What Now?

Early adulthood is filled with intense emotions and insecurity. What if you never fall in love? What if you can’t find work you’re passionate about? You miss home. You miss close friends. You’re lost in the noise of how you think you should be living and worried about wasting what everyone says should be the best years of your life.

What Now? shares mindfulness practices to help twentysomethings learn to identify and accept these feelings and respond—not react—to painful and powerful stimuli without pushing them away or getting lost in them. This is not about fixing oneself or being “better.” Readers are encouraged to embrace themselves exactly as they are. You are already completely whole, completely loveable, completely worthy. What Now? shares practices that help us to wake up to this fact.

This uniquely tumultuous developmental period is a time when many first live away from home and engage in all kinds of experimentation—with ideas, substances, relationships, and who we think we are and want to be in the world. Yael Shy shares her own story and offers basic meditation guides to beginning a practice. She explores the Buddhist framework for what causes suffering and explores ideas about interconnection and social justice as natural outgrowths of meditation practice.

About the Author

Yael Shy is the Founder and Director of MindfulNYU (the largest campus-wide meditation initiative in the country) and the Senior Director of the Center for Global Spiritual Life at New York University. She leads meditation workshops, classes, and retreats around the country and the world, including at NYU Abu Dhabi, NYU Berlin, NYU Tel Aviv, Mindful Life, Princeton University, and elsewhere and teaches weekly at MindfulNYU and at the meditation studio MNDFL in Greenwich Village.

In 2010, Shy was named one of the “36 under 36” change-makers transforming the Jewish world by Jewish Week newspaper. She has practiced meditation regularly in Jewish, Zen Buddhist, and secular contexts. Yael has been published in the Harvard Business Review, the Huffington Post, the Journal of Interreligious Studies, the NYU Review of Law and Social Change, among other publications. Yael Shy lives in Brooklyn with her husband and son.