The Olive Tree Programme:

When we encounter big ruptures in our lives – having to leave home, moving to a different place with a different culture and environment, we can experience disorientation and uncertainty. This can be overwhelming.  There is a sense of loss, of grief. We may lack access to resources – including our inner resources.

What might help us to recover, to repair, to build the capacity to cope with the changes we are now experiencing?

The Olive Tree Programme is an initiative originally designed for Arabic-speaking immigrants and refugees in Iceland by Palestinian and Irish-based practitioners.  Various organisations such as the Red Cross and local municipalities in Iceland attended the programme in 2025.

Created by Ghada Radwan, Mary Jennings, Margaret Quinn, and Tom Larkin, the name symbolizes the remarkable ability of the olive tree to regenerate its seeds—even after being burned. 

The programme draws on the focusing based psychology and philosophy of Eugene Gedlin and mindfulness practice, offering a grounded embodied approach to healing, resilience and life skills.

This programme offers a calm and safe space to develop life skills and simple practices that offer the possibility of repair and the development of greater resilience in the face of life’s challenges. A short documentary about the programme was recently released, which you can watch here:

Who is this for?

This course will benefit adults who have experienced displacement because of conflict and war and are seeking to rebuild their lives in a new context. Open to asylum seekers, refugees, those with leave to remain or people with temporary protection status living in Ireland.

Key elements to be explored

• Establishing safety and stability in one’s body; one’s relationships and the rest of one’s life.
• Tapping into and developing one’s own inner strengths, and any other potentially available external resources
• Learning how to regulate one’s emotions and avoid emotional overwhelm
• Developing and strengthening skills for managing painful or unwanted experiences and minimizing unhelpful responses to them
• Finding ease and pleasure in everyday situations

Format of the programme

The Olive Tree consists of 6 x 2.5 hour weekly in-person sessions.

Each session includes time to slow down, to acknowledge what has happened and to take small steps to care for ourselves and develop our capacity and resources. The sessions include experiential exercises, opportunities for personal reflection, time in nature, group discussion and suggestions to take away for practice at home.