The Practice of Freedom

Oneika Mays: It is not letting people off the hook, I think. I think it’s letting go of the energy around whatever happened, which is really stepping into freedom because we’re not trapped by what someone did. We’re not trapped by the story. We’re not trapped by the energy around that. And it gives us a chance to relax and to open up into this idea of healing, which is so important. And these were some of the wonderful conversations that I had with folks at Rikers. I spent most of my time at Rikers in the women’s facility where so much harm had happened to so many of the women that I talked to and the stories that they were holding onto and the conversations that they could end up having with themselves about realizing it’s not letting people off the hook, but it’s about being able to be whole and to step into healing. And it’s freedom. It’s really about liberation when we let that go.

James Shaheen: Hello, I’m James Shaheen, and this is Life As It Is. I’m here with my co-host Sharon Salzberg, and you just heard Oneika Mays. Oneika is a yoga and meditation teacher and former mindfulness coach at Rikers Island Correctional Facility, where she taught for more than a decade. In her new book, Sit with Me: A No-BS Journey to Mindfulness and Meditation, she draws from her experience at Rikers to lay out a clear and accessible guide to metta, or loving-kindness practice. In our conversation with Oneika, we talk about how she came to be Rikers Island’s first mindfulness coach, how metta can be a practice of internal freedom even when external freedom is not a possibility, what she’s learned from bell hooks about love, and how we can remain whole in a world that breaks us apart. Plus, Oneika leads us in a guided meditation. So here’s my conversation with Oneika Mays.

James Shaheen: Okay, so I’m here with Oneika Mays and my cohost Sharon Salzberg. Hi Oneika. Hi Sharon. It’s great to be with you both.

Oneika Mays: I am so happy to be here with both of you, and Sharon again! Nice to chat with you.

Sharon Salzberg: This is so great.

James Shaheen: So Oneika, we’re here to talk about your new book, Sit with Me: A No-BS Journey to Mindfulness and Meditation. I especially like the “No-BS” part. So to start, can you tell us a bit about the book and what inspired you to write it?

Oneika Mays: Yeah. Thanks so much. The book was, I think, a long time in the making for a bunch of different reasons. I used to volunteer at Rikers for a while, so the book itself is, I think, a field guide to metta and bits of mindfulness, and it also describes my experiences working at Rikers Island as the jail’s first mindfulness coach. I worked there full-time for about five years. I volunteered there for over six years. And when I was volunteering, I used to write these Instagram posts about what the class was like and what it was like to teach trauma-informed mindfulness and yoga inside. And so many people were like, “You’ve got to put these things together in a book.” And I said, yeah, yeah, sure. And then a friend of mine said, you know, you were this person who worked in corporate retail for like twenty years and now you’re a meditation and yoga teacher, and you’ve got to tell that story. So I put the two things together, and you’ve got Sit with Me.

James Shaheen: Okay, so to back up a little bit here, how did you come to meditation, and what led you to Rikers Island?

Oneika Mays: I came to meditation because my life kind of fell apart. I had practiced yoga for a little while, just like a smidge, in the late nineties. I was introduced to it through a friend, even though my parents had practiced for years when they were doing yoga on PBS, but I wasn’t really into the practice then. And then when I found the practice in the nineties, it cracked me open, and it’s like I was meeting myself. I like to say that yoga found me. I appreciated the physical part of the practice, and I felt this huge dopamine rush going to all of these classes. My introduction was hot yoga, and a lot of people who practice hot yoga talk about how juicy you feel. But I was starting to chase that high, and I got injured because I was just practicing class after class. So I wanted to stay engaged with the practice, so I started to sit more, and I was like, oh, this is what it’s all about. It’s about being with myself. And I think that’s when I really dove first into mindfulness, and I studied mindfulness, and then I did a really wonderful course on MBSR with Emily Herzlin at the Interdependence Project. And that got me really into a lot of the teachers there. And I studied more, and then I discovered metta, which completely changed my life.

James Shaheen: There’s someone else here who discovered metta.

Oneika Mays: That’s when I discovered Sharon too. I discovered Sharon, and I discovered metta. My teacher, Kim Brown, is a student of Sharon’s, and it just made me realize that I was okay, and in this world that it was okay to be who I was and love the parts of myself that I didn’t even like so much. And I just engaged with my life just so differently after that. And it was really like a revelation to be like, oh, you know what? I’m not as terrible as I’ve spent all of this time thinking. And I was already studying a lot of yoga. I also became a massage therapist because you know, you can’t pay your rent just being a yoga teacher. And I started volunteering at Rikers Island. I had a conversation with my cousin. My grandfather was an activist, and my grandmother was politically active, and my parents were too. So in a conversation after I started teaching yoga, she’s like, “Why aren’t you teaching in jail?” And I was like, I don’t know. I don’t know why I’m not teaching in jail. So I went to Google and found a wonderful nonprofit, and that was my introduction. And the first time I walked into Rikers, I had never appreciated what a calling was until I went there for the first time and I walked inside the women’s jail. It’s called the Rose M. Singer Center. A lot of people call it Rosie’s for short. And I remember just thinking like, I’m supposed to be here for myself as much as to teach.

Sharon Salzberg: It’s beautiful. Just in case anybody doesn’t know, the word metta with two T’s, M-E-T-T-A, means loving-kindness, and we’re going to go much more into that in a minute. So you begin the book with a question: How do we remain whole in a world that too often breaks us apart? So I wonder if you can say a little bit more about that question and how it’s guided you.

Oneika Mays: You know, I grew up in predominantly white spaces, and being Black in those spaces, I felt like I was always on the edge of something. I wasn’t ostracized. You know, I think when I talk about feeling on the edges, it gives this idea that maybe I was actually on the edge of things, and I wasn’t. I had a really full life and lots of friends, but I grew up with lots of little microaggressions and some overt racism, and navigating my sexuality and being queer, I kind of felt like I didn’t fit in in lots of ways. Externally, society told me I didn’t fit in, and so I found myself trying to manipulate and change myself to be in different spaces so I felt comfortable, not realizing that that comfort was going to come from inside me and that comfort was going to come, that safety, I think I was always reaching for was what I wanted to find inside myself and I ultimately found when I discovered a loving-kindness practice. I think mindfulness and things like therapy saved my life in a lot of ways, because I struggled with mental illness for a little while, but when I discovered loving-kindness, I started to really enjoy my life instead of just feeling like I was trying to survive day to day.

Sharon Salzberg: So let’s talk some more about metta, or loving-kindness. As many people know, I’ve often struggled with what the translation should be, and I had a big wish that the word metta would enter the culture, but it hasn’t quite, so loving-kindness is the common conventional translation. I sometimes say connection, just feeling connected to oneself and others rather than disconnected. So that’s been something, as you know, that’s been so central to my own life and teaching and practice, and I’m wondering how you first began doing that practice or expressing that practice as you worked on Rikers Island, and how was it received?

Oneika Mays: I was reluctant to actually teach metta at Rikers, and my struggle was around the difficult person. I felt like if I was going to bring in this idea of a difficult person to people, would that be triggering for them? And I realized as I was thinking about it, like, why don’t I want to do this, what’s my reluctance, that I was kind of being my own difficult person and being afraid that I’d be rejected if people got upset with the difficult person, and realizing that connection that you mentioned isn’t just about being liked. It’s this idea that I can feel whole in a space and present something, and if people embraced it, they embraced it, and if they didn’t, that wasn’t about me. And that was, I think, a really important shift in how I started to teach.

So I just started to bring the practice in first when I was volunteering, and then it became central to how I maintained my own sanity inside Rikers, but also working with folks one-on-one when I was there. And people, a lot of people loved it. I mean, truly loved it. You know, there were people who said that they felt like, especially moms, that it was a way to mother from afar, moms who were incarcerated and away from their kids and feeling so helpless, like they couldn’t do the things that they were used to doing, and being able to do a loving-kindness practice and then even embody that knowing that they were sending love to their loved ones, sending love to themselves over difficult situations was really powerful, and I’m glad that I got over myself.

Sharon Salzberg: Well, they do say that the Buddha taught loving-kindness as the antidote to fear, so that’s an interesting reflection as well. And metta, as you know, is the first of the four brahmaviharas, or divine abidings is one translation of that. And you link this idea of where we can find a sense of home and safety. So can you talk about metta as a home or a dwelling place and abiding?

Oneika Mays: Yeah, I mentioned before how I used to feel disconnected growing up, and I appreciated when I started to practice metta that the safe place that I was looking for was me. And when I was at Rikers, you know, there’s a lot of teachers, especially in the yoga world, who talk about creating a safe space, especially when trauma-informed practices became really popular. And I realized that there aren’t really any safe places, even when you’re with people who you think are supposed to be safe. But the safety that I was seeking, I think the safety that we seek is inside ourselves, and that comes with learning how to love ourselves and that home can be located again and again when we remember our own connection to our own hearts. And it carried me through being in a place like Rikers, and Rikers became a home in some ways for me to sit with that and to sit with myself.

Sharon Salzberg: So you use the framework of metta as a form of welcoming, welcoming difficult parts of body, heart, and mind home and making space for it all. And when you say Rikers became a kind of home, I think the environment, I’ve never been there, I’ve been to other prisons teaching, and it’s not a great feeling in terms of the environment. So can you talk about metta as an act of welcoming or hospitality?

Oneika Mays: Rikers is truly one of the saddest places I’ve ever been. I think it is really like a hell realm. And when I was there, there’s so much you have to give up, even as someone who’s working there. Like you give up your own sense of safety and freedom once you walk inside, because you are there all day and anything can happen, and that’s something that you just have to start to accept. And then you’re working with people that you wouldn’t necessarily break bread with, I say that gently, day to day, from staff to people that you’re working with who are incarcerated, and it’s not about liking anyone. And I think that’s what metta did for me, realizing I didn’t have to like people in order to love them. I didn’t have to like that place. And there was a battle that I went through, particularly working there full time. It was one thing to go in as a volunteer once a week or twice a week and be there for a few hours and then leave. You’re there, you engage with it, and then you go home. But when you’re there eight hours a day, five days a week, the relationship changes and you have to settle in. You have to become a part of the environment, which ultimately also made me leave. But in order to be there, you have to engage with it, and you can only do that—I could only do that, let me say that. I could only do that with love and with connection because I would only cause so much grief for myself if I found myself constantly battling against it or constantly listing all of the reasons that it was terrible.

James Shaheen: Oneika, you point out that there’s a tendency to make metta harder than it is. For instance, you thought you had to like everybody. I found that I liked a lot more people when I did the practice, but still, there was that pressure. Sharon kind of pushed me into a metta retreat once, but I won’t go into that now.

Sharon Salzberg: Oh no. It’s the best story in the world.

James Shaheen: I was feeling a deep resentment toward somebody and I vented, and Sharon responded with the dates of her meditation retreat but no commentary. So that’s how I ended up there. And it was a great thing. But why do we make a metta harder than it is? And how do we get in our own way here?

Oneika Mays: I think life is really hard. It’s really hard to be a person, and things are always coming up, and we’re holding onto old stories about what we think we’re supposed to be or how we think we’re supposed to act. And I think that we make life this game of addition and holding onto things rather than letting go of the stories that we have about ourselves and other people and being able to loosen the grip around certain things.

And I think those are some of the obstacles. You know, I talk about it in the book. I truly believe that most people want to be connected with other people and want to think the best of people until that thing comes up, like somebody owes you money or you owe them money, or they hurt you, or you have these feelings about yourself. And that stops us.

I realized that metta isn’t about not wanting to love people, but it’s about looking at what stops me from loving people. And when I do that, it means that I need to do some reflection. I need to ask myself some questions and do some deep inquiry around that. and that’s uncomfortable. And we have to meet ourselves, and we have to meet some parts of ourselves that we may be ashamed of or afraid of. And I think that’s what I think gets in the way.

James Shaheen: Yeah. You know, along those lines, you talk about three emotions that come up for you in practicing metta, and I think we can all relate: shame, judgment, and guilt. So can you talk about these obstacles and how you’ve learned to work with them?

Oneika Mays: If I could, it would be probably—we’d be talking for hours if I told you all of the things that I did to avoid shame. I mean, I can’t even tell you how many times I got myself into trouble to avoid that emotion, that sense of embarrassment that I wasn’t enough, and then judging people and myself. And, you know, these things still come up. And guilt comes up all the time.

But when I started to feel that connection to myself and realized that I didn’t have to feel bad about those things, and I could look at those things almost like a curious observer, I think curiosity becomes really important when we’re talking about connection, it didn’t make it seem so heavy. It didn’t make it seem like such a big deal. And when that happened, I could look at these things and I could make decisions about them, like maybe this wasn’t a big deal to be shameful about, or maybe it was because I acted like a jerk and I needed to look at that and apologize to somebody. But that connection allowed me to do that with a sense of tenderness that I didn’t really recognize was necessary before. I used to think that love was a weakness for a lot of different reasons and not a way to feel brave or courageous or strong.

James Shaheen: You know, you also talk about a sense of ease. You describe metta as ease. So what do you mean when you talk about ease?

Oneika Mays: The sense of being comfortable in your own skin. You know, I teach from a very personal place, and I used to feel so tight all of the time, like I was being looked at, or I would think about something that I said and I wanted to change it, like, “Oh, I should have said this instead.” This idea that I wasn’t enough, that not enoughness was like a running thread through my entire life. But feeling connected to myself, I could look at that sense of tightness and say like, okay, maybe you feel like that, but is that such a big deal even if you do feel that way? And then when I looked at that, I could back up a little bit, and then I would start to feel more full and accept who I was. And I started to realize that, oh, I’m showing up in spaces just as I am, even if I am feeling insecure, even if I am feeling afraid. And this is just what it means to be me. This is what it is to be a person in this life, in this time right now. And there’s a real sense of joy that comes from being comfortable, even being comfortable being uncomfortable sometimes.

Sharon Salzberg: So you describe metta as developing the habit to return to love again and again, which is quite a lovely description. So how can metta support this habit and help us examine the many stories that stop us from fully embracing ourselves as we are?

Oneika Mays: When we feel connected, we can keep coming back because we’re not afraid of returning to ourselves. It melts that fear, or it melts the need to run away from the fear. So when we can return, I’m afraid, but I can still come back to myself because I’ve done it before and I was okay. There was a fear of what happens when I return, what’s going to happen, and it could feel paralyzing or this sense of fear. But once you start doing it again and again, you get more comfortable and it becomes not necessarily, because it can feel different every time, but the idea of returning, the act of returning, I think, is what we need to practice rather than what happens once we do it. 

Sharon Salzberg: So you turn to bell hooks as a guidepost here, and when we finish recording, I’m going to send you a photo because we have a Buddha here at the Insight Meditation Society that was a bequest from bell. It’s an outdoor Buddha, and it’s sitting under a tree very close to where I am sitting right now. So you talk about bell, particularly her signature work, All About Love, which you shared with many people on Rikers and even started a book club about, and I wonder if you can talk a little bit about what you learned from her work and her work on love, of course, and why do you think it had particular resonance with the people you encountered on Rikers?

Oneika Mays: When I first encountered that book, I was a bookseller. I was working at a bookstore, and she had a signing in Manhattan for that book, and I was lucky enough to attend, and speaking with her after reading the book and the generosity that she just lent to a bunch of us who were there just hanging on her every word, I know we were fawning over her and probably incredibly annoying, but her generosity to have these conversations about love from a woman who I just identified with as Black, as a woman talking about experiences that were somewhere unknown to me, but then others felt incredibly familiar. And I met so many Black women when I was at Rikers, and when I started to study the dharma, I kept returning to her because representation truly matters. And when you hear somebody’s story who has walked a similar path as you, you feel that instant connection that feels ancestral. It feels familiar, it feels like home. And so it was so pivotal to me and that I devoured all of her work. bell hooks, Toni Morrison, Audre Lorde, all of these women who I consider like my literary aunties, who spoke about love in a way that I had never heard it articulated before and a way that just captured Blackness that I was like, yes, this is me, and the universality of what love is and talking about love as needing to be something that we needed to have a definition for so it could be something that we all connected to.

So it became so powerful that I wanted to share this with other people, and the way folks just gobbled it up, I knew I would do this because I would have multiple copies of the book because people would borrow it from my house and I knew I would never get it back again. So I just started keeping copies, because people would see, oh, I’ve heard about this. So it just seemed very natural to bring it in. And I’ve read actually that her book is used in jails all over the country as work to connect because it’s so personal and universal at the same time. And I think that’s what really resonated because that’s how I like to learn too, through personal stories and deeper teachings, and she will forever be an auntie to me because of that.

Sharon Salzberg: So one of the things bell said, in contrast to how I or we might generally describe metta or love, we might describe it as a place of safety, and she would say the practice of love offers no place of safety. Love is hard work.

Oneika Mays: Yeah. Oh, I completely agree. And Rikers was like a lab for that hard work. Not just the place itself, which jail by its very definition is about punishment and pain. And it’s also a peeling back of layers of doing the work on yourself as you’re engaging in the whole experience of mass incarceration. But you start to learn who you are as a person in an environment like that, and you bring it outside with you, that hard work. I found that I could let go of a lot of things that I think I used to hold onto so tightly as a way of identifying things like racism in the world. The first time I learned about metta, I didn’t want to do the difficult person, because immediately I thought about people who are racist, and why would I want to do that? But recognizing what was I really afraid of by doing that. And it was about holding onto this idea to push back against that. So who would I be if I actually let that go? And that scared me. And I think that’s an example of the hard work, that we have to let go of these ideas and these pieces of our identity. And it doesn’t change us, it doesn’t minimize us, but in fact can make us bigger. And that can also be scary too, this idea of truly showing up in the world without a wall that used to protect us.

James Shaheen: You know, Oneika, we’ve been talking about metta for oneself, but in metta practice, one of the later stages or next stages is extending loving-kindness to a neutral person. And I was surprised to read that this is your favorite part of the practice. So often it’s one that we skip over or rush through. So can you talk about this component of metta practice and what it has taught you?

Oneika Mays: I used to skip over it because it seemed like, well, why would I want to do that? And it was hard for me to cultivate or stir up energy to connect with somebody I didn’t know really well. But once I did, I recognized that this is what it’s all about. It’s about connecting with everybody you don’t know. And if I could really connect with the neutral person, I could connect with anybody anywhere at any time.

It just happened to me on Sunday. I was outside, I was walking my dog, and I didn’t realize how hot it was. It only felt like it was like 80 degrees or so. We were going to go on a short walk, but she got really hot. So we were sitting in the shade, and I carry water with me. And a car stopped, a couple, and they rolled down the window and they said, “Are you guys okay? Do you need anything?” I said, “Oh, she’s okay. We’re just waiting for her to cool off.” And the woman said, “Well, we can drop you guys off, how far are you?” And I said, “I’m not that far. I’m only five or six blocks.” And for a moment I was like, am I going to hop in this car with these strangers with my dog? And I did, because she was hot. And why sit outside for even longer and have my dog suffer if I could hop in this car with the air conditioning on? And we ended up having a lovely conversation about our neighborhood and about Jersey City. And when they dropped me off, I thanked them. I was so grateful. And I said, “I’m so grateful for you guys.” And she said, “Hey, you know, we gotta look out for each other. We gotta take care of each other.” And I ran inside and texted my friend about my familiar stranger neutral person story because it was just, this is what it’s about. It’s about being able to see people and to recognize that we can sense the goodness in people and we can connect with them, and we don’t have to know them. And that felt like the practice in action, and I’m so grateful for finding metta for that more than anything. You know, even when I’m angry at somebody, I care. So there’s something there. I can work with that. But now everybody is somebody for me to be connected to.

James Shaheen: Right. You know, you’ve been using the term “familiar stranger” rather than “neutral person,” which I found very nice. Can you talk about that choice? What feels different there?

Oneika Mays: Because with a neutral person, and it is a neutral person, but a familiar stranger is somebody who’s kind of on the outskirts of our lives, the edges of our lives, who we might not want to be connected to or we don’t see as important, but when we can connect to even the people that we don’t interact with regularly but can still cultivate connection for them, it starts to make everybody part of our in-group. You know, we think of in-groups and out-groups, where our in-group are those folks that we feel close to, that we want to take care of. And out-groups are sort of everybody else. And the familiar stranger, I think, lives on the edge of the in-group and out-group, and it’s a bridge. It’s a bridge to the world.

James Shaheen: You know, interestingly, you note that this stage of the familiar stranger helped you to build community on Rikers. How did that go?

Oneika Mays: It was great sometimes and challenging in others. I used to think of all of the officers, and I admit upfront that this is a reductive way of thinking, but I used to think of all of the officers as terrible people and everybody who was incarcerated as folks who were there on some miscarriage of justice. And the truth is far grayer than that. But with that idea of a familiar stranger, people I wasn’t seeing every day, or people that I wanted to think of who were at a distance, they could be a part of my world. They could be a part of the process. Because when you are locked up with folks for a long period of time, it’s important to have some sort of connection with them, even if you aren’t necessarily on the same page with them about lots of things in the world.

James Shaheen: You know, I just have to add something. I find the practice a little bit contagious. You can even experience it vicariously. I remember when Sharon talked about somebody at a nearby deli who was her neutral person. And I think I’ve got this right, Sharon. It was on Ninth Street, I think. And I remember walking in there and I was not paying attention. All of a sudden I looked up, and I said, “I think that’s Sharon’s neutral person.” and I felt great. I felt great affection for him. I was so happy to see him, because the way she described him, I knew it was him.

Oneika Mays: I love that.

James Shaheen: Yeah, it’s contagious, right? You know, you link this step of loving the stranger to loving the unfamiliar parts of yourself, which you talked about earlier. Can you talk about that journey?

Oneika Mays: Yeah. I think there were a lot of parts I kept away from myself for lots of different reasons. But when I started to practice loving-kindness, again and again, I was opening up to myself, not just to other people, realizing that I wasn’t really connected with my own neighborhood, or I was this person who was going to work and sort of just coming back from work and the people that I worked with were my connection. But then when I started practicing more and more, I recognized this part of myself that felt a fear of connecting with strangers. Maybe they wouldn’t like me. Maybe I wouldn’t like them. And the more that I practiced and connected with the neutral person, with the familiar stranger, and opened up to these parts of myself that were hidden, I realized that I was missing out on a part of myself that I found pretty interesting and who actually was really intrigued by local businesses, by my neighbors, people who I wouldn’t have felt like I wanted to reach out to before. And it was a part of myself I didn’t even know existed until I started practicing loving-kindness.

Sharon Salzberg: So you also talk about the challenges and potentials of practicing metta for those who’ve harmed us, and this takes on particular significance in the context of your work at Rikers. I’ve found it takes such a deep exploration of what loving-kindness is and what it isn’t and what we’re afraid it might mean. So can you talk about learning to extend loving-kindness to those we disagree with, or even those who’ve caused us harm?

Oneika Mays: You know, when folks have caused harm, there’s a desire to hold onto the harm and keep that close as a way to feel safe and say, “This happened to me, and this mattered because this happened, and if I allow myself to offer connection to that person, is that going to mean that I’m okay with what happened?” Or if there are people out there who do things that are by most people’s definition harmful, if I offer a sense of connection to them, does that mean that I’m okay with that? And it’s recognizing that it’s not about being okay with harm that’s being caused, and that’s not the same thing as offering connection and wanting all people to be healed and to be well and wanting people not to cause harm.

When I was a volunteer, I was teaching at Manhattan Detention Center, which is a jail in Manhattan downtown. I was working in the protective custody unit, and there was a guy there, and I talk about this in the book, and the officers told me the crime that he allegedly committed. And when I heard what it was, I felt my body get tight. Like very tight. And I remember thinking, okay. And I also remember being annoyed with the officer for telling me, because I feel like he told me on purpose, so I would feel distance. And he came to our class. We taught a chair yoga class. And at the end of the class we were doing a seated relaxation at the end of class, and two men walked up to him and whispered in his ears, and you could tell it was a threat. And I knew the minute that we weren’t there, something was probably going to happen to him. And in that moment, he transformed from a person who supposedly did X or allegedly did X to somebody who looked really afraid. And in that fear, I saw his humanity. And it did take that for me to see it, but I realized in that moment, if I was going to keep doing this work, I was going to have to walk a different walk. I couldn’t just say I was embracing unconditional love for people, but I really needed to do it. And I remember feeling shame because I was like, oh, it took me this to see his humanity. Why wasn’t I seeing that before? But it opened up hard work that bell hooks talked about, to peel back the feelings that I had about people and harm that may have been caused and even reflecting on harm that I have caused to other people and realizing, okay, this is what it’s really about. It’s about examining that and recognizing I can not be okay with what people do. I can not even be okay with what I do. But if I can find that connection, can that be a way to healing? Can that be a way to moving differently in the world, and can that be a different way to witnessing people in the world? And it changed everything for me. And I’m glad that happened. I’m so grateful for that.

Sharon Salzberg: So there is a common fear that extending metta to a difficult person is a way of letting them off a hook. So how has your relationship to this part of the practice shifted?

Oneika Mays: It’s not letting people off the hook, I think. I think it’s letting go of the energy around whatever happened, which is really stepping into freedom because we’re not trapped by what someone did. We’re not trapped by the story. We’re not trapped by the energy around that. And it gives us a chance to relax and to open up into this idea of healing, which is so important. And these were some of the wonderful conversations that I had with folks at Rikers, people who wanted to talk about shame or guilt or harm that had been caused to them. I spent most of my time at Rikers in the women’s facility where so much harm had happened to so many of the women that I talked to and the stories that they were holding onto and the conversations that they could end up having with themselves about realizing it’s not letting people off the hook, but it’s about being able to be whole and to step into healing. And it’s freedom. It’s really about liberation when we let that go.

James Shaheen: You know, one dynamic that can come up at this stage is working with anger and conflict. So can you talk about how your time at Rikers helped you learn to work with anger productively?

Oneika Mays: It’s about acknowledging, yes, because Rikers, as you would imagine, was full of a lot of anger on lots of different levels. It was anger for folks who were incarcerated, it was anger with officers about what they had to endure, the long hours that they had to endure, double, triple shifts, that they were doing, anger at the system. There was so much anger, all of it justified. And I think that’s a part of it, recognizing that anger is not something to run from or to avoid. And in fact, when we can have conversations about anger and how to work with it, it’s something that’s useful. It’s something that can fuel. And I think it’s when we try to avoid or try to push down or try to pretend that it’s not happening or punish people for anger, then it becomes a problem.

I mean, it was every day that there were conversations around anger. You know, there was one person who told me she didn’t punch somebody because she had been practicing metta, and she didn’t punch somebody in the face. And that’s like an extreme version and yet so important, somebody being able to pause. You know, it gives us an opportunity to pause and examine, like, is this anger righteous? Am I angry for a good reason? Do I need to do something for myself? Do I need to do something for someone else? Or am I stewing? You know, it helps us recognize the different kinds of anger, even subtle or what we think of as subtle forms of anger, like sarcasm or passive aggression, when we think of those as not being angry or funny but being able to even look at those forms of anger as well as something that needs to be addressed.

James Shaheen: Yeah, I mean, anger can be so difficult. It’s very easy to slip into spiritual bypassing and skip over these challenging emotions. So how can we recognize when we’re starting to bypass?

Oneika Mays: You know, I think this is such an interesting conversation because I don’t always know if we can. I think we notice it after we bypass, and we notice the repercussions of us bypassing is when we notice we’re bypassing rather than in the moment. And this is, I think, a conversation that needs to be opened up to all kinds of spiritual communities.

We talk about this idea of skipping over difficult emotions, but we don’t recognize that we’ve skipped over the difficult emotions until we meet the consequences of our actions. So I think when we find ourselves consistently in difficult places and pretending that things are better than they are, that’s a time to pause. And I think we can start to ask ourselves questions. Am I helping myself right now? Or am I hurting myself right now? And that’s my flag for myself when I start to think, Am I jumping over something? It’s hard to do in the moment though. It really is, because I do think we bypass with the best of intentions. We bypass because there is something that we don’t want to deal with. And why aren’t we dealing with that? Are we not dealing with that because it’s so traumatic and we’re not ready? So that might not be the best place to do it. But if we find ourselves in a position where, here I am again in this mess that I created, that’s the opportunity to ask ourselves, am I bypassing over some difficult emotions?

James Shaheen: Yeah, I always have to check myself when I say it doesn’t matter.

Oneika Mays: Yeah. Or it’s fine.

James Shaheen: Yeah, usually I say that only probably because usually it does matter, whether it should or not. You know, the “should” idea is sort of silly. If it matters to you, it matters.

Oneika Mays: Right. And I think it’s so hard though because how many times do we do that before we recognize we’re actually skipping over something?

James Shaheen: Before we explode at our partner or something like that.

Oneika Mays: Right.

James Shaheen: So you talk about practicing metta for the difficult person as an exercise in compassionate empowerment rather than peacemaking. So what do you mean by that? And what did this look like in practice?

Oneika Mays: I often had challenges where I thought that difficult people needed to be people that I needed to make peace with and be in communication and community with once the issue was over and not understanding that I’m having a problem, and do I need to put a boundary down and take care of myself because harm’s been caused and I don’t want it to keep happening because this relationship doesn’t seem helpful or it’s really unproductive and that empowerment means that I love myself and you enough to know that we can’t be engaged anymore. Or if it’s a person or a relationship that I’ve got to be in because of the circumstances or my environment, or if it’s work, I can also recognize that. But we don’t have to hug people all the time. It’s not about hugging it out and saying like, let’s go have a meal together. That’s not what this is about. And sometimes I feel like even the idea of love and forgiveness gets a bad rap, that we think it’s about making peace and making friends rather than saying, this is the best way to manage this relationship going forward. I’ve got to take care of myself because I matter and you matter, and I’m stopping you from hurting yourself and me.

Sharon Salzberg: So let’s talk some more about metta as a practice of freedom, particularly a way of accessing inner safety and freedom when external freedom is not a possibility. So can you talk about what you learned about freedom in the context of working in an unjust system?

Oneika Mays: My office didn’t have a lock on the door. Well, a lock from the outside because I was actually locked in my office once at Rikers by an officer. I couldn’t keep people safe. I mentioned earlier that I know there are lots of teachers who say that they create safe spaces, and I just don’t think that’s possible because we can’t know what everybody’s thinking. We can’t know everybody’s experience. People don’t know what might trigger them and make them feel unsafe inside themselves if you’re teaching. I mean, Rikers was like the physical manifestation of this. An officer could come into my office at any time for any reason because they could. So even if I’m sitting with someone in meditation, I would even say to them, “You know, the door’s closed and we’re going to try to keep it as quiet as we can, but someone might knock on the door. The door might open. I just want you to be aware of that,” and recognizing that people had this opportunity to empower themselves in an environment that took away everybody’s sense of agency. And I think that was one of the biggest lessons in safety that I learned, that none of us are safe from this external place. And anything could happen. A fight could break out, something could happen, somebody could pepper spray. There are all of these things that could go on, but what we can do is take care of ourselves and keep returning to ourselves in those situations. And remember that that’s where the safety is and not looking for it outside, it was a really big lesson. And because of that, people did feel comfortable. I can’t tell you how many people used to fall asleep in my office when we were practicing, and it was like the highest compliment because they were realizing, “Oh, I can relax for a few minutes and take a nap and take a fifteen-minute nap. I would have people schedule time to see me just so they could just take a nap. And I thought that was great.

Sharon Salzberg: It is pretty great. In the face of injustice, you also talk about rest, to continue this conversation, as a form of freedom and resistance, drawing from the work of Tricia Hersey and the Nap Ministry. So can you talk about how rest can be a form of resistance and how this guided your work?

Oneika Mays: Yeah. I think for so many folks who are marginalized, the idea of having to keep going is exhausting. You know, we have things going on right now for Black folks in particular who are just feeling really tired, and this idea that we just have to keep going all of the time is ridiculous. And you just don’t want to, and so you don’t have to, and sometimes you can say, you know what, not today. You know, there’s that great expression “Not today, Satan,” and sometimes you say, “Not today, Satan.” I’m just going to sit this one out because I need to, for me, for my folks, for my ancestors, I just need to rest.

And I think being the descendant of enslaved folks who were required to work no matter what under horrendous conditions, this idea of being able to say that I’m going to sit down because that is a form of resistance. My ancestors who have often been on the front lines of so many protests and whose bodies have literally been used to fight certain wars, to be able to say, that’s not going to be me and I’m going to relax, I’m going to enjoy myself, I’m not going to do anything just because I don’t feel like it is really powerful, and at a place like Rikers, when there’s both lots of boredom and a need to push people to activity so they don’t feel bored, letting people relax and do nothing, I think, was also my way of protest. So if people wanted to come down and take a nap because they didn’t feel like doing something, I was going to let them.

James Shaheen: Oneika, related to this theme of recognizing the importance of rest and balance, ultimately you decided to leave Rikers. So what led to that decision?

Oneika Mays: There were lots of things that led to the decision. I’m an abolitionist by practice and don’t believe that places like Rikers should exist, and I think the way that I justified going is because there are still people who are behind bars, there are still people in cages who need care, who need support, who need us to bear witness to their suffering, to bear witness to people who even work inside the system who are suffering. And I thought about that every single day when I crossed the bridge to Rikers, because Rikers Island is literally an island. And that’s what I would think about when I was crossing the bridge. But at a point, holding those two truths became too much for me. So that was one thing.

The vicarious trauma I experienced bearing witness to a lot of the violence, the physical, psychological, emotional, and spiritual violence I witnessed became too much to hold. You end up getting institutionalized when you work in an institution like Rikers. To get by, you have to learn how to compartmentalize. That position of mindfulness coach was a sacred honor to be able to sit with people one-on-one. I used to see about ten people a day, five days a week. And because I wasn’t a therapist or a counselor or a lawyer or an officer or a doctor, it was just a person. People shared a lot, and you would hold those stories, and as deep as my practice was, as deep as the care practices I had to deal with it, at some point it just became too much to hold.

And then I think finally the other part of it was that my soul couldn’t take it anymore. When people heard about the program and everybody would say, ‘Oh, that’s so great that that’s there,” I would find myself with this slow-burning resentment that I was making Rikers “look better,” And I put that in air quotes because the program that I helped to spearhead also included acupuncture and wellness. And the acupuncturist and the wellness coach, they are just incredible human beings. And we did this thing that was really powerful. And I didn’t want people to get the idea that Rikers was okay now or better than it was because this program existed. And that was a choice that I ended up making because I didn’t want to participate anymore. I had to walk away.

James Shaheen: That sounds like a really tough choice because you really do care about the people who are there. And you say that this is what practice is all about, holding the tension of making impossible decisions. Can you say something about that?

Oneika Mays: Yeah, I left Rikers probably about two years later than I probably should have left when I reflect about when my burnout started and when I really felt like it was hard to go in. And I remember having a conversation with a doctor after I left, and he asked me that question: Do you think you left when you needed to? And I said, no. It was two years later, because of the people you connect with, not just folks who are incarcerated, but staff members and officers who you also get connected with who also appreciate you being there, and you don’t want to let that go because you realize you’re the only person doing that in that place, and you don’t want to walk away because you feel a responsibility.

But I was sinking. I mean, I was really sinking. I was really hurting. I was starting to lash out in all of my relationships outside because I was frustrated and I was angry. I started to think that everything else wasn’t important and the stuff that I was doing was more important, and it really started to shift me, and it wasn’t something that I could hold, but I didn’t want to let go. I just didn’t want to walk away. And I still get pangs of guilt thinking that I could go back, I could start volunteering again, but I would ultimately set myself up. And so it’s thinking about what other ways can I show up that aren’t going to sink me but still bring that connection. And that’s what loving-kindness is about. It’s about recognizing that I matter too.

Sharon Salzberg: So you say your time at Rikers redefined how you move through the world. So I know it’s probably absolutely impossible to summarize, but I wonder if you could share some of the biggest lessons you took away from your time volunteering and then working there. And here was one, I matter too.

Oneika Mays: Yeah. I matter too. I think I used to say it and not really believe it, and I really believe it now after working at Rikers, because making that impossible decision, when I left, I felt proud. Because I was like, you did something for yourself that was really hard and you didn’t want to do, and yet your body is even reacting in this moment to you leaving. So I think that’s really big.

I realized that I didn’t have to like people to love them, which was another big one. And I think I do like a lot more people maybe, but I also don’t worry about it as much. And I think that’s a big lesson because I just see people—and not just people. I think I started to care about the Earth more working there and the environment and our impact on it and what we do and that it matters. So I think that that shifted for me, and I feel like I’m just more comfortable in what happens in the world. I don’t feel myself reacting as much to things that happen in the world in ways that I would react before this kneejerk reaction to parrot something. If something happens to my community, there’s a real pause, and not because I’m trying to see the other side when something terrible happens, but there’s a pause in me thinking about folks who are impacted rather than reacting to the issue itself. And I think that’s a big shift.

Sharon Salzberg: I have one final question. You include a quote in the book from Alice Walker that I loved, which is that hard times require furious dancing. So I wonder if you could tell us about furious dancing.

Oneika Mays: Laughing is something that is so important. And it’s interesting because my grandfather, who I mentioned who was an activist, he was a member of the Black Panther Party and a communist and a union organizer. There wasn’t a lot of joy. He was really incredible and he was funny, but there wasn’t a lot of joy. And I think because there was this sense that what would whiteness think about us if we were seen as smiling or laughing or dancing? And I held that in my body for a very long time, wanting to appear serious, wanting to appear worthy. And loving-kindness shifted that for me, and it was a battle because I felt like I was turning my back on the movement, turning my back on what it meant to be empowered as a Black person in the world. And realizing that my joy is absolutely part of the revolution because it matters. It makes me whole. And we need to laugh. We need to embrace joy. And with so many hard things and challenging things and terrible things that happen in the world, we need to remember that laughter is also just as important. It’s a part of our human experience.

 James Shaheen: Oneika, anything else before we close?

Oneika Mays: No, I think that’s it.

James Shaheen: Well, that certainly was enough. It was great. Oneika Mays, it’s been a pleasure. Thanks so much for joining us. We like to close these podcasts with a short guided meditation, so I’ll hand it over to you, Oneika.

Oneika Mays: Oh, wonderful. Thank you so much. This really was a joy.and really, I’m glad to practice. So let’s do it. I invite you, wherever you are and whatever you’re doing, if you can, you can let your eyelids get heavy if that’s comfortable. And we’ve talked about what loving-kindness is and what we want to bring into our lives. But I mentioned that it’s also about what we can let go of to invite in this idea of connection. So I invite you to bring some attention to your hands. Are they open? Are you literally holding onto something if you’re doing something as you listen? Or are they metaphorically holding onto something, a grudge or an old story, the need to be right? Love isn’t only what we add, it’s what we’re willing to release and to make room. So as we begin, notice what you’re holding, and I invite you to take a breath in and let it go. And one more time, if you want to breathe in and out. There’s nothing that you have to shift or fix or change, just noticing what’s there around you, inside you. And if it makes sense, if something arises, you can name it just to yourself. If it’s a person, a version of yourself that you’re still gripping, whatever it is, you don’t have to drop it. Maybe just loosen the grip a bit. Maybe you can bring some attention to your body, to your physical body, noticing where you are in space, where you’re located, bringing some awareness to your shoulders, to your head, what you’re sitting on, and the bottom of your body, and then bringing some attention to your heart.

This practice is a heart-opening practice working with anahata, the heart chakra. Bring your attention there. See if you can let that attention start to grow for yourself. Not who you think you’re supposed to be, but just who you are right now holding onto something or not. And silently, can you offer yourself this? May I release what I’m holding so love has somewhere to go. May I be at ease. May I be free. May I release what I’m holding so love has somewhere to go. May I be at ease. May I be free.

And now I invite you to bring someone to mind, someone easy to love, and then offer them the same. May you release what you’re holding. May you be at ease. May you be free. May you release what you’re holding. May you be at ease. May you be free.

And with that heart awareness widening, expanding to those you know, to those you don’t, to everyone carrying something heavy, including yourself: May we release what we’re holding, may we be at ease, and may we be free.

And slowly starting to draw that awareness out from everyone, drawing it back to yourself and to your heart, acknowledging your body, and your breath, allowing yourself to take one more breath in and then a breath out, and silently thanking yourself for practicing, letting go to let in more love. And as you’re ready, you can seal your practice in whatever way works for you, whether it’s pressing your palms and bowing, thanking yourself, your teachers, and as you’re ready, you can let your eyelids lift, coming back. Ashe.

James Shaheen: Thank you Oneika, and thank you Sharon.

Sharon Salzberg: Thank you.

Oneika Mays: Thank you so much.

James Shaheen: ​​You’ve been listening to Life As It Is with Oneika Mays. Tricycle is a nonprofit educational organization dedicated to making Buddhist teachings and practices broadly available. We are pleased to offer our podcasts freely. If you would like to support the podcast, please consider subscribing to Tricycle or making a donation at tricycle.org/donate. We’d love to hear your thoughts about the podcast, so write us at feedback@tricycle.org to let us know what you think. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a review on Apple Podcasts. To keep up with the show, you can follow Tricycle Talks wherever you listen to podcasts. Tricycle Talks and Life As It Is are produced by Sarah Fleming and the Podglomerate. I’m James Shaheen, editor-in-chief of Tricycle: The Buddhist Review. Thanks for listening!