Two years on from Dr Gabor Maté at the RDS
Some conversations stay with you.
In 2024, we brought Dr Gabor Maté to Dublin for Trauma, Illness and Healing in a Toxic Culture, a one-day event at the RDS exploring trauma, healing, chronic illness, the mind-body connection and the effect of modern culture on our wellbeing.
Two years later, so much of what was shared that day still feels present in the work of the Kyne Foundation.
The event brought together people from across wellbeing, mental health, education, community and social impact. Dr Gabor Maté invited the room to think differently about pain, behaviour, illness and healing. Not as separate issues, but as deeply connected parts of the human experience.
It was a day about trauma, but also about compassion.
About what people carry.
About what young people need.
About the ways modern life can disconnect us from ourselves and each other.
And about the possibility of repair when people feel seen, heard and understood.
For the Kyne Foundation, the day became part of something wider.
Dennis Okwera, founder of the Lumule Foundation, joined us as special guest and charity partner. His story brought the conversation into a different kind of focus, one rooted in resilience, community and the rebuilding of hope.
Alongside voices connected to youth wellbeing, mental health and community, the event reminded us that healing is not only personal. It is relational too.
We heal in conversation.
We heal through care.
We heal when people stop turning away from what is difficult.
Looking back now, the event feels like one of the moments that helped shape the language of the Foundation.
Connection creates wellbeing.
That belief was present in the room that day. It was there in the audience, in the conversations between sessions, in the questions people asked and in the feeling that many had come not only to listen, but to understand something more deeply.
The event did not begin as a formal strategy. Like many Kyne moments, it grew from connection, instinct and the sense that this conversation needed to be shared.
That still feels important.
At Kyne, we are drawn to people and ideas that help us become more compassionate, more honest and more awake to one another. Dr Gabor Maté’s work continues to ask difficult but necessary questions about how we live, how we parent, how we support young people and how we make space for healing in a culture that often moves too fast to notice pain.
Two years on, the details of the day may have softened, but the feeling has not.
People gathered.
Stories were shared.
Something shifted.
And for us, that is where meaningful work often begins.
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