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Our world is in crisis — climate disruption, social unrest, technology upheaval, geopolitical shocks and widening polarisation all converging at once.
How is this impacting us, as individuals, as communities, as humanity?
Woven into the world
Most of us in the West have been socially conditioned to perceive people as individuals, as separate selves, with clear boundaries between inside and outside, between self and the world. Seeing ourselves in this way, we naturally assume that our inner experience – what we think and feel – is predominately a reflection of our personal history and circumstances.
If we consider that our nervous systems respond not only to the particulars of our lives, but also to the instability, fragmentation and stress within social, historical and ecological contexts globally, the world ‘out there’ moves from being the wider context within which we’re situated to becoming part of the content of our experience.
The world is within us.
Social Regeneration for a world in crisis
In the midst of global turbulence, as coaches we’re being asked to cultivate a specific adaptive capacity: to meet complexity with greater agility and sensitivity through turning towards what’s alive in the coaching room – to meet our clients in the specificity of their personal contexts and the universality of the transpersonal dimension.
To develop this capacity, we need the support of one another in community to create a bigger holding space for personal and collective experience to be processed and integrated.
The World Within Us is a social regeneration initiative focused on gathering people together to intentionally explore how the world’s challenging events – particularly climate change, injustices, tragedies, crises and systemic trauma – live within us, not as information or opinion but as embodied experience affecting our relationships, wellbeing and capacity to respond.
The methodology through which we do this is Global Social Witnessing, a collective relational practice developed by Thomas Hübl, trauma expert, international group facilitator and author. In a structured group setting, participants are invited to move from bystander to active witness through slowing down and noticing cognitive, emotional and somatic responses to a specific world event carefully selected and held by the facilitator.
Benefits of the practice
With the support of one another in practice, we have the opportunity to deepen awareness of our inner responses, strengthen our ability to metabolise our experience and expand our window of tolerance to stay present with suffering, uncertainty and complexity.
Through meeting the world within us, we’re actively taking responsibility for our contribution to the collective field and enhancing our client’s capacity to do the same.
The quality of our inner response to the world matters. Whole groups and societies can develop the capacity to hold difficult global realities with clarity and compassion, creating the conditions for healing and transformation.