this is my in-group. So I think that's why I think it's important to note.

[00:15:32] Because you do reach a certain age, don't you? I'm going to say for myself, I'm a little older than some, that you get to a stage where you don't really care that much about what other people think or being desperate to be accepted or part of a group anymore, do you? Yeah. And I think my practices help me recognize that. And with mindfulness, when we're talking about paying attention to things without judgment, we start to appreciate and recognize what we like and what we don't like. And we're making these comparisons around things.

[00:16:01] And then we start to loosen up on all of that and say, does it really matter? I don't think it even matters if we have to like one another. But can we find universal recognition of being unconditionally friendly toward people? And then we're not so caught up in whether this person says this or says that or acts this way or acts that way. Because we're identifying the place where we connect through humanity. Yeah. And I think that's a really important thing because we always see in the world at the moment, don't you? Don't we?

[00:16:31] That this idea of them and us are the geographical, national, local, spiritual thing. And then this has become extreme, hasn't it? Because there's us and everybody else who's either wrong or out to get us. And I think the sort of thinking you're talking about works really against that idea, doesn't it? It does. And it doesn't say that we need to be friends or break bread. No.

[00:16:59] It can even say, I don't like you very much, but I respect your right to exist. Yeah. And it's that simple and that challenging, right? Wasn't it a little bit that said you do you? Wasn't that interesting? Yes. Exactly. No, exactly. I think it's really important. And I think we've also lost this ability around nuance, too. We don't have nuanced conversations anymore. We think that everyone has to agree with everything that I said or nothing.

[00:17:27] Or they're just completely put over there. They're put into the them category. And it's exhausting. It's exhausting to try to navigate your life that way. It is exhausting. And also the idea that everybody's wrong and everybody has no nuance is right. But also the fact that we have lost the skill of listening to the other side, especially when we disagree with them. And if you disagree with somebody, don't you want to listen? It seems to be the case that what we want to do is argue and tell that person. We don't listen to hear. We listen to respond.

[00:17:57] Yeah. I think we've lost that skill of critical thinking. And I wonder, I don't know what's happened to that, but nearly everything is to do with parenting and education. So I suppose it must be something to do with that because we live in a world where there's so many certainties of people who put fundamentally wrong because they're different to me. I'm just saying that for fun. No, but it's so true, though. And it's so funny because the older I get, the less I feel like I know. Like with every passing day, I'm more unsure about everything. Yeah.

[00:18:27] But I actually think social media has also really contributed to that. And just the internet in general. I'm old enough to be pre-internet, pre-cell phones. And the world was both bigger and smaller at the same time. It seems something seems so far away. And then there were experiences that I had here in the United States that were universal, like shows on television. Everybody watched the same thing because there were fewer channels and our attention spans were longer.

[00:18:56] So we had an ability to sit. We had an ability to listen because that's what we did because we didn't have devices distracting us. We didn't have 400 channels to choose from on television. We didn't have advertisers marketing toward one tiny particular niche to pull us away or have us buy something. Yeah, it is interesting. And it comes back to our discussion earlier about books because actually I'm not sure whether this current generation do read because I don't know whether they do have the attention span.

[00:19:25] And the answer is I don't know. But I suspect that they don't because I look at texts in schools now and it's all abbreviated versions. Don't you have something called CliffsNotes in your country? Yes, yes, we had CliffsNotes. And my mom wouldn't let me get them. I was reading something about, what's it, Aphmaui's and Men? It's a very short story, isn't it? And someone was telling me that there's a truncated version that just basically is three pages long. It tells you all you need to know. So, isn't it a shame?

[00:19:53] It really is a shame because the journey is about starting the story and getting to the end. You get caught up, you meander, you wander, you get lost. It's the most beautiful thing about reading. I just read a script today. A friend of mine sent me to look at it and give some notes. And I was just lost in reading it. And it was like watching a film because it was just so well written.

[00:20:20] And I had to read it again after I was done because I felt like 120 pages isn't long enough. I need some more. But yeah. I was just reading some research today from, I forget exactly who it was, but they were talking about the increase in academic submissions. But AI means that the thinking is poorer. The ideas are poor, scarce. There's a paucity of English comprehension. And AI is done as used longer and longer, more incomprehensible words rather than making things easier.

[00:20:48] And it just, it seems to be one of the tragedies of this generation. The ability to think, just to sit with me and enjoy yourself. Because actually what a joy is in reading. It's not just the reading process. It's actually discussing it with someone afterwards, isn't it? Absolutely. That's a part of the process. It's a part of the reading process. It's a part of the writing process. And I think AI is a shame. It's useful for some things. I think there are some things that AI is really useful for helping you get organized.

[00:21:17] But if you're letting it do your thinking for you, you're only softening that skill. And it becomes more and more challenging. And I can see on social media when I'm scrolling, like you can tell right away when something is written by AI. You can feel it. It's stilted and too wordy at the same time. It's like saying everything and nothing. It is. It has its uses, obviously. It's like everything. But here's an unfair question, perhaps, to forgive me for this.

[00:21:47] But other than your own book, which we're going to talk about next, which book could you recommend to people to really get a handle on meditation? Or if they were reading this book, it would give that experience of meditation and the reading of it. Wherever You Go, There You Are by Jon Kabat-Zinn was just blew my mind open. Sharon Salzberg's book on loving kindness is also something that completely opened my heart to myself.

[00:22:16] So I think those are definitely two that I would do. And the heart of yoga, believe it or not. It's a book about yoga, but there's a lot about how we connect with ourselves that I would also suggest. So they're really very interesting books. It's a non-waffly, waffly, ooey, wooey, squooshly, squooshly, wooshly books. They're very good books, aren't they? Very practical. And I get I'm suspecting your books are a bit like that because your book, I think, is called Strange Enough, Sit With Me. A non-BS journey to mindfulness meditation.

[00:22:46] So why did you write the book? Who did you write it for? Let's start there. I wrote the book for a couple of reasons. When I was first volunteering at Rikers, I used to write about on social media about the classes that I taught because I wanted people to know what it was like inside Rikers Island Correctional Facility, which is a really notorious jail here in the United States. I've heard of it. Yeah, that notorious. Well, it's because I've watched Blue Bloods and Law and Order.

[00:23:16] I just thought it was fiction. I'm Batman. So it's a real place. And it's I wanted people to know what it was like and what it was like to teach yoga and meditation there. And whenever I would do that, people would say, you have to turn this into a book. This is really fascinating. And I didn't think about it again. And then one of my dear friends said many years after I shifted careers and became a yoga and meditation teacher, she said, when are you going to write a book on who you used to be and who you are now?

[00:23:44] Because the transition is huge and it's a huge transformation. And that's when I started to think, can I put the two of these things together and tell a story? And the book is for actually wrote my book with an avatar in mind, a person. And it was my neighbor, Declan, who lives across the street. I imagine Declan doesn't know much about meditation. And how can I tell this story in a way that somebody who hasn't meditated or someone who might not even be interested in meditation would find this interesting.

[00:24:15] And I'm guessing because if that were LA, every Declan across the street would already be into meditation. Oh, he would be a meditation teacher. Yeah, he'd be a spiritual guru. But I'm guessing in New York, that's less likely to be the case. Yeah, it's less likely to be the case in my neighborhood. Very unlikely to be the case. But I like things to be accessible. I like to take concepts that people would say that doesn't interest me and make them interesting. So if I'm going to buy you a book, which I think sounds very interesting, what am I going to get from it?

[00:24:45] It's part memoir. So it's part of my own story about how and why I discovered mindfulness and meditation and really embrace this journey of loving myself in a spiritual practice. It's also a teaching on loving kindness and or meta, which is the poly word for loving kindness. And it's an unconditional friendliness that we have for ourselves that's expansive. It expands out, starts with us and it gets larger and wider until we include everyone in everything.

[00:25:11] And then it's also a story about what it was like to work at Rikers Island full time. I worked there for almost five years and I volunteered for about six. And what it was like to work inside one of the most notorious jails in the United States. Yeah. You can't just leave it there. What was it like? That was my little hook for you to ask more questions. I thought you were going to say, and now you need to buy a book. I was a mindfulness coach.

[00:25:38] So I was fired and I worked with an acupuncturist and a wellness coach. And we spearheaded and launched a program that didn't exist before. Four women? And yeah, we worked in the women's jail. When I volunteered, I used to go to all of the jails. But they wanted to see how this program was going to do. So they had us launch it in the women's jail. And we worked with people who had insomnia, anxiety, and general aches and pains and somatic issues.

[00:26:06] And it was an incredible experience to do that, to have people who got excited about the program and who got excited about mindfulness and meditation or acupuncture or just generally how to take care of themselves while they were incarcerated. I had my own office. And I would see about 10 people a day individually. Wow. For the rest of that, that's a good tease. And for the rest of the people who want to find out the real story, need to buy the book. So where can we find it?

[00:26:34] You can find it anywhere that you order books. It's, yeah. And it's also on audio. So if you like to listen to audio, I read the book. So you can listen to the audio as well. Fantastic. That's absolutely brilliant. So what would you say? Just go back a second for me, because you said something. You talked about unconditional friendliness. And then you talked about a word you said, which was... Metta? Yes. Unpack that for me. Yeah. So metta, it's from Buddhism. And it means loving kindness.

[00:27:03] It's really another way to say love. And it's a love that's unconditional. We don't have to earn it. There are no expectations around it. But it's expansive, and that's the point of loving kindness, that we start with us, and then it works out. And as a practice, as a meditation, when you do the meditation, you first offer yourself phrases that wish you well. May I be happy? May I be safe? May I be healthy? May I live with ease?

[00:27:32] And then from there, you include a loved one, which traditionally was called a benefactor, someone you know wishes you well. And then you offer that person those phrases. And then you get wider. And then you include what's called a neutral person or a familiar stranger. You do that. Then you include a difficult person. And then you include all sentient beings. That's... If I'd listen to... I'm going to say this. I possibly shouldn't say this. But if I'd listened to it from L.A. I would have been snorting by now. You would have been snorting.

[00:28:02] With Roxanne. In your background, actually, that makes that sound a heck of a lot more practical. The practical part about it isn't about the wishing people well. When I first discovered this practice, I thought it was nonsense. I couldn't see offering well wishes to people who were difficult or who caused harm in the world. But the practice isn't about wishing people well. It's about noticing what gets in the way of wishing people well. That's where the work is. Why can't I offer this person who I say is a loved one well wishes? What's going on there?

[00:28:31] What can I reflect on? And that's the power of it. I really enjoyed this. And unfortunately, we've got to say goodbye now. The book is Sit With Me. It's available on all good bookstores. And I'm sure Barnes & Noble has an especially large section of your books. Past employees and such like. A final thought to leave us with, Nika. Anything you want to leave our audience thinking? That you don't have to like people to love them. That is a great thought.

[00:29:00] So thank you for spending time with us tonight. I really enjoyed it. Thank you. You take care. Hi, I hope you found that episode useful and entertaining. If you want to support our work, please go to resilienceunravel.com. And you can become a member there as well. You can also send us a question there and even apply to do a podcast.

[00:29:25] You can also leave a review on Apple Podcasts or any of the other podcast hosts of your choice. As well as getting hold of some useful resources about resilience and a whole lot more. Join us next time on the next edition of Resilience Unraveled.