Starting Tomorrow: A Deep Dive into Global Social Witnessing
A chance to build an essential skill.
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“Witnessing is the subtlest form of intervention. Other interventions can be birthed from it.” — Thomas Hübl
Resonant World #102
I’m noticing anger, grief, shame and fear in my system as I watch appalling videos of the racist and Islamophobic violence taking place across the UK.
I’d been planning this post since before the far-right attacks on migrant hotels and businesses erupted over the weekend, but it now seems even more timely.
My friend Manda Johnson and her collaborator Robert Buxbaum are launching a six-part webinar series on Global Social Witnessing, starting tomorrow.1
Global Social Witnessing is a practice where a group of people comes together in community (online or in-person), with skilled facilitation, to intentionally attend to a particular crisis in the news, and explore our individual response at a deeper level than we can access as we scroll on our phones.
I’ve attended a number of Global Social Witnessing events organised by the Pocket Project, including at the outbreak of Russia’s invasion on Ukraine, and in relation to the build-out of fossil fuel infrastructure on the U.S. Gulf Coast (held in partnership with DeSmog), and I’ve found them to be incredibly powerful.
The facilitation and co-regulation supported me to become more acquainted with the emotional and somatic responses these crises trigger in me — and deepened my capacity to come into relation with these and other hard realities, without experiencing the kind of overwhelm that might otherwise have caused me to dissociate, or go mute.
I believe that Global Social Witnessing represents a pillar of the kind of social architecture that can help communities digest some of the chaos that’s building in many places, and develop more intelligent responses as the unravelling accelerates.
Manda and Robert are co-founders of the Pocket Project’s Global Social Witnessing Competence Centre, and have worked to develop and refine the practice since 2017.
I’ve had the privilege of getting to know Manda through our participation in various in-depth trainings by Thomas Hübl and team, and so I’m acquainted with the depth of the presence she brings, and the quality of wisdom she holds.
I’ve no doubt the webinar will be a transformational experience — equipping participants with the skills to support themselves and others to attend to the collective and inter-generational trauma fields manifesting all around us, and access the unique medicine we can each apply — in countless different ways — in response.
Webinar sessions are two hours long and will be held on August 6, 13, 20, 27, and September 3 and 10, 2024. Times, fees and information for registration for the webinar can be found here.
Some voices from past participants:
“I loved the mixture of theory in the beginning and then the applied practice. This was very helpful to me. I felt super safe and comfortable to speak and share "unfiltered" from my heart.” — Angela V.
“I found this webinar series on introducing the Principles and Practices of Global Social Witnessing was a wonderful opportunity to get hands on practice of this new modality of interfacing, relating to and potentially impacting the wider social/global field. I found it extremely well put together, held with a high degree of integrity to the material by the three facilitators, with opportunity for learning, experiencing and relating within a small community of fellow learners.” — Wendy W.
“Those sessions were beautiful. I witnessed people having realizations about themselves and how what was happening in them was connected to what we were witnessing or having trouble witnessing. I thought the whole course was both very tight and very spacious. The container was superbly held.” — Kim W.
It’s a huge boost when people become paid subscribers, and support of any amount affirms that my mission to serve the global community of trauma healing practitioners has value. Thank you!
Occasionally I share links to courses where I stand to gain a percentage of the course price if people purchase it via the link in my newsletter. This is not one of those cases.
I took part in the course Manda and Robert offered two years ago. It was a great and deep experience!
What a wonderful initiative to build the skills for what I believe is demanded of us in the present time as we witness the dying and destruction of this present unsustainable era to the next...