Beyond the Irish Question
Collective Integration in Practice
SATURDAY 23 JANUARY 2027 · DUBLIN · €125
The workshop Details
A one-day, in-person workshop with David Young and Simon Courtney
New to Collective Integration? You’re welcome to start here. You don’t need to have attended the December online introduction.
What happens when the mood in a room changes?
A conversation goes quiet. You feel yourself tense up, but you’re unsure what changed or
whether anyone else noticed it. What could you do in that moment?
In this one-day workshop, David and Simon will introduce Collective Integration through
guided exercises in pairs and as a group. We’ll pay attention to what we feel in our own bodies,
what changes when we’re with someone else, and what we can learn by comparing our experiences.
What you’ll do on the day
Two people can sit in the same room and come away with very different impressions of what happened. In Dublin, we’ll get curious about those differences and practise talking about what we sense in the moment.
Notice what changes as you sit with someone
David and Simon will guide you in paying attention to what happens in your body as you sit with another person. You might notice your breathing change, feel yourself settle, or find that you want to say something. David draws on his martial arts background in the way he teaches partnered practice, with an emphasis on noticing how we respond to one another in real time.
Bring a wider story into the room
In one practice David describes, you sit with a partner and bring to mind a family or community they belong to. Does anything shift in how you feel as you sit together? You each describe what you noticed and hear how it was for the other person. They might recognise something in what you say, or their experience might surprise you.
Hear how others experienced it
We’ll come back together as a group and compare what we noticed. You’ll practise putting words to an impression and asking how it was for someone else. Think of a meeting that suddenly goes quiet, or a family conversation that keeps circling the same subject. What might you hear if you asked what others were noticing?
Who this day is for
If you’re curious about how people affect one another in families, teams or communities, you’re welcome.
The day may also speak to people who work with groups and want to explore what happens when tension or silence enters the room.
Prefer to start online? Join the optional 8 December introduction ↗
MEET YOUR FACILITATORS
Simon Courtney
Irish psychotherapist, coach and group facilitator. Through Beyond the Irish Question, Simon explores how the stories we inherit live on in our relationships and communities.
David Young
Teacher, facilitator and developer of the Art of Collective Integration. David works with groups to explore how conflict, history and unspoken experiences shape the way we relate.
Heather is the co-owner of WholeHearted, an executive coach and a certified Thomas Hübl Transparent Communication Practice Group leader. She brings experience in trauma-informed practice and group facilitation and will be there to support participants throughout the workshop.
Heather Thalheimer
Who this day is for
If you’re curious about how people affect one another in families, teams or communities, you’re welcome.
The day may also speak to people who work with groups and want to explore what happens when tension or silence enters the room.
Prefer to start online? Join the optional 8 December introduction ↗
WHY THIS SPACE
When we hear the words collective healing, we often imagine individuals each doing their own healing, as if the collective were simply a sum of separate people, or something out there that we might one day help.
Collective Integration begins from a different place. Alongside our individual bodies and nervous systems, this approach invites us to explore a collective body: the shared dimension of experience that lives within us and between us.
We may begin to notice it in the atmosphere of a room, in a familiar silence, or in the way our experience changes when we bring a family, a community or a people into awareness. With practice, we can become more attentive to these shifts.
This evening offers a first meeting with the Art of Collective Integration, developed by David Young. It is an opportunity to experience the approach and feel whether the one-day workshop in Dublin in January, or the four-day training, might be right for you.
A CONVERSATION WITH SIMON AND DAVID
We spoke live on Instagram about Collective Integration and what we’ll explore together on 8 December.
Watch the whole conversation on Instagram here
WHY COLLECTIVE TRAUMA?
What a family, a community or a people could not feel at the time does not simply disappear. It stays undigested in the collective body, and it keeps returning, in the charge that rises at the dinner table, in the tension no one names in a meeting, in the divisions that seem to replay themselves from one generation to the next. Much of what we experience today as polarisation, numbness or fragmentation is the tip of this iceberg.
We have places to digest our personal histories, in therapy and in our closest relationships, but very few places where a group can digest what it carries together. In Ireland we know something of this, in the famine, emigration, the loss of language and the long habit of silence, and the same is true, in different forms, for peoples all over the world.
“It is not an idea somewhere else. It lives here, between us, and in our own bodies.”
- Simon Courtney
WHO IS THIS SPACE DESIGNED FOR?
This evening is for:
Anyone who senses that their own healing is woven into something larger.
Therapists and somatic practitioners interested in the relationship between personal and collective experience.
Facilitators, teachers and leaders who encounter tension, silence or polarisation in groups.
People curious about how family, ancestral and cultural histories live in present relationships.
Those considering the January workshop or four-day training who would like to experience the approach first.
No prior experience of collective trauma work is needed. You are welcome to bring your curiosity, questions and lived experience.
WHAT WE’LL EXPLORE
The heart of the evening is learning to attune to ourselves and to discern between what is mine and what is collective.
This is not an idea but a capacity of our own nervous system. In one moment I am feeling my own life, and in another I may notice I have tuned into something we carry, as a family, a people or a country, and the sensations, emotions and quality of presence shift.
Rather than following the stories we tell about these things, we stay in the here and now and notice what actually arises in us as we attune.
In small groups of resonance we explore our experience of the collective together, paying attention to the somatic, emotional and relational changes that come as the we space becomes more alive.
A simple question will guide the exploration:
How does “us” feel?
EVENING STRUCTURE
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A TEACHING
An introduction to Collective Integration, collective trauma and the practice of attending to the collective body.
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A GUIDED PRACTICE
Time to slow down, attune to yourself and notice what changes as your awareness includes a wider collective.
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RESONANCE GROUPS
An opportunity to explore together, paying attention to what arises in our bodies, emotions and relationships.
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REFLECTIONS & QUESTIONS
Space to bring your experience back to the whole group and deepen your understanding with Simon.
“The heart of the evening is learning to attune to ourselves and to discern between what is mine and what is collective.”
— Simon Courtney