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Name: Fully Present
Rating: 4.5 (222 reviews)
Author: Susan L. Smalley and Diana Winston

Susan L. Smalley Diana Winston

The Science, Art, and Practice of Mindfulness

4.5 (222 ratings)

21 mins

Brief summary

Fully Present by Susan L. Smalley and Diana Winston is a guide to mindfulness meditation, offering simple techniques to help you cultivate awareness, reduce stress, and live in the present moment.

Topics

Meditation

Table of Contents

Fully Present
Summary of 8 key ideas

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Key idea 1 of 8

What’s in it for me? Top tips to master mindfulness.

Our lives are busier than ever before. Between work, chores and the endless distractions provided by our digital gadgets, it often seems like there isn’t any time to relax and simply enjoy the present moment.

That, leading mindfulness experts Susan Smalley and Diana Winston argue, is a misconception.

Worse still, it’s a fallacy that’s downright dangerous. Living life on autopilot isn’t sustainable. In the long run, stress and anxiety get the better of us all unless we take action to counter their effects.

That’s where meditation comes in. An ancient art that’s been scientifically proven to boost our health and happiness, it’s a great way of clearing the mind and rejuvenating the body. And here’s the good news – you can start incorporating this practice into your daily routine today! In these blinks, you’ll find out how.

Along the way, you’ll also learn

why pain doesn’t mean you have to suffer;
how a grape can help you; and
how to be mindful when you’re in the middle of a children's playground.

Eating mindfully lets you truly appreciate food.

Maybe you’ve come across the myth that city kids don’t know that milk comes from cows. Why are people so ready to believe these kinds of stories? Perhaps because they describe a real problem – we’ve lost touch with nature and the food we put in our bodies.

That’s where mindful eating comes in. Mindfulness is generally about focusing your attention on the present moment, so it makes sense that it might help you appreciate the food on the plate in front of you. So, how does it work?

It’s pretty simple – in fact, it’s something you can practice right now.

Grab a grape, or whatever fruit you have at hand, and make yourself comfortable. Sit down, cross your legs and close your eyes. Before you take a bite, picture where that grape came from. It must have started as a seed, right? Imagine the long journey that brought it into your home. First, it sprouted and grew into a small vine. As it grew, it absorbed sunlight, water and nutrients until it matured into a fully-grown vine and eventually bore seed-packed fruits.

But that didn’t happen on its own. Humans planted that seed, tended the vine and harvested the grapes. Others boxed the bunches and put them on trucks, which carried them along roads until they reached a supermarket. Allow your mind to dwell on all the connections that contributed to this single grape’s presence in your life.

Now you’re ready to taste the grape. Your thoughts will have awakened your curiosity and heightened your sense of awareness. Open your eyes and look at the grape as though you’d never seen one before. What color is it? Is the skin matte or glossy? How does the light reflect off it?

Finally, ask yourself whether you truly want to eat it. If you do, now’s the time to take a bite. Chew slowly and allow each flavor note to make an impression on your palate. As you savor the taste, pay attention to the thoughts, memories and ideas going through your mind.

Chances are that’s one of the best tasting grapes you’ll have eaten in a long time! No wonder – mindful eating attunes you to both the “what” and the “why” of the food you’re eating, letting you truly appreciate it.

Changing your habits isn’t easy, but some tricks can help you do just that.

Habits are hard to shake once they become ingrained. That can be a problem. Whether it’s smoking, overeating or spending too much time online, many of contemporary society’s problems are the result of negative behavioral patterns. There’s a good reason for that – changing your habits is tough! Why? Well, as economist Steven Levitt and journalist Stephen Dubner suggest, it all comes down to incentives and consequences.

Take the example they use in their bestseller Freakonomics. In what soon became a famous study, researchers looked at the hand-washing habits of medical staff working at Cedars Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles.

Focusing on your breathing is a great way to become more mindful and beat stress.

We’ve all been there. You’re already running late when the traffic in front of you suddenly grinds to an agonizing halt. As your frustration mounts, you can feel your breathing and heart rate increase, and your blood pressure shoots through the roof. How do you calm down?

A great place to start is to focus on your breathing. In fact, that’s pretty much where most meditation practices begin. Here’s how to do it.

Meditation transforms mundane moments into memorable experiences.

Mindfulness is like a key to a new world of experiences. Mastering it can transform the most mundane chore in the world into something deeply satisfying and pleasurable. Sounds good, right? Stay tuned to find out how to unlock those doors of perception!

Meditation conjures images of remote monasteries and monks, but it’s actually deeply rooted in everyday life. In fact, one of the best ways to practice mindfulness is to take a walk. You don’t even need to go far. Find yourself a quiet room with enough space to walk 10 or 15 paces in a straight line, and you’re set. Here’s how it works.

We often make pain worse than it is, and mindfulness can help us soothe our suffering.

There’s an old saying that pain can’t be avoided but suffering can. That might sound pretty counterintuitive. After all, the two can’t be separated. Pain leads to suffering, right?

Well, not quite. We often make unavoidable pain a lot worse by turning it into suffering. Think of childbirth. It’s undoubtedly rife with pain, but different women experience that pain in all sorts of different ways. Some suffer terribly and remember it as a horrific experience. Others perceive it as more of a transformative experience, rather than a traumatic one.

Mindfulness can support a healthier emotional life.

Negative emotions are part and parcel of being a human. All of us feel angry, sad, jealous or depressed from time to time. The problem, however, is that we’re often not very good at dealing with those emotions. In fact, most of us have downright unhealthy responses to negative feelings.

That’s usually because nobody teaches us how to deal with our emotions as children. After all, there’s no special emotional intelligence class in schools. That leaves it up to our parents, but they often don’t teach us about emotions, either. In the end, lots of us unconsciously adopt our parents’ dysfunctional strategies for coping with difficult emotions.

Loving-kindness, which meditation can help you achieve, is an antidote to self-hatred.

One of the most dispiriting phenomena in contemporary American society is the fact that so many people are filled with self-hatred and self-doubt. Even Meryl Streep, a fantastically successful actress who’s racked up a record 21 Academy Award nominations over the course of her career, once admitted that she still has doubts about whether or not she’s any good at her job!

So, what’s the answer? Well, the most effective antidote to self-hatred is loving-kindness. That’s a meditation practice drawn from Buddhist traditions. In this blink, we’ll take a look at how it works.

Using a variety of meditation practices helps you develop different types of mindfulness.

Imagine a park bench next to a busy playground. The sound of children screaming, squabbling and shouting is deafening. There’s no way on earth you’d be able to meditate here, right? Well, you can! It all comes down to what kind of mindfulness you’re practicing.

There are two basic types of mindfulness – let’s call them focused mindfulness and open mindfulness. As the names suggest, the former is about paying attention to one particular thing like your breathing. The latter, by contrast, is a way of being attentive to the whole world of sounds, sights and smells around you.

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What is Fully Present about?

Fully Present (2010) is a hands-on guide to mindfulness, full of actionable tips to help you put the ancient practice into use today. Based on the expertise of two of today’s leading mindfulness researchers, these blinks guide you through both the science and the art of meditation, showing you how to integrate it into your everyday life and start transforming mundane activities into rich experiences.

Fully Present Review

Fully Present: The Science, Art, and Practice of Mindfulness (2010) is a comprehensive exploration of mindfulness and its positive impact on our well-being. Here's why you should definitely read this book:

Incorporating groundbreaking scientific research, it sheds light on the benefits of mindfulness and offers practical exercises to incorporate it into daily life.
By merging mindfulness, psychology, and neuroscience, the book provides a holistic approach to cultivating awareness, reducing stress, and enhancing resilience.
Its accessible and relatable approach to mindfulness makes it engaging for both beginners and experienced practitioners, captivating readers with its practical guidance and insightful anecdotes.

Best quote from Fully Present

Applying mindfulness as a tool of inner exploration […] is a never-ending process.

—Susan L. Smalley and Diana Winston

Who should read Fully Present?

Mindfulness practitioners
Stressed-out workaholics
Psychologists and coaches

About the Author

Susan L. Smalley is the founder and leader of the Mindful Awareness Research Center at the University of California in Los Angeles. She is a professor of psychiatry whose research focuses on the benefits of mindfulness. Diana Winston is a popular mindfulness teacher who teaches throughout the US and Asia. She is also the head of the Mindfulness Education Department at the University of California in Los Angeles.

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Mindfulness & Happiness

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