Robert Marx, co-lead for the Sussex Mindfulness Centre gives a talk on “Leading with Compassion: Transforming Workplace Culture” for BAMBA’s next Mindful Workplace Community event.
Mindfulness and compassion-based interventions can be transformative for individuals, but lasting change requires a systemic approach. Shifting an organisation’s culture often begins with its leaders.
In this event, you will: ✔️ Understand some key principles underlying compassionate leadership. ✔️ Have a sense of the core components and structure of the SMC Compassionate Leadership Training. ✔️ Experience some compassionate leadership practices that you can use in your work. ✔️ Feel inspired to develop these ideas in your organisations and workplaces.
Compassionate leadership is relevant to anyone exerting influence on their team, service or organisation. You do not need to be employed in a senior position.
Event details: 📅 Date: Thursday 27th March 2025 ⏱️ Time: 12:30 – 13:30 GMT 📍 Location: Online via Zoom
Tickets cost between £5-£20 or a donation to BAMBA, and a recording of the event will be sent to all those who purchase a ticket. Book your ticket here.
About Robert Marx:
Apart from being co-lead at Sussex Mindfulness Centre (SMC), Robert is a lead consultant clinical psychologist and psychotherapist. He has been involved in running mindfulness groups for staff and patients since 2006. He leads the national MBCT in NHS Talking Therapies training. He also teaches Mindful Self-Compassion groups to staff, and with Prof Clara Strauss, developed the SMC Compassionate Leadership Training which has been delivered to leaders in various organisations.
How mindfulness has helped me with racing thoughts and self-criticism
“It is a real blessing,” says Lizzy, Social Prescribing Team Leader in Brighton and Hove. “I notice that I have a strengthening sense of self and acceptance.”
Lizzy West describes how writing a social prescription for herself to try a mindfulness course has helped her to find inner resilience and confidence to be there for herself.
In 2023, I found myself grappling with some wellbeing issues and I wasn’t feeling great. It was frustrating because despite having a few tools I thought might help, I felt stuck with my difficulty. I am a Social Prescriber, so I decided to write myself a social prescription and one place in my community I turned towards was Sussex Mindfulness Centre. I was sharing a flyer for an eight-week mindfulness course for people of colour with my clients in the refugee and migrant community. I realised it might be the supportive space I needed myself as a mixed heritage, British born person. I joined the course and found it a really helpful and nourishing experience. Group dynamics can be overwhelming sometimes in other contexts, but in this group, I could really immerse myself in learning about and practising mindfulness. It gave me a unique space where I could explore my identity and wellbeing within a diverse setting. I didn’t really even know I needed this before. Participating in a group where everyone was Black, Asian or a person of colour and reflecting on shared and diverse experiences was powerful. There is real value in a shared, mindful community of this kind.
Mindfulness helps me have a gentle dialogue with my inner critic
My negative self talk can get a bit wild sometimes. Mindfulness doesn’t stop it, but I am able to observe it. That is a real blessing – to be able to create a bit of space between the noise in my mind and me. I notice that I have a strengthening sense of self and acceptance. Sometimes I can even smile at it. And I don’t feel like I have “failed” if I’m not always feeling calm or relaxed. I used to think resilience meant that I wouldn’t feel or do the “wrong” thing when I got stressed. But now I feel that resilience is how I ground myself and learn to accept whatever’s going on inside me. I am living resiliently rather than just pushing things away.
I do a little practice every day. Just doing a small bit each day and slowly building on that is one of the ways I’m being less harsh with myself. I’m not judging myself or rushing with mindfulness.
Mindfulness also helps with my working relationships
I am able to pause and be less reactive at work. I can take a moment before replying to an email or dealing with a situation. Healthcare settings are intense workplaces. Mindfulness is helping me to be a more supporting team leader: I can listen better because my mind isn’t racing so much. Likewise with patients – I can slow down and be myself. They get a better version of me.
I am also developing a better sense of my own needs in the workplace and in other relationships. I am thinking about work differently, and feeling more confident to ask for what I need. I am feeling that I can give myself permission to do this.
Now I hope to socially prescribe mindfulness to others
I have recently completed training to teach adapted mindfulness-based interventions, also with Sussex Mindfulness Centre. This was a mixture of online and in-person training over 11 months and attracted an interesting group of people from the UK and beyond. It was a very safe and held environment and I always came out of each learning session feeling nourished afterwards. I am hoping that I can use adapted mindfulness interventions in my work supporting people with their mental health in the community. I really want to share what I can with other people so they have some tools for themselves.
I have found a way to be there for myself through mindfulness
I was in a breath workshop recently and the teacher said “you are what you’ve been waiting for.” I found that so touching. We can draw on many tools: apps and counselling and other things. They are all valuable. But to be supported by your own inner self is the biggest gift. It’s not about being more spiritual or everything magically being ok. But mindfulness is a better way of supporting yourself and coping with whatever is and whatever is to come.
“Mindfulness practice, particularly loving-kindness meditation, has been life-changing,” explains Hannah. “It has affected all areas of my life, whether at work or home”.
Hannah works as an administrator in the NHS and shares her experiences of using mindfulness to respond to her recent autism diagnosis and to manage life’s stresses. She describes how a Mindful Self-Compassion course with the Sussex Mindfulness Centre has helped her to manage shame around her autism, support herself through challenges and nurture self-compassion.
This blog post is based on an interview with Tamsin Bishton using Hannah’s words. It’s part of a blog series “My journey with mindfulness” edited by Tamsin.
How I started exploring mindfulness practices
I’ve been open to mindfulness since my 20s when I had an out-of-body experience. That led me to lunchtime meditation sessions at an NHS hospital, which I really took to. I didn’t know much about it then, but I found that it helped me to work with my thoughts. I also did a compassion-focused therapy course with Paul Gilbert and attended some Buddhist retreats during that time. When I had children, I found it harder to find the time to meditate. It was when I joined the Sussex Partnership as an administrator last year that I got interested again. I did an eight-week Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) course and my practice started again.
After the MBCT course, I practiced mindfulness every day. I learned about loving-kindness meditation, and I used this to focus compassion on my mum, who has dementia, and for myself. This led me to the eight-week Mindful Self-Compassion (MSC) course which I recently completed, also at Sussex Mindfulness Centre.
Mindfulness has helped me respond positively to my autism diagnosis
Hannah Rudd’s Mind Map, helping visualise learning from the Mindful Self-Compassion course
I was recently diagnosed with autism, and self-compassion has been crucial for addressing the lifelong feelings of shame and not fitting in. These beliefs, like feeling unlovable, were common for me growing up undiagnosed. Mindfulness helped me realise and rewrite these beliefs. It has also helped me find ways to manage my sensitivities, particularly to sounds, with comforting words and soothing touch. As a result I’ve been able to stop my anxiety medication.
I’m a visual learner, and I think this is connected to my autism. When I was in my 20s I created a mind map and over the years I’ve applied it to lots of different things to help me understand better. This mind map supported my learning and experiencing as I explored self-compassion and loving-kindness meditations.
I used the mind map to organise my reflections. I found that placing key aspects on paper, and deciding where and how they fit together helped me to make sense of it all. Reflecting on my experiences in this way had a huge impact on how effective the course was for me.
Practising self-compassion through mindfulness has profound effects
Mindfulness practice, particularly loving-kindness meditation, has been life-changing. It has affected all areas of my life, whether at work or home. I’ve grown more resilient, managing challenges without feeling overwhelmed. I’ve integrated loving-kindness into my day, regardless of what else is going on in life, and it has transformed how I feel about myself and others.
It’s not without its challenges. For example I did experience what’s called “backdraft” when first trying to use soothing touch and comforting words in response to stressful situations. I found that playing the piano really helped me work through this. I could sit and play the piano and this drew out my emotions gently and safely, helping me to uncover unconscious negative beliefs that were preventing me from being compassionate towards myself such as “I don’t matter” and “I’m not ok”. It taught me that addressing difficult experiences rather than avoiding them can be beneficial. Accepting that discomfort is okay has helped me in many other areas, reducing resistance and embracing challenges.
I think mindfulness can be helpful for people with autism like me
Based on my experience, I would say that the Mindful Self-Compassion course is particularly beneficial for autistic people like me. It helps address shame and allows you to accept yourself just as you are. I believe it’s vital to understand deeply that there’s nothing wrong with you. Mindfulness has helped me to avoid burnout and is teaching me to love myself fully, reshaping life positively.
Robert Marx initiates a day long workshop to explore mindfulness, heartfulness and compassion practices from different faith traditions. Here he explains the thinking behind the day.
I’m very excited to be thinking about and planning this day. In the NHS, we frequently talk about Equality, Diversity and Inclusion. Religion is one of the protected characteristics in the Equalities Act that often gets left out of the conversation. The NHS is rightly a totally secular organisation providing evidence-based healthcare, not religious belief and practice. And yet, it’s important to acknowledge that some of the concepts and practices directly derived from religion, such as gratitude, forgiveness, mindfulness and compassion are increasingly shown by the research to be effective tools of psychotherapeutic healthcare.
At a more national level, we see the cost of being unable to have a multi-faith dialogue in a spirit of openness and willingness to learn from each other. Cases of anti-semitism and Islamophobia have risen steeply over the last year. The othering of people from different countries and faiths is becoming more mainstream and can sometimes be dressed up in a religious context and narrative. This polarisation and exclusion can only be bad for our prospects for living in peace together.
My hope for this day is that we can join in mindfulness and compassion-based practices delivered by people from multiple faith traditions. And that out of an openness to understand, we can encounter each other in fresh and connected ways. Although there may be people in the room with widely differing beliefs, including those with no religious affiliations, our aspiration is to explore our shared experience and see if we can learn from each other. I hope you can join us.
Bridgette O’Neill is preparing to lead the new eight-week course Deeper Mindfulness: Frame by Frame with colleague Taravajra. Here she writes about what she appreciates about this new course that was developed by Professor Mark Williams.
Have you ever felt that your mindfulness practice has plateaued? I know I have. Like brushing my teeth or exercising, formal mindfulness practice is part of my daily life and has been, and is, transformational for me. However, from experience I know that with familiarity I can move into a comfortable zone where my ability to see clearly can get foggy.
Of course, with time difficult life events will inevitably wake me up from this comfort zone and bring energy and new learning and unlearning into my relationship with practice. I’ve also learnt over the years that I don’t need to wait for life challenges to wake me up further; I can actively seek opportunities to deepen into a more compassionate aware way of being that we call mindfulness.
There are many opportunities for deepening and enlivening our practice. A good option is to engage in a structured course that focuses in more depth on a particular aspect of mindfulness and provides the support of a teacher and community of fellow participants. One structured course that I’ve appreciated in recent years is Deeper Mindfulness: Exploring Feeling Tone Frame by Frame which was developed by Mark Williams. I first took this course as a participant a couple of years ago and went on to do a weekend retreat and teacher training led by Mark Williams and Antonia Sumbundu.
The course has a particular focus on the second way of establishing mindfulness, that is the feel or feeling tone with which all our experience arrives, pleasant, unpleasant or somewhere in between. In both Buddhist and contemporary psychology, becoming aware of the feel of our experience moment by moment is considered the key to greater choice and freedom from habit. Before doing the course, I had experience of practices that focus on feeling tone and had done a retreat with this particular focus. Even so, I really valued this eight-week course. I loved the simplicity of its design and how each week adds one more element to practice and understanding, building on everything that has come before. The practices were guided in a very trauma-sensitive way and as a mindfulness teacher it was great to witness how this was done so clearly, and without too many words. Most practices had 10, 20 or 30 minute options which meant that I could combine them with other regular practices and I could easily choose to practice a couple of times a day to support greater integration and continuity of practice across the day.
Other aspects of the course that really help embed learning and awareness into everyday life are guided reflections for the end of the day, reflections on bringing mindfulness into speaking and listening and even a practice for times when you can’t sleep. Kindness is completely woven through the course with encouragement to bring appreciation rather than criticism to our amazingly active minds and to acknowledge that it’s ok to like or not like whatever is occurring without needing to jump into reacting. Another form of kindness within the course is that we are encouraged to deliberately turn towards aspects of experience that we appreciate and are grateful for.
I’ve been revisiting all the practices in preparation for teaching the course and I’m remembering all over again how helpful it is to foreground with fine-tuned awareness, the at times clear, and at other times more subtle feel with which my experience arrives. And how this can help me to notice with kindness when I’m acting out of habit in ways that deplete me, and can also enable me to savour moments of pleasure and nourishment.
I highly recommend the course as a way to refresh and deepen practice, to bring more understanding to how it is to be human and as a way to open to joy and greater ease in everyday life.
How mindfulness helped me with anxiety and depression
“My inner critic was loud – and it got a bit quieter when I meditated, ” explains Tamsin Bishton, a communications specialist and mindfulness teacher. “For me that has been a gift that has stayed with me for the last 15 years.
In the first of a series of blog posts featuring different people Tamsin describes her journey with mindfulness. For Tamsin, mindfulness was a last resort as she struggled to deal with the depression and anxiety that has followed her since she was a teenager. She describes how mindfulness has helped her make friends with herself and support others.
How I came to mindfulness
I was in my late thirties when I was referred to an eight-week Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) course after an extended course of Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (CBT) with Sussex Partnership Foundation Trust. I had no idea what mindfulness was. I think I was a bit suspicious at first.
But the CBT course had really helped me get on top of my anxiety and depression, sparked by workplace stress. And I dreaded relapsing. Depression has been with me since I was an older teenager and I was starting to feel overwhelmed when I relapsed. I was keen to try anything that might help me avoid that. And as I learned, mindfulness was at least as effective as antidepressants, so I was up for giving it a go.
I am so glad that I did. Right from the first practice we did in the first session of that eight-week course, something just clicked. Not that it was easy or without its challenges. But I felt connected with myself in a more gentle and understanding way. My inner critic was loud – and it got a bit quieter when I meditated. For me that has been a gift that has stayed with me for the last 15 years.
Teaching mindfulness has helped me deepen my practice while supporting others
After several years of practising mindfulness and attending day retreats at the Sussex Mindfulness Centre I made the decision to learn to teach mindfulness to others. I spent a year learning to teach Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy and Stress Reduction with the compassionate team at Sussex Mindfulness Centre. Because it’s a part-time course I was able to do this learning alongside my other work. It involved a mixture of in-person training with the other trainees, practising a lot, observing an eight-week course and then co-teaching a course with a very experienced and patient teacher. I made a couple of friends for life through that course. And it helped me to understand that mindfulness isn’t something you can read about and then mimic. It requires embodied learning – that means committing to the journey of practising mindfulness regularly, learning about yourself, reflecting and listening to what experience has to teach you.
I now teach adapted eight-week courses for people with long-covid. I also host a regular weekly online drop-in on Monday evenings with a group of people who started practising together at the start of the pandemic. I do this teaching alongside my other work in communications. Mindfulness has helped me to rediscover a love for my work that I thought I had lost for good. And I have learned so much from people as they embark on their mindfulness journey and then deepen their practice. It is an honour to walk alongside them on that journey.
Mindfulness can help us to make friends with ourselves and ride the waves
Mindfulness has also taught me that being human means experiencing challenges and, sometimes, suffering. And it seems to me that a certain amount of anxiety is a perfectly reasonable response to what’s going on in the world in 2025. So, yes, the low moods do sometimes come. And I do get anxious sometimes. But mindfulness has helped me to see that these states of mind do not define me. Instead of getting overwhelmed, I can be gentle with myself when they come. I can make friends with the scared and sad parts of myself and take care of them. As Jon Kabat-Zinn says, “You can’t stop the waves, but you can learn to surf.”
I’d encourage anyone suffering with depression and anxiety to explore mindfulness for themselves. If I can “learn to surf” then anyone can.
