Today, Michael speaks with Oneika Mays. Oneika is a meditation teacher, yoga practitioner, and writer whose work centers on mindfulness, loving kindness, and compassionate living. After leaving a successful career in retail leadership following profound personal loss and transformation, she spent more than a decade bringing meditation and healing practices into spaces often overlooked—working with individuals and communities who have felt judged, forgotten, or alone, leading her to working on Rikers Island with incarcerated individuals. Her book, Sit With Me: A No-BS Journey to Mindfulness and Meditation, explores grief, self-compassion, unconditional friendliness, and the courage it takes to truly face yourself.

Conversation Highlights Include:

-How profound loss, career upheaval, and a canceled wedding became the catalyst for a completely different way of living.

-Choosing discomfort and transformation over staying trapped in a life that no longer felt aligned or authentic.

-A deeply honest reflection on grief, and learning to hold sadness and joy at the same time without denying either experience.

-Why asking better questions creates expansion, self-awareness, and curiosity instead of emotional shutdown and certainty.

-An invitation to "sit with yourself" by meeting discomfort, shame, fear, and uncertainty with tenderness instead of avoidance.

-How real freedom often begins in the moments we stop running from difficult emotions and allow ourselves to fully feel them.

-A powerful conversation about loving people you may never agree with, like, or understand, while still recognizing their humanity.

-What more than a decade of teaching meditation inside Rikers Island revealed about judgment, compassion, trauma, and human connection.

-An honest look at prison systems, accountability, restorative healing, and why true transformation requires support beyond punishment.

Next, Michael closes the episode with a guided meditation on introspection, remembering your True nature, awakening to Divine Presence, and living from expanded awareness.

🪷 Follow Oneika and get a copy of her book, Sit With Me, here: https://www.oneikamays.com/ and across social media.

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