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Background: There is a lack of research focused on the experience of maintaining cigarette smoking cessation for a year or more, cigarette smoking is the largest preventable killer worldwide, and recidivism for cessation is estimated as high as 97%. Purpose: To explore the lived experience of maintaining smoking cessation for one year or more. Methods: Design: Streubert's nurse-developed descriptive phenomenological method. Participants: Seven adults (five women) residing in the New York metropolitan area participated in this study. Data-collection and Setting: Interviews completed in public settings were audio-taped and transcribed, field notes, reflexive journal, and background questionnaire. Data-analysis: Phenomenological analysis involves dwelling intensely with the data. Immersion with the data allowed for emergence of themes, referred to as essences, in common to the experience of sustained cessation. Relationships between the essences were established, and this was followed by an exhaustive description of the experience of maintaining cessation. Results: Maintaining smoking cessation for a year or more is a multi-layered and dynamic process, where smoking behavior is synergistically influenced by biological, psychological, and social conditions. Six themes that captured participants' experience of maintaining smoking cessation are: reclaiming acceptance; learning through relapse; breaking free; developing an olfactory aversion; reframing; and self-transformation. Conclusions/Implications: Nurses working with individuals who wish to sustain cessation may be more effective by recognizing cessation as a multi-determined phenomenon. Nurses are the largest group of health care professionals in the US. Practicing nurses encounter patients at every developmental stage and in every health care setting, seeing more patients than any other health care provider. Therefore, the potential impact nurses can have on smoking cessation is enormous. The findings suggest that cessation interventions should 1) target multiple-levels of influence 2) include collaborations across health-care settings and among health care professionals, and 3) incorporate shared decision making with patients. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]