Somewhere between the mind’s need to solve and the heart’s need to feel, there’s a trembling space we rarely visit. It’s the place where tears rise without permission, where words fail and silence becomes sacred. It’s the place Bayo Akomolafe leads us to, not with answers, but with questions that rearrange the air.

Cultivating Our Inner Presence

In Cultivating Our Inner Presence, a Regenerative Masterclass offered as part of the Global Social Witnessing (GSW) Facilitators’ Training, participants are not given tools to control the world. Instead, we are invited into the uncertain, the liminal, the cracks, where control dissolves and something else begins.

Over the past weeks, the GSW Training has slowly been gathering shape, not like a structure rising from blueprints, but like a forest path discovered one step at a time. Rooted in presence and relation, this year’s facilitator cohort is exploring what it means to hold space not just for others, but for the world to move through us. We’re learning, together, that presence isn’t a skill you master, it’s a way you listen. And listening, we’re finding, often begins with forgetting the need to know.

Session One with Bayo: Where the War Is

In his first live session, Bayo invited us to look at the architecture of our responses. Not what we say, but what says us. “What if we are integrating into a burning house?” he asked. It was not rhetoric, it was medicine, laced with grief.

He spoke of war not as the thing that interrupts life, but the thing that shapes it. We live in systems rooted in separation, dominance, and a sense of urgency. Peace, in this context, is not just the absence of violence; it’s a radical disruption of the norm. Presence, then, is not soft. It’s radical. It’s the refusal to keep rushing. The courage to stay with what trembles. The willingness to feel what’s under the numbness. Breakout groups buzzed not with solutions, but with shared stillness, tears, nervous laughter, wordless nods. We weren’t gathering to learn what to do. We were learning how to be with.

Session Two with Bayo: On the Edge

This session was a deepening. Bayo speaks in spirals. He returns not to repeat, but to expand. This session pushed us further into the felt, into the unknown. He invited us to notice what exceeds us, what cracks our composure, what shows up in the body before it reaches the tongue. Something moved. And it’s still moving.

Outside the Masterclass, the GSW Facilitators’ training is unfolding like a living organism. Weekly practice groups have become small ecosystems of trust. Some facilitators-in-training are holding silence with tenderness. Others are experimenting with edges, naming discomfort, inviting rupture, staying.

The field is international, intergenerational, imperfect, and that’s precisely what makes it work. There is no single way to witness. Some bring poetry. Others bring tension. All bring themselves.

Witnessing as World Work

If you’ve ever wondered what it means to witness not just people, but processes, not just events, but the emotional residue they leave behind, this work might be for you.

And if you’re curious, but not quite ready to join a full training, the Pocket Project’s Resource Library offers a quiet place to begin. There you’ll find recordings from past Global Social Witnessing calls, where you can feel into the quality of attention this work cultivates. You may not always understand it with your mind. But something in you will recognize it.

The Crack is Still Open

As the GSW Facilitators’ Training continues, one thing becomes clear: we are not here to become experts. We are here to become more present.

Not to speak louder, but to listen deeper. Not to lead from certainty, but from humility. Not to escape the crack, but to tend it. Because, as Bayo reminds us, “The crack is not yours. It is the world’s.” And in the trembling presence of that crack, something new may yet take root.

✨ Feel into the practice:
📖 Explore the Pocket Project Resource Library
📅 Learn more about the GSW Facilitators’ Training Course