Kosha Joubert – Global Social Witnessing

Thomas Hübl: Welcome to Point of Relation. My name is Thomas Hübl. This is my podcast and I’m very happy to be sitting here together with Kosha Joubert, who’s the CEO of the Pocket Project. First of all, Kosha, very warm welcome.

Kosha Joubert: Thank you Thomas. Lovely to be here with you.

Thomas: We have worked together, collaborated closely over the last years and developed The Pocket Project and all its impact and all its different projects. And so you did some amazing work there. So first of all, thank you for that. And now we are developing a new project, Global Social Witnessing Facilitator Training. But we want to use this episode to explore a little bit what is Global Social Witnessing.

And maybe before we go into that, let’s look a little bit at our world today is being perceived by many people as stressful, as volatile, as uncertain, as difficult to predict and relate to. There are all kinds of larger, potentially big challenges that we are facing and I think that creates a lot of emotional and stress response in many people. It triggers our trauma layers. And I’m curious first to hear from you, if you introduce our listeners a bit more into how the pocket project is holding that at the moment, what our offers you feel the pocket projects offering that gives people that come to us like a space to deal with the current situation and also be part of its digestion development and so on.So maybe you can introduce us a little bit to the current work and then we look a bit deeper at Global Social Witnessing.

Kosha: Yeah, thank you Thomas. And it’s been such an honor working with your guidance in the Pocket Project. I also just want to take a moment to thank you deeply, you and Yehudit Sasportas, your wife, for founding the Pocket project and organization that in a way creates pockets of healing that can address pockets of trauma and bringing this stream of service to the world into the field of your work where many people who learn with you for a long time then support the work of the Pocket Project in various ways as practice group leaders now as Global Social Witnessing facilitators in the future as collective trauma facilitators in the international labs. So it’s really a place where people can bring everything they learn into service. And just that in itself is, I think, reassuring to so many people because what the world is making visible more than ever as our awareness is growing is that the repetition of trauma from the past is all around us and not just around us but also within us in our responses to what is happening.

And it feels as if with rising awareness, our eyes are opening, we can see it and the need for tools and consciousness that help us to bring responses to it that are responsible, that come from a place of ability is really growing rapidly in more and more people. So we offer as much as we are able skills training for how can I learn the skills that help me meet the world with more awakeness and more presence. And I think in a way that is the heart of what we do. We’ve seen in some of our Global Social Witnessing calls recently how the fear levels and the stress levels are rising. I think more and more of us are feeling overwhelmed also because some of what is happening in the world is so visible and so extremely painful and so close to our ancestral trauma layers that whole areas of our own foundations are shaking and we feel the pain more and more acutely as our sensitivity grows, as we start to heal, our nervous systems start to open.

So I think many of us are feeling that actually being fully present is so painful and that is the truth of it. It’s very painful. So having some skills and feeling that we have a community that we can come back to co-regulate with that we’re not alone in. This is I think the first layer of our giving our service. But then we have the international labs where we really go deeper into specific areas of collective trauma to address them to start the process of integrating collective trauma, which is incredible. And at the beginning it feels very heavy. When we did the first round of labs in 2020, it felt very, very thick. We already felt a change somehow in the labs that we’re running in 2024. The reports on those are just coming out in the next months. But it’s been amazing some of the experience.

So I really invite our listeners to come to our website, have a look at that. And then we do a lot of trauma relief work in the hot crisis area. So we especially have trauma relief projects in Ukraine. This is a project that has grown over three years now. We’ve offered more than 5,000 free one-on-one sessions, more than 250 free group sessions. And this year we’re coming in collaboration also with universities, different organizations in Ukraine to deliver a trauma-informed leadership and societal resilience training to 250 young Ukrainians to develop them into resilience facilitators who will be able to offer circles of support in their environments in these difficult circumstances. And we’re starting to develop the same in our Palestine and Jewish Israel trauma relief projects. And we’re also looking at other areas in the world Africa. So developing tools that allow us to multiply our trauma relief work in different areas.

And of course all of that sits within a larger framework of ongoing training, education and research. And that is probably the best time where we can also turn towards the Global Social Witnessing facilitator training, which we are developing at the moment, which is starting in June. And maybe Thomas, if it’s okay, I would love to turn this around and ask you a question about this because you developed Global Social Witnessing in I think it was 2016, 2017, so quite a long time ago. And I would love to ask you what this practice could mean in the world today and what it really means to move from being a bystander passively receiving the news of the world constantly in a way that is very overwhelming to becoming an active global social witness who brings presence and embodiment to a global field of witness.

Thomas: Yeah, beautiful. Yeah, that’s exactly like you framed it already. I felt, I dunno almost 10 years ago, that we need, besides an individual practice, like a contemplative practice, a meditation practice, self-regulation practices, there are many practices that we can practice basically for ourself or for our own inner regulation system. But I felt we are living in a time where we become, we are all global citizens through the technology we are using. And so we need a practice that in a way fits for the time. And at that time we called it five minutes a day that we will sit with some newsfeed or be a witness to something that happens. It can be in our community, close to our home or on the other side of the world. It doesn’t really matter because the more we understood the principles of collective trauma, it’s to see that where we are collectively hurt, we don’t even know what we don’t see or feel.

So we cannot be a full witness to certain events that are happening because we are not fully embodied by the nature of trauma, individual trauma, ancestral trauma and collective trauma. So we say we see things, we can read them the news headlines and on news outlets and on social media, but actually either we get very triggered in the sense of hyperreactive or we get triggered in the sense of indifference, distant or not connected, numb. And so yes, then I still read the headlines, but I don’t feel much because I’m already overwhelmed. And then I say, yeah, okay, I can deal with it, but actually we can’t deal with it when we are numb because our body says I’m not here. My emotional system and my physical system are not responsive to the event, which means we leave that event, whatever is that event in the world alone and which means we are actually not contemporary witnesses and that is subject of or is part of the repetition compulsion of those events.

So that’s why we said, okay, let’s develop this into a practice. And Global Social Witnessing is the practice that developed out of that initial practice where we said, okay, if groups of people practice that we can see. It’s not that we have to be able to feel and see everything, but we need to become aware how much of the world and events in our neighborhood, even in our house where we live in different apartments, there’s stuff happening that we don’t notice or in our communities or globally that actually many events are not being holistically witnessed.

So based on that, when we see the data that is numbed because of the history that we have been born into is the reverse, like the negative and positive when you do a casting, do you have a casting form and you have a sculpture and they fit perfectly together. The shadow, the collective shadow fits perfectly with all the events that we are not fully witnessing and becoming aware of that end of our conscious universe is actually the beginning of the expansion of our conscious universe. And this is a collective practice. And I think the Pocket Project is very dedicated to furthering or developing collective spaces where that practice can be more and more implemented. And because I think we need to come together as groups, of course we can practice this by ourselves too, but it’s very powerful to do this with groups. And maybe you can share a little bit about how Global Social Witnessing has been applied already. I mean there were many, many moments when it has been applied already. Maybe you can give us a few examples of what you have seen and how that felt or maybe what was the impact of those sessions that the poker project already had. And then we can talk a little bit more about the deeper facilitation.

Kosha: Yeah, beautiful. I think what you just said about becoming more aware about where the edges of our consciousness and where that stops. And in a way you spoke to it and you’ve spoken to it in many, many other contexts, that there’s this mirror image also of where our consciousness ends in terms of what we can see in the world out there and where our consciousness ends within our own embodiment and the edges where our nervous system stops feeling because we are touching traumatized material within us. And I think one of the beautiful aspects of this world is that I learn to know myself more fully and meet my inner edges as I get to know the world more fully and meet the edges of even our collective consciousness in the world.

There’s something so beautiful about that because it can only start happening and unfolding when we bring compassion to these edges and when the outer and the inner in a way comes very close through our presence and our ability to stay with, not to pathologize, but to bring caring to the places where our seeing stops. So there’s something incredibly powerful that we experience in this. And also when we speak about the stress and anxiety that people are meeting at the moment because we meet that where we, as you said, move into stress and numbness and hyperactivation and often when we feel very isolated in those places, and they’re in a way perpetuated from isolation. And when we, from that hyperactivation, move into arenas of polarization, it increases on a level the isolation.

So the breakdown of those levels of barriers by coming together and melting consciously doing our practice to melt more consciously and a collective body, a group vessel where we’re very aware that we’re not alone, but we’re addressing areas together and what each one person in a Global Social Witnessing call experiences is part of our collective experience and is fully acknowledged and has its place. It’s important, it might be unique, it might be in resonance with many others in the call, but it’s important. It’s a crucial ingredient of the world that we are facing. So yeah, cultivating awareness of the social body I think is a really important piece of the work. And the other thing that has developed a lot is how we meet the news because for sure it’s very powerful to read pieces of news and then be able to maybe even more focus on how does this land in my nervous system and really stay at that edge.

What we’ve really developed is meeting it through human nervous systems that come online with us so that we invite our Ukrainian friends to come online and share. I remember a call where we heard from young Ukrainians, this was back in 2022, young Ukrainian men when the war just broke out about their fear of what is going to happen in their future. Young fathers sharing about the fear of having to leave their children and go to the front lines meeting the first of their friends that come back winded from the front lines just meeting the purity of the fear in the masculine body. This is for instance, one moment that I have very awake in my memory and that has changed me forever in the way that I experienced soldiers. That it’s not just a soldier, it’s a young man who never wanted to go there in the first place.

And these experiences really change us forever in a way. And so that meeting the embodied nervous system of the other, and what we’ve heard from the other side is that it feels often like a miracle to be witnessed and held in a place where the news doesn’t really reflect the personal experience. Nothing out there helps people to feel deeply felt or I don’t want to say nothing. Of course there are other spaces like this, but Global Social Witnessing fulfills a unique role in allowing people to a space where they can feel deeply felt by a third side, as William Uri calls it, by a Global Social Witnessing body that is sensitive and turns its awareness and its eyes and its compassionates hearts towards.

Thomas: Yeah, that’s beautiful. It’s like I just want to underline something I think for us to understand because one defense mechanism, you said a very important sentence before one defense that we have as humans is to turn the world in 2D, it’s the soldier, but this soldier is like a poster. It’s a 2D version of that person that has a full complexity on its own. It’s a three or four dimensional living system. But as a defense against overwhelm, we often 2D the world. And we often don’t know that that’s what’s happening. That’s why we are saying it’s not that that’s right or wrong, that’s just a function of our psyche and our nervous system. But it’s important in the relationship. And you said it in the moment, you turned the soldier into this young man that has maybe young kids that is also afraid. That goes to the front lines, then the whole experience becomes embodied.

3D is embodied, we feel the situation through our body and four D will be, oh, there’s space time and there’s more awareness like conscious process of that embodied experience. But often when we get triggered in our trauma, we pop back into this 2D state and then we are first of all not related, so we are more isolated, but we don’t experience the world anymore the way it is. We see it as a poster. And from that 2D state, which I think is also the state that many people are in when they are fighting the other, whoever is the other is like a poster. And that reduces our capacity to be compassionate, that reduces our capacity to feel each other to co-regulate with each other. So if many people are in that state, even co-regulation in a system is difficult because just that we are in the same space doesn’t make the co-regulation.

It really needs attunement. And that’s also important for facilitators to notice because when many people in the room are in that to the state, the power of the co-regulation is very reduced. So we need to really be aware of that, not pathologize it and invite each other back into a space of sensing, which you said at the end also has a tremendous impact on the people that are going through trauma or through traumatic events and are being witnessed by many people, often hundreds of people that are holding a space for them to support them to come back into a more grounded embodied experience. And I think the function of Global Social Witnessing, and of course any collective trauma facilitation is as a partly that is also based on this pop from 2D to 3D. And in 3D we can regulate ourselves better, we can regulate with each other better and we can begin to digest the experience that we are in.

So I wanted to underline the principle behind what you just said because that’s often not in our collective awareness, these 2D states. And that I think social sensitivity is also to feel when I see somebody is in that state, and that’s also the state of othering because the others are polarizing and the social fragmentation is based on this 2D, I don’t feel you. That’s why I can talk about you in ways that I would never talk about you if I felt you. And so we see on social media a lot of that happening and that’s crucially important. So thank you for bringing this in. I dunno if you have any response to what I just

Kosha: Said. Yes, if that’s okay, I would just love to just continue this conversation because it feels so clear. Because there’s something also when we feel deeply, deeply hurt and what comes back as a 2D response in a way, it deepens the hurt

And there is no healing possible. There’s no reception possible when it’s like I meet a hard surface of numbers of facts for me when I’ve lost a child in any of the wars right now looking at the numbers and the news, there’s very little to alleviate my pain, my grief, the sense of deep injustice. It might actually fuel my wishful revenge and violence. But if there is a 3D response where I realize I think this is also very important for legal work that victims often don’t feel often, I think the deepest wish in a victim is to feel seen fully, to feel deeply felt in what it has meant to go through that what it means on a daily basis to have lost so much to be heartbroken. And if we can offer that to each other, that deep compassionate, yeah, it’s like you often use the word melting. It’s like melting into each other rather than meeting hard surfaces. That is where the healing movement comes from, the compassion movement, which has the power to transform. As long as we meet as Ds, there is no real change as possible and we stay within the repetition.

Thomas: Exactly. And maybe to add to this is it needs real maturity to be able to be present with someone that is in that state because often we are acting out, of course, our pain in that state and not to strengthen that, but really to be able to respond to that state in a different way needs a lot of maturity. That’s why inner integration work and trauma integration work to develop a mature self is so important because that’s the antidote. That’s the remedy for social fragmentation. And when we see social media is full of exactly those 2D responses and to hold a more mature or wiser or more compassionate stance or space for that so that we can, because when we pathologize it, then we do the same. We just cement it. And so to be able to bring that back into a different dialogue, as you said, and then also in I think massive social justice processes, I think that’s a very, very important quality. And so much can be evolved through collective witnessing and also warming collective spaces. And then we really feel very cold inside and alone and hurt. And when loss or loss of life or loss of valued or even loss of respect and dignity has happened.

Kosha: Yeah, yeah, exactly. And I think our work on developing the Global Social Witnessing facilitator training really builds also on all the work that we’ve been doing in the area of trauma-informed approaches and the background on ancestral healing work that you’ve been offering through your courses and the courses that have been offered just on developing trauma awareness and now kind of building on that to spread the skill because to be able to become compassionate to others that become 2D, I need to be compassionate to myself in the places where I become 2D, and that’s exactly the place where I lose my awareness. It’s extremely, and I think we all know that from our most intimate relationships, from our reactions to the world, where do I start pointing the finger and make my partner suddenly he shifts from being the most beloved person to being my enemy. How does that happen? How do I actually do that in my nervous system and then be compassionate with that? It does take a huge amount of maturity. So maybe you could share more about what are the qualities that we would be looking for in Global Social Witnessing facilitators? Who would we call to this training and what would be your vision for what networks of Global Social Witnessing facilitators could bring into the world at this time?

Thomas: Yeah, of course. I think it needs some of the personal maturity. I think we need to have done some work or feel naturally integrated to a certain extent because if I carry too much personal trauma and I expose myself to things that are happening in the world, I might just get retriggered all the time, which is not helpful obviously. And so it needs already a certain individual maturity and also the wish or longing to really participate and extend our awareness into the collective space. Not everybody wants that, but there are some people that feel like, wow, I’m super interested in that. And I think the combination between personal maturity calling to participate in our collective space in a creative way and find ways, new ways to contribute something to the collective space and also contribute something to exactly what’s happening right now in the world.

The solution is not later, the solution is now. And so how do we develop the solution now than waiting for the solution that is going to get better later, which I think is a trauma effect that we are waiting for the better tomorrow later. And feeling agency today, it’s the agency now of course having some experience in the work with people or also in the facilitation, at least in some form, feeling comfortable with groups. So yeah, I think these are the three pillars, the personal pillar, the collective calling, and some experience in that field because we are dealing, these are complex matters. At first it looks like, okay, we are dealing with events, but when we look a little bit deeper into our individual ancestral and collective psyche, then the processes that we are dealing with are pretty complex.

Kosha: And I think that there is something so beautiful that these spaces can offer at this time because building on everything you’ve said before also about this shift to the 2D level and how it inhibits true relatedness and therefore also our true agency to come forward. And we’re seeing these huge fields of stress and anxiety and fear, which lead to mental health overwhelm. I’m thinking here especially of young adults at the moment, universities, but every single one of us, also our school children that are just coming online in this world to start looking at the collective world and what is the world they’re meeting and especially how are they meeting this world? So to have adults, to have young adults, to have very mature adults who can open spaces like this in schools, in universities, in organizations within NGOs that are doing complex work in the world to really open witnessing spaces which are very well adjusted to the level of development of the participants, the level of capacity of the nervous systems that are present in those groups that are able to titrate well, what is the information that we bring also to heal what has happened?

You and I both also have partly a German background, the way that the Holocaust was worked on where children were sent to concentration camps with very little trauma-informed knowledge and in a way traumatized overexposed rather than led into it in a sensitive way. So it feels like Global Social Witnessing can bring healing impulses on many levels to open up human beings to their unique agency and response to world events rather than keep us caught in the community.

Thomas: Exactly. You mentioned a few lovely possibility examples where it can be applied and you’re also speaking to a phenomena that I want to underline or unpack a little bit. At least when I look at our society, we don’t have very good social rituals to digest the impact of certain events or certain phases. Covid for example, COVID was a good example. You have a global pandemic crisis that influenced so many economies. So many people lost relatives or their jobs or a lot happened in that time. And then basically from one day to another, let’s continue. And there, so hold on a moment, something happened and where are we saying, okay, let’s reflect a bit on what happened together. We have spaces where we can come together and digest. And the same as what you said about taking young, young people or teenagers like myself. And I think when I was 16 or so, I also, with my school, I went to see a concentration camp in Austria as part of our history lessons, but there wasn’t any digestion space.

And had I known then what I know now about trauma and its side effects, I would’ve said, wow, this is such an opportunity to help young people to digest what they experience because history is not just out there, it’s alive in all of us as after effects of trauma. And this could be such an amazing process to digest and develop as part of the healing. And so I think for this, there are lots of innovative possibilities for Global Social Witnessing to be applied in different spaces as because there is a lack of digestion of processes. And I think many people also experience that. It seems like we have less and less time to have the space to just digest and be with our daily experience because the world’s getting very fast. And so for that, the Global Social Witnessing is a collective practice for them. So is there anything else you want to share about Global Social Witnessing and the course, the upcoming course that is coming on soon?

Kosha: Yeah, maybe just to add one thing you always say, to underline one thing that you just said, because I feel very inspired about some conversations that I’ve had with Oleksandra Matviichuk from Ukraine, and it just opens up for me a completely new dimension of what Global Social Witnessing could offer in this world exactly in this area of digestion because she leads an amazing NGO in Ukraine that have received the peace Nobel Prize for their work of documenting human rights violations and violations of international law during the war in Ukraine. And they’ve collected over 80,000 instances so far. And in my interview with her for the World Women’s Summit, she stated, or I asked her, so what are you going to do with all this documentation? Which legal entity in the world is going to be able to address these? The criminal court of justice doesn’t have the capacity even to address this.

There is no court in the world that has the capacity to address all these cases. So it’s just an external. I also just heard, for instance, even here in the UK, current criminal cases in London often have a five year waiting list before they get a court to appearance. So both victim and perpetrator wait for years before it can even be addressed. So it’s just a very external example of this inability to digest. And I think that, so we’re just exploring, for instance with Oleksandra Matviichuk where the Global Social Witnessing might be a modality that can bring the healing to the or not the healing that is completely overdrawn, but that can bring recognition to the victims, a global witnessing space that feels like something has been seen where the documentation doesn’t just lie in folders in offices closed away, but is actually opened so that the light of our consciousness can reach these places even if the law and the legal institutions cannot.

Yeah, and with that, I guess the only other thing I would like to say today is that if this inspires any of the listeners here today, that I would really invite them to come to the website of the Pocket Project that we have ongoing Global Social Witnessing events each month, free events that anybody can to address different themes that are currently up in the world and also to explore really, do you feel a calling? Could you become a person in your environment, in your social fabric that can bring this all out? Because in a way, it’s a low hanging fruit of becoming a change agent in the social body of humanity at this moment. And the vision of having thousands and hundreds of thousands of teachers and people in the world really bringing this out in their environments to me is very touching and a deep, deep foundational ingredient of the collective healing movement.

Thomas: Yeah, that’s beautiful. As you said, also, professions like teachers or people in organizations, so even the healthcare system, different systems where we apply those in smaller groups, in larger groups and in all kinds of versions can be thought through or there are so many types of applications possible. But I want to also state again how that is again, part of enlivening the social body when we don’t see ourselves as separate entities, but it’s interdependent within the ecosystem that we are part of. So that means if we stay true to and don’t pathologize the process, but if we stay true to the process, that’s the way how to expand our awareness. And let’s see, the more we expand our social awareness, the part of our social body that is numb, that is turned off, that is overwhelmed, traumatized, hurt, reactive, will step by step, develop a new awareness so that current processes can be witnessed and seen and felt more for what they really are.

And that will reduce over time the repetition compulsion, because so many people say you see history repeats, history repeats individually and collectively. And I think these kind of practices, collective practices have the power to step, step-by-step, illuminate the collective nervous system more and more so that our collective awareness is growing and things like polarization as we see it right now, what is strong collective fragmentation will be eased and eventually turned into development because that’s the chance. It’s like we see this is a symptom, but if you work with the symptoms and with the root of the symptom, so then you can use this as a fuel for new development. So I think if that finds a kind of a more massive application in the world over time, over the years. So I think that’s part of the remedy that helps us to deal with the fragmentation and polarization that we see and help us to develop collective maturity, which I think is very needed in these times. So I see our time. Is there anything else, Kosha, that you think we didn’t speak about that you want to mention? Is there anything

Kosha: For me, there’s just a moment of gratitude, Thomas, for this medicine that you all initiated and the way you’re supporting its movement in the world, and to really acknowledge what a beautiful medicine it is to bring forth, I think, post-traumatic growth to really shift polarization towards agency and to soften our collective nervous system altogether. So I feel very touched by the possibility that you outlined just now. Yeah. So thank you very much for this conversation and I hugely look forward to deepening this practice also through the training and through the involvement of all those who become part of the practice. Yeah,

Thomas: Beautiful. Kosha, thank you. Thank you for your work and thank you for this deep conversation. I think everything that helps us to bring that more into our collective awareness, how much collective awareness is needed, I think is great. And so thank you very much. This was beautiful. And I hope the whole development with Global Social Witnessing goes really well. So thank you.

Kosha: Thank you, Thomas.