A Brief History of World Witnessing

World Witnessing is the most recent step of many on our journey with Global Social Witnessing. Acknowledgement is due here to the wonderful people who have accompanied us in practice groups on a journey of discovery and transformation. Their commitment and willingness to face into world events, to get to know and share the depth of their embodied experience, has transformed them and us. We have all learned and become more capable of being related on a multitude of different levels and we are enormously grateful and humbled by the people who regularly show up in the room.

Global Social Witnessing was introduced by the Pocket Project's co-founder Thomas Hübl in 2017.  Several of us met at Thomas' Pocket Project Collective and Intergenerational Trauma Integration Training that summer and our colleague Christine Gerike initiated and invited us to join a GSW Practice group shortly thereafter.  What began as exploration in a practice group has blossomed into a powerful and compelling social technology that grows our capacity to meet and respond to these times of change and transformation.  Having reflected on and spent time refining the details of the practice, in 2020 Manda, Robert and Christine created the Webinar series Witnessing the World in Me and Me in the World, a deeper dive into the principles and practice of Global Social Witnessing and more recently Manda and Robert began offering a next level training, The Art of Witnessing. 

We are highly committed to this practice.  We and our fellow practice participants continue to be deeply affected by witnessing together and by the experience of being increasingly transformed from the inside out.  The process transforms the quality of our relatedness to events in the world, enhances our capacities for effective social activism, and ripples out into the world as subtle energetic activism.

Our vision is to grow and seed this valuable social technology as broadly as possible in communities and organisations, so that it supports them as they seek sustainability in our rapidly changing and increasingly volatile future.  This includes continuing to build and support our own practice and learning community and training and supporting others to lead and grow witnessing practice where they live and work.   

To this end we continue to work collaboratively with the Pocket Project on its Global Social Witnessing projects and with the Institute for Global Integral Competence on GSW education.

"I am only just starting to understand a tiny bit about Global Social Witnessing, but I can sense that something in me is opening up again in connection to the world.  Feeling a lot of gratitude."
​Hanneke V.