Diana Winston is the Director of Mindfulness Education at UCLA Semel Institute’s Mindful Awareness Research Center (MARC) and the co-author, with Susan Smalley PhD, of Fully Present, the Science, Art and Practice of Mindfulness (DaCapo, 2010). She teaches mindful awareness practices to the general public to promote health and well-being. Called by the LA Times “one of the nation’s best-known teachers of mindfulness,” she has developed curriculum and taught mindfulness since 1993 in a variety of settings including hospitals, universities, corporations, non profits, and schools. She has taught mindful awareness to health professionals, leaders, teachers, activists, seniors, and adolescents in the US and Asia.

Diana is the founder of the Certificate in Mindfulness Facilitation, a pioneering year-long UCLA program that provides training, support, and supervision to those wishing to incorporate mindfulness into their occupation or to share mindfulness with individuals, groups, communities, or institutions. She is considered one of the early founders of meditation programs for youth, and taught on the seminal mindfulness and ADHD research study at UCLA in 2005. Her work has been mentioned in the New York Times, O Magazine, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and in a variety of magazines, books, and journals. She is also the author of Wide Awake: A Buddhist Guide for Teens (Perigee Books, 2003), the CD “Mindful Meditations,” and has published numerous articles on mindfulness.

Diana is a member of the Teacher’s Council at Spirit Rock Meditation Center in Northern California. She is a graduate of Brown University and has been practicing mindfulness meditation since 1989, including a year as a Buddhist nun in Burma. Currently Diana’s most challenging practice is mindfully parenting a kindergartner.

Little Book of Being Practices.

A Ruff Transcription of our Conversation:

Hi, I’m with Diana Winston, Director of Mindfulness Education at UCLA and we’re just going to jump right into it.

The first question is why meditate?

Diana: Why not meditate, it’s such a broad question. Yeah, but there’s so many dimensions to it. You know, I think about all the scientific research showing why mindfulness is helpful and how it improves. All sorts of things like physical health conditions and reduces blood pressure reduces stress, I think about how it’s helpful for anxiety and depression and all sorts of mental health concerns and. There’s you know, there’s so many different studies these days that have been showing the benefits of mindfulness. So there’s as I had the physical health impacts insomnia, it can impact cardiovascular disease. It can impact, you know, just a whole Ray of stress-related health conditions and. Just around that. Yeah, do they do you are using the same mindful meditation that that you’re teaching here or are you using different types of meditations for different types of ailments or you know chronic pain or those kind of things are working with different? It depends. So we’re talking we’re talking there’s been like about three or four thousand studies and they all do different things the most popular thing that’s been done probably as mindfuln...