Our Story
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 the 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.
Christine, Robert and Manda met at the Pocket Project's Collective and Intergenerational Trauma Integration Training in Israel mid-2017. Global Social Witnessing was introduced by the Pocket Project's co-founder Thomas Hübl at the Celebrate Life Festival that same summer.
Christine Gerike initiated our first GSW session in the Autumn of 2017; both Robert and Manda participated. What followed was a fortnightly practice that began mainly with participants of the Pocket Project's Trauma Integration training. Initially the practice was experimental and experiential, energized by a deep curiosity and longing to explore our relation with the world. We gradually began to analyze and give language to what we were doing, refining the practice and noticing the different ways it impacted and grew new capacities in us.
At the beginning of 2019 we established a Meta Group of a small number of committed practice participants so that we could reflect, debrief and continue to learn from our experiences. This began a process of distilling the elements of GSW as a practice and recognizing more clearly the capacity for GSW to increase relatedness and help us turn towards rather than away from challenging issues in ourselves and the world. In the process we began to write about and describe the elements of the process.
Later in 2019 Manda, Robert and Christine met in Europe at the Celebrate Life Festival where it became obvious that there was great interest in the practice. Dr. Kazuma Matoba was initiating a GSW Lab Conference to be held in Germany in March of 2020, and we were invited to participate and lead daily practice sessions as a part of the conference. We also concluded that following the Lab Conference there would be interest from participants to learn more about GSW practice and we set about writing a curriculum to teach the competencies and Principles of Practice of GSW. This culminated in the creation of the six-session Webinar series "Witnessing Me in the World and the World in Me."
The GSW Lab Conference was postponed due to Covid 19 and was rescheduled for March 2021. Rather than offering the webinar as a follow-up to the Conference, we offered it to registrants as a way to deepen their understanding of GSW in preparation for the rescheduled Conference. The webinar series was taught over the summer of 2020 and attended by 25 participants. We also led a yearlong series of monthly witnessing sessions open to all Lab registrants leading up to the rescheduled conference. In the end, the conference was held online in April 2021 and we co-facilitated witnessing sessions during the conference, including the Conference's final session.
Following this, the GSW Competence Centre that we had previously established within the Pocket Project became more active and we have been co-facilitating and co-curating the Pocket Project's new program of monthly GSW sessions since March 2021. Further, Ubiquity University, in conjunction with Academy of Inner Science (AIS), Institute for Global Integral Competence (IfGIC) and CMM Institute for Personal and Social Evolution (CMMI) is now offering a Masters Degree Program in Global Social Witnessing. The Masters program focuses on Global Social Witnessing in the context of Science, Social Science and Art, as well as GSW practice and is for people interested in awareness-based systems change. We are delighted to have created and to be teaching the practice curriculum for this degree.
All of this has led us to establish worldwitnessing.org.
We are highly committed to this practice, which we want to share as relevant and necessary to meet this time of change and transformation. We and our fellow practice participants have each been and continue to be deeply affected by the process and what it teaches us about the power and importance of witnessing together and the experience of being increasingly transformed from the inside out. The process not only changes us but ripples out into the world as subtle impacts we have on our social spheres, as enhanced capacities for effective social activism, and by increasing collective energetic relatedness to otherwise disowned crises in the world.
Our vision is to grow and seed this valuable social technology as broadly as possible in communities and organisations and to support them as they seek to discover what genuine sustainability looks like in our rapidly changing and increasingly volatile, emergent future. This includes continuing to build and support our own practice and learning community, working directly with and supporting other communities and organisations, and training and supporting others to lead and grow witnessing practice where they live and work.
Christine, Robert and Manda met at the Pocket Project's Collective and Intergenerational Trauma Integration Training in Israel mid-2017. Global Social Witnessing was introduced by the Pocket Project's co-founder Thomas Hübl at the Celebrate Life Festival that same summer.
Christine Gerike initiated our first GSW session in the Autumn of 2017; both Robert and Manda participated. What followed was a fortnightly practice that began mainly with participants of the Pocket Project's Trauma Integration training. Initially the practice was experimental and experiential, energized by a deep curiosity and longing to explore our relation with the world. We gradually began to analyze and give language to what we were doing, refining the practice and noticing the different ways it impacted and grew new capacities in us.
At the beginning of 2019 we established a Meta Group of a small number of committed practice participants so that we could reflect, debrief and continue to learn from our experiences. This began a process of distilling the elements of GSW as a practice and recognizing more clearly the capacity for GSW to increase relatedness and help us turn towards rather than away from challenging issues in ourselves and the world. In the process we began to write about and describe the elements of the process.
Later in 2019 Manda, Robert and Christine met in Europe at the Celebrate Life Festival where it became obvious that there was great interest in the practice. Dr. Kazuma Matoba was initiating a GSW Lab Conference to be held in Germany in March of 2020, and we were invited to participate and lead daily practice sessions as a part of the conference. We also concluded that following the Lab Conference there would be interest from participants to learn more about GSW practice and we set about writing a curriculum to teach the competencies and Principles of Practice of GSW. This culminated in the creation of the six-session Webinar series "Witnessing Me in the World and the World in Me."
The GSW Lab Conference was postponed due to Covid 19 and was rescheduled for March 2021. Rather than offering the webinar as a follow-up to the Conference, we offered it to registrants as a way to deepen their understanding of GSW in preparation for the rescheduled Conference. The webinar series was taught over the summer of 2020 and attended by 25 participants. We also led a yearlong series of monthly witnessing sessions open to all Lab registrants leading up to the rescheduled conference. In the end, the conference was held online in April 2021 and we co-facilitated witnessing sessions during the conference, including the Conference's final session.
Following this, the GSW Competence Centre that we had previously established within the Pocket Project became more active and we have been co-facilitating and co-curating the Pocket Project's new program of monthly GSW sessions since March 2021. Further, Ubiquity University, in conjunction with Academy of Inner Science (AIS), Institute for Global Integral Competence (IfGIC) and CMM Institute for Personal and Social Evolution (CMMI) is now offering a Masters Degree Program in Global Social Witnessing. The Masters program focuses on Global Social Witnessing in the context of Science, Social Science and Art, as well as GSW practice and is for people interested in awareness-based systems change. We are delighted to have created and to be teaching the practice curriculum for this degree.
All of this has led us to establish worldwitnessing.org.
We are highly committed to this practice, which we want to share as relevant and necessary to meet this time of change and transformation. We and our fellow practice participants have each been and continue to be deeply affected by the process and what it teaches us about the power and importance of witnessing together and the experience of being increasingly transformed from the inside out. The process not only changes us but ripples out into the world as subtle impacts we have on our social spheres, as enhanced capacities for effective social activism, and by increasing collective energetic relatedness to otherwise disowned crises in the world.
Our vision is to grow and seed this valuable social technology as broadly as possible in communities and organisations and to support them as they seek to discover what genuine sustainability looks like in our rapidly changing and increasingly volatile, emergent future. This includes continuing to build and support our own practice and learning community, working directly with and supporting other communities and organisations, and training and supporting others to lead and grow witnessing practice where they live and work.
"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.
Hanneke V.
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