From 16 to 22 September 2025, the coastal town of Plurien in Brittany, France, hosted the international training course Mind Your Emotions, funded by #ErasmusPlus.
For a week, youth workers and participants from across Europe explored emotional awareness through meditation, body practices, theatre, and intercultural dialogue. The training created a safe space to recognize, express, and transform emotions, while at the same time strengthening key competences for youth work.
One of the central goals of youth work is the construction of a more harmonious and equitable society, where empathy and effective communication play a crucial role. Working on body awareness, theatre, and conflict management helped participants to cultivate the skills needed to promote a tolerant European identity rooted in diversity, empathy, and authentic human connection.
The training aimed to enhance the capacity of youth workers to manage emotions and conflicts in their professional practice and to provide them with artistic tools—particularly theatre—that they can use with young people. Theatre offered a way to simulate real-life situations, creating space to reflect, experiment, and learn. Through this process, participants developed knowledge, skills, and the confidence to guide and support the communities they serve, with particular attention to minorities.
Martina, one of the Italian participants, described a particularly powerful activity:
“We dived into a meditation to explore our mixed emotions… with those emotions and images still within us, we then took modelling clay and shaped it into what we were as children. Finally, we tried to connect that ‘younger’ version of ourselves to a ‘bigger’ version, to understand how emotions had found their space within us. After the break, we dedicated ourselves to theatre, discovering the basic rules of the Neutral Mask and, divided into groups, we challenged ourselves with performances, putting into practice what we had learned so far.”
The week concluded with new skills, stronger connections, and a renewed commitment to integrate emotional awareness into youth work. Participants left inspired to help young people improve communication, manage emotions and conflicts, and build a future based on empathy and inclusion.
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