Robert Marx reflects on his vision for the silent retreat, Opening the Heart, that he is co-leading with Paul Johanson in February 2026.
Thomas Merton said that “love in fact is the spiritual life, and without it all other exercises of the spirit, however lofty, are emptied of content and become mere illusions.” Doesn’t this seem intuitively true to you? Can we imagine a meaningful, genuine path towards wholeness and connection without love?
The question perhaps is what do we mean by ‘love’? We use the word in so many contexts; we say, “I love your hat” and “I love meditating” and “I love you” and although they all use the same word, they all mean something different. “Love” is very much romanticised in our culture and associated with “falling in love” which may be beautiful and exhilarating and painful but it’s also likely to be transient.
The love that we find in the “slogans” of the Tibetan Lo Jong or Mind Training approach, work for us in a deeply challenging way and it is these slogans we’ll be using for our next retreat in February. Slogans like “Be grateful to everyone” and “Don’t expect applause” bring us right up against our own need to defend ourselves and entrench our position. They question our polarising, othering and blaming tendency which perhaps is one of the biggest blocks to love, by keeping people out.
When I keep these kinds of phrases in my mind, they show me my own self-preoccupation and offer me a way to loosen it. I might think, “Why would I be grateful to that person who is so dismissive towards me? Why wouldn’t I want applause for the hard work I do?” But if I can turn around my mindset then I can start to let go of my expectations about how life should be and start to appreciate what is here. People who are dismissive are the ones who teach us patience. We’re not going to learn patience from the people who always encourage us. Our disappointment at not getting applause shows us the hidden agenda we had for doing something.
And so, coming back to love. Love as a commitment to courageously explore, where we don’t need to stay closed and armoured and defensive, where we can safely generate kindness and goodwill, is something that we might often lose sight of. But it is something we can always come back to, however we feel.
As a Mindful Self-Compassion teacher and a practitioner in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, I feel the cultivation of qualities of the heart, such as tenderness, courage and kindness, are essential for living life to its fullest and deepest extent. Paul Johanson and I have used the framework of the Lo Jong Mind training slogans to shape the retreat and help us foster these qualities.
I hope that you will join us.
Dr Robert Marx is Co-Lead of the Sussex Mindfulness Centre. You can find out more about the retreat and book tickets here.