Global Social Witnessing (GSW) is at its core the emergent human capacity to mindfully attend to global events with an embodied awareness, thereby creating an inner world space mirroring these events.

As a practice of contemplative social cognition (Singer et al., 2015), GSW involves a sequence of micro-actions (Petitmengin et al., 2017): An active choice to pay attention to world events, to allow oneself to be affected by them, to become aware of phenomenal impressions on various levels (mental, emotional, somatic, relational…) and to attentively stay with these impressions and their unfolding within one’s awareness. 

GSW can be practiced individually or by a collective entity. The potential collective practices are two-fold: Firstly, initiated through a shared intention of a collective entity, a particular global event is mirrored simultaneously within each individual member. Secondly, the collective entity’s social field may mirror the complex systemic dynamics of global events and their potential unfolding (Hübl, 2017). To this end, the elements of a global event get represented by group members. Examples for the second type of practice are Social Presencing Theater (Hayashi, 2015), Process Work (Mindell, 2010) and Systemic Constellation Work.