applied
trauma-informed
online course 2024
online course 2024
Global Social Witnessing Facilitator Training
Phase 2
Global Social Witnessing Facilitation Skills
Holding Space for a World in Transition
Sept 3 - Oct 21, 2025
In times of uncertainty and systemic breakdown, the capacity to witness with presence, compassion and discernment becomes a vital human response. The Global Social Witnessing Facilitator Training offers a profound journey into embodied witnessing – cultivating our ability to attend to world events with inner spaciousness and relational depth. This training supports the emergence of a culture of ethical presence, where attention becomes a healing force and leadership is rooted in coherence.
Now entering Phase II, we invite those who completed the foundational journey to deepen their practice and step into the art of facilitation. How can we host spaces that honour pain without collapse, difference without division, and complexity without overwhelm? This next phase offers the skills, support, and refinement needed to become a guide in collective witnessing.
With Thomas Hübl, Jens Riese, Karen Simms, Robin Alfred, Manda Johnson, Robert Buxbaum and Kosha Joubert.
The training unfolds in three phases, each building on the last. Phase I laid the foundation and is a prerequisite for continuing. If you missed Phase I you can catch up via the self-study version, now available. We are now entering Phase II, a 6-module training available by application only.
A 6-module training led by expert facilitators – Thomas Hübl, Jens Riese, Karen Simms, Robin Alfred, Manda Johnson, Robert Buxbaum and Kosha Joubert – this phase deepens participants’ ability to facilitate GSW spaces, foster group coherence, and navigate conflict and emergence as catalysts for transformation.
20% reduction: Early Bird price available for applications received by August 3 (with registrations completed by August 10).
MODULE 1: Getting Started –Structure, Intention & Surrender in GSW Practice
With Manda Johnson & Robert Buxbaum
Wed, Sep 3 - 18:00-20:00 CEST
- Learn to establish clear and purposeful intentions for guiding a Global Social Witnessing process.
- Explore elements that create a safe, inclusive, and generative space for participants.
- Learn more about the practical and subtle aspects of how to select and present the topic to be witnessed.
MODULE 2: Preparing for Abundance – Resourcing the Field
With Jens Riese
Tue, Sep 9, 2025 - 18:00-20:00 CEST
- Learn to facilitate group processes that foster coherence, alignment, and mutual trust.
- Practice techniques for enhancing deep listening, relational presence, and empathetic resonance.
- Understand the importance of coherence in amplifying the group’s capacity to witness complex realities.
MODULE 3: Building Coherence – Strengthening the Field
With Karen Simms
Tue, Sep 23, 2025 - 18:00-20:00 CEST
- Learn practices to develop inner resources such as mindfulness, resilience, and compassion for sustaining presence.
- Explore the role of personal awareness and emotional regulation in the process of witnessing.
- Strengthen your capacity to relate to yourself and others with openness and nonjudgmental awareness.
MODULE 4: Meeting the Conflict – Relating to Polarization
With Thomas Hübl
Sun, Sep 28, 2025 - 19:00-21:00 CEST
- Develop skills to navigate conflict and polarization with openness, curiosity, and compassion.
- Learn to hold space for divergent perspectives and facilitate constructive dialogue.
- Explore conflict as an opportunity for growth and deeper understanding within the witnessing field.
MODULE 5: Working with Emergence & Co-Facilitation
With Robin Alfred
Wed, Oct 15, 2025 - 18:00-20:00 CEST
- Cultivate the capacity to embrace uncertainty, ambiguity, and complexity in facilitation processes.
- Learn to support emergent insights, solutions, and connections in the witnessing space.
- Reflect on the practice of co-facilitation.
MODULE 6: Applied Facilitation for GSW Group Practice
With Kosha Joubert
Tue, Oct 21, 2025 - 18:00-20:00 CEST
- Discover which elements can deepen witnessing and increase the impact of GSW events.
- Refine the facilitation of group sharings for a nuanced and expanded sense of relatedness to the witnessing topic.
- Finding clarity on how to move forward in your practice as a Global Social Witnessing Facilitator
20% reduction: Early Bird price available for applications received by August 3 (with registrations completed by August 10).
2 months
Course Duration
12 hours
Certification
Live & Recorded
Online Course
2 hours
Weekly Time Investment
Global Social Witnessing (GSW) is the human capacity to mindfully attend to global and societal events with embodied awareness. It asks us to stay present in the face of suffering, to host the world within our own nervous systems, and to move from reaction toward meaningful participation.
As a social intervention technology, GSW recognizes that true healing and transformation emerge when we bring care and consciousness to what has been fragmented—inside ourselves and in the collective. At the Pocket Project, we understand that systemic and historical trauma inhibit human development and block pathways to peace. GSW is our invitation to become aware citizens, attuned facilitators, and vessels of collective coherence.
Basic Principles of Global Social Witnessing
Self-Study Version
A 6-module training featuring esteemed teachers such as Bayo Akomolafe, Deb Dana, William Ury, Thomas Hübl, and Kosha Joubert.
Focuses on cultivating mindful attention, personal and collective presence, and the ability to hold space to help overcome polarization in the face of the unfolding realities of our world.
Global Social Witnessing Facilitation Skills
Sept 3 – October 21 2025
A 6-module training led by expert facilitators including Thomas Hübl, Jens Riese, Karen Simms, Robin Alfred, Manda Johnson, Robert Buxbaum and Kosha Joubert.
Equips participants with the skills to facilitate GSW spaces, build coherence within groups, and engage with conflict and emergence in transformative ways.
Global Social Witnessing Practice Phase
November 2025 – May 2026
Provides an extended period for practical integration while facilitating GSW spaces, ongoing learning, and guided support from experienced mentors, Manda Johnson, Robert Buxbaum and Kosha Joubert with Thomas Hübl.
Set a Clear Field – Learn how to create intentional, attuned, and ethically grounded containers for witnessing.
Resource the Group – Apply techniques to support emotional safety, nervous system regulation, and collective coherence.
Root Facilitation in Presence – Develop inner steadiness and clarity to hold others with compassion and discernment.
Host Polarization with Integrity – Facilitate dialogue across differences—holding space for tension, complexity, and emergence.
Deepen Systems Sensing – Strengthen your ability to sense, attune, and respond to subtle dynamics in group fields.
Navigate Emergence & Complexity – Engage creatively with what arises in real time—working with uncertainty, silence, and transformation.
Facilitators in Phase 2 are trained to hold nuanced group spaces that invite divergent perspectives. In doing so, we foster a deeper sense of belonging and understanding, where silence can speak, pain can be witnessed, and something new can arise. We explore how to meet the edges—without forcing consensus—so that integration, not further fragmentation, becomes possible. We learn how to navigate and soften polarization, allowing for the emergence of new pathways toward understanding and reconciliation.
In a time of multiple global breakdowns—from climate collapse to polarization, war, and systemic injustice—many of us are overwhelmed, disoriented, or shut down. Yet the world doesn’t need us to have all the answers—it needs us to be present, together.
This training cultivates facilitators who can hold space for the unknown, sense into systemic patterns, and host transformative witnessing processes. We need leaders who can host grief, truth, and emergence—without bypassing, collapsing, or dominating. This is the work of mature relational presence.
Thomas Hübl
Thomas Hübl, PhD, is a renowned teacher, author, and international facilitator who works within the complexity of systems and cultural change, integrating the core insights of the great wisdom traditions and mysticism with the discoveries of science. Since the early 2000s, he has led large-scale events and courses on the healing of collective trauma.
He is the author of Attuned: Practicing Interdependence to Heal Our Trauma—and Our World and Healing Collective Trauma: A Process for Integrating Our Intergenerational and Cultural Wounds.
He has served as an advisor and guest faculty for universities and organizations, as a coach for CEOs and organizational leaders, and is currently a visiting scholar at the Wyss Institute at Harvard University.
Karen Simms
Jens Riese
Jens Riese works as coach, trauma therapist, leadership trainer and social change facilitator.
As Senior Partner at McKinsey he co-founded and led the sustainability and economic development practices, and supported more than 20 countries and 50 NGOS and 100 companies in the transition towards a green economy.
He pioneered the use of participatory lab approaches to engage diverse stakeholders in social change, incl. in Ethiopia, Tanzania and Papua New Guinea.
Jens has been studying intensively with Thomas Hübl. He taught on the trauma-informed leadership course and co-led two collective trauma labs. Jens has a research background in biology and environmental management with a PhD from Cambridge University.
Manda Johnson
Manda Johnson is a somatic therapist, group process facilitator, artist, and core member of the Pocket Project’s Global Social Witnessing (GSW) team. She co-leads GSW practice groups and large-scale witnessing events, and co-created the course “Witnessing the World in Me and Me in the World.” Manda also co-founded World Witnessing, partnering with the Pocket Project to grow witnessing as an essential practice for the times we are living in..
Her background includes training in Somatic Movement Therapy, Hypnotherapy, psychodrama, and degrees in Dance and Chinese medicine. A student of Thomas Hübl since 2015, she graduated from his first Collective Trauma Training and now supports his programs and trainings.
Manda brings embodiment and mystical principles to leadership and group work, including past facilitation for Collective Intelligence NZ. Based in New Zealand, she shares life with a US partner, her children, step-son, and grandchildren. She is deeply passionate about nature and living the sacred through embodied presence.
Robin Alfred
Robin Alfred is an executive coach, facilitator, and organizational consultant with over 25 years of experience working globally with NGOs, top teams, SMEs and individuals.
A former criminal justice social work manager in London, Robin later co-founded Open Circle Consulting, bridging inner and outer transformation.
His trauma-informed, emergent approach integrates frameworks like Appreciative Inquiry, Process Work, and Archetypal at Work.
A Senior Student of Thomas Hübl, he supports international trainings on collective trauma and mysticism. Robin also serves on the Pocket Project’s Trauma Consultancy Team and teaches “Emergent Leadership,” a training in applied mysticism.
Robert Buxbaum
Robert Buxbaum is a coach and core member of the Pocket Project’s Global Social Witnessing (GSW) team. He has helped develop and refine GSW practice since it was introduced by Thomas Hübl in 2017.
Robert co-founded www.worldwitnessing.org and co-created and co-teaches “Witnessing the World in Me and Me in the World,” a six-session GSW training. He co-facilitates ongoing GSW Practice Groups and partners with the Pocket Project to make the practice widely available.
A long-time student of Thomas Hübl, Robert is a graduate of the Timeless Wisdom and Collective Trauma Facilitator Trainings. He co-led a Pocket Project International Lab in 2024, mentors for TWT Global 2025-26, and served on the TWT Global 2022-23 Assistant Team.
Kosha Joubert
Kosha Joubert serves as CEO of the Pocket Project. She holds an MSc in Organisational Development, is an international facilitator, author, coach and consultant, and has worked extensively in the fields of sustainable development, curriculum development and intercultural collaboration.
Kosha grew up in South Africa under Apartheid and has been dedicated to the healing of divides and collective trauma ever since.
She has been learning with Thomas for 15 years. She has served as a host and mentor for almost all of Thomas Hübl’s online courses, co-moderated two of the Celebrate Life Festivals and was a co-host of the 2019 and 2020 Online Summit on Collective Trauma.
Wanjîkū J. Kîarîe
Katherine Poco-Enders
These sessions are designed for individuals who identify as part of the Global Majority/BIPOC community. The Global Majority refers to people of African, East Asian, South Asian, Indigenous, Central and South American, and Arab descent, as well as those of dual- / multiracial heritage.
Session 1: 16 September, 2025
Session 2: 20 October, 2025
The training unfolds in three phases, each building on the last. Phase I has been completed, serving as the foundational prerequisite for continuing. We are now entering Phase II, which is open by application only.
Scholarships
We are offering 75%, 50% and 25% scholarships for the Global Social Witnessing Facilitator Training 2025 to participants from crisis areas, members of the Global Majority and indigenous leaders.
Scholarships
We are offering 75%, 50% and 25% scholarships for the Global Social Witnessing Facilitator Training 2025 to participants from crisis areas, people of colour from the ‘Global South’ and indigenous leaders.
