A Taste of Global Social Witnessing, with Bayo Akomolafe
Release Date: 08/26/2025
Medical Realities in Gaza: From Resilience to Reclamation, with Dorotea Gucciardo
What is Collective Healing?
Hosted by Kosha Joubert Produced by J’aime Rothbard. When Dorotea Gucciardo returned to Rafah in southern Gaza in November last year, she could barely comprehend the scale of the devastation caused by the Israeli military. “I couldn't recognize a thing. Every building was gone. and not just gone but removed, rubble removed and new roads built. And I remember asking the U.N. representative on the bus that was bringing us in, where are we?...It was as if I was on a completely different continent.” In this powerful episode, Gucciardo, who is Director of Development at the Canadian medical...
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The Anatomy of an Emergent Mystic, with Valencie Exceus
What is Collective Healing?
Hosted by Matthew Green. Produced by J’aime Rothbard. What is a global acupuncture point? Join us as we explore how the mystical is born out of integrated lived experience. Valencie shares her journey into collective healing, tracing her story from birth and early life in Haiti, into her formative years after her family migrated to the United States. Valencie speaks of the imprint of cultural collisions that she faced as she came of age in a foreign land, offering a glimpse into the mountainous terrain that she carried within. She draws us into a parallel reality reflecting...
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Factory Farms: Wounds in the Web of Life, with Christine Gerike and Michael Grünwald
What is Collective Healing?
Hosted by Sonita Mbah. Produced by J’aime Rothbard. What happens when we expand the circle of collective healing to go beyond the purely human world? And how can we begin to address the enormous weight of animal pain caused by factory farms? In this episode, Christine Gerike and Michael Grünwald introduce a year-long Pocket Project they’re hosting from February 25 called . The Lab is one of more than 40 the Pocket Project is hosting in 2026 exploring collective and inter-generational trauma from a wide range of geographic, cultural and thematic perspectives. [Applications open .]...
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From Bystander to Witness: Transforming Global Media, with James Scurry
What is Collective Healing?
Hosted by Matthew Green. Produced by J’aime Rothbard. In Pocket Project calls, we come together in community to mindfully attune to global crises we’ve learned about through the news. But what happens when we make the people and systems delivering that news our ? What can we learn about both the media’s capacity for courageous truth-telling and its potential to amplify collective and inter-generational trauma loops from the past? This episode features James Scurry, a senior producer at Sky News, psychotherapist and co-convener of , an annual symposium convening senior...
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Tending Wounded Places with Furious Love, with Hāweatea Holly Bryson
What is Collective Healing?
Hosted by Matthew Green. Produced by J’aime Rothbard. For centuries, the march of modernity has not only unleashed devastation on Indigenous peoples and our natural environments, but also aimed to eradicate healing arts that have sustained communities and landscapes for millennia. Hāweatea Holly Bryson is an Indigenous psychotherapist, rite of passage guide, and Māori healing practitioner of the Ngāi Tahu and Waitaha tribes who is working to challenge the colonial power structures that still endure within Western psychotherapy, and restore the role of cosmologies that long predate modern...
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The Beautiful Wound, with Teddy Frank
What is Collective Healing?
Hosted by Kosha Joubert Produced by J’aime Rothbard. When Teddy Frank was diagnosed with breast cancer, her initial reaction was one of shock and denial. Then a more competent part of herself — a part she recognised from her ancestral lineage — took charge, seeking to gather as much information as possible about her treatment options. The visceral experience of existential terror came on much more slowly – and with it an initiation into what it means to feel at first helpless, and then embraced by a much bigger force. In this episode, Teddy speaks about the encounter with...
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The Prayers of Our Ancestors with Solea Anani
What is Collective Healing?
Hosted by Matthew Green. Produced by J'aime Rothbard. This episdode is a rebroadcast from July 1, 2025. Solea Anani sees the collective healing work taking place in the world today as the answer to prayers offered long ago by our ancestors. In this powerful dialogue, Solea opens a unique window into ancestral healing work – drawing on her roots as a member of the red-skinned Taino people of the Dominican Republic, who know the island as Quisqueya, or Mother of All Lands. Solea describes how the grief, fear and isolation she experienced as a child when her socialist parents moved...
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The Initiation of Parenthood as a Doorway to Ancestral Healing, with Thomas Hübl
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Hosted by Matthew Green. Produced by J’aime Rothbard. Do we need ‘parenting schools’? What does it mean to be initiated into the archetypal power of being a mother or father? And what responsibility do we hold to build the kind of healing communities that can nourish us in our daily lives – and allow us to nourish others in return? In this second part of a conversation first published on , co-founder builds on a question about the transmission of ancestral trauma from parent to child to set forth an expansive vision of the power of healing-oriented communities to support us through...
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Growing your Cup and Meeting Triggers with Compassion, with Thomas Hübl
What is Collective Healing?
Hosted by Matthew Green. Produced by J’aime Rothbard. Why do we beat ourselves up for getting pulled into the same old triggers? And how can we grow our capacity to observe our emotional reactions – rather than being hijacked by them? co-founder has devoted his life to helping as many people as possible to ‘grow our cup’ – his term for building a capacity to meet the trauma loops playing out inside of us with more awareness, spaciousness and compassion. In this episode, Thomas and Matthew go back to basics by exploring how we can tell when we’re experiencing trauma...
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Peace Activation in Israel-Palestine, with Eva Dalak
What is Collective Healing?
Hosted by Matthew Green Produced by J’aime Rothbard. It’s often said that peace starts within. But what does that mean in practice? is a Palestinian peace activator, international consultant, and women’s empowerment coach with decades of experience as a gender and conflict expert working across Africa, Latin America and Asia. In the immediate aftermath of the October 7, 2023 attacks on Israel, Eva founded , a global peace initiative that brings Israelis and Palestinians together to heal divides by bearing witness to each other’s pain. She continues to host this space every...
info_outlineHosted by Kosha Joubert. Produced by J'aime Rothbard.
Description: For Dr Bayo Akomolafe, Global Social Witnessing is a way to “be with each other in the fires, and not burn.”
As the Pocket Project prepares to launch Phase Two of the Global Social Witnessing Facilitator Training on September 3, 2025, this episode features a dialogue between Bayo and Kosha Joubert, the Pocket Project CEO, from Phase I of the course.
“For those of you who would like to show up for this sharing together, this is not a place of checking each others’ stories – it’s a way of holding with compassion the stories that are emerging,” Bayo tells participants.
“If we don’t start to cultivate the capacities to hold nuance in this way, then we are unfortunately part of the projects of war,” Bayo says. “This is an invitation to a stranger kind of paradigm. It’s about being there with each other in the fires, and not burning.”
This episode offers key insights into the principles of Global Social Witnessing — a potent tool for establishing a sense of presence, sensitivity and agency in relation to the pain and suffering transmitted through the news.
It also opens a window into what to expect from Phase Two of the facilitator training and self-study courses offered by the Pocket Project in this essential practice.
To find out more about regular Global Social Witnessing calls hosted by the Pocket Project, please click here.
Further Resources:
Phase Two of the Global Social Witnessing Facilitator Training
Self-Study Course: Holding Space for a World in Transition
Global Social Witnessing Calls
About Bayo Akomolafe: Rooted with the West African Yoruba people, Bayo Akomolafe is a widely celebrated international speaker, posthumanist thinker, poet, teacher, public intellectual, essayist and author of two books: These Wilds Beyond our Fences: Letters to My Daughter on Humanity’s Search for Home (North Atlantic Books) and We Will Tell our Own Story: The Lions of Africa Speak.
Bayo is also the Founder of The Emergence Network, a planet-wide initiative that seeks to convene communities in new ways in response to the critical, civilizational challenges we face as a species.
He is host of the postactivist course/festival/event, ‘We Will Dance with Mountains’ And currently lectures at Pacifica Graduate Institute, California, and sits on the Board of many organizations including Science and Non-Duality (US) and Ancient Futures (Australia).
0:00 Introduction to What is Global Social Witnessing
1:39 What is Global Social Witnessing?
5:34 Significance of Greeting Each Other
6:55 Curating an Intentional and Emergent Space
7:50 Story of Martin Luther King and Harry Belafonte
9:13 "Integrating into a burning house"
14:30 The Continuity of Wartime
18:05 Going Deeper, Beyond Consensus and Becoming Different
20:05 Being Habituated into Forgetfulness
22:40 Staying Open to the Cracks that Are Emerging
24:50 Invitation for Participants to Sit Together
25:50 Guidelines for Global Social Witnessing
29:30 As a "Ritual of Presence"
30:50 Participant refelctions
32:50 The Future Potentials of Global Social Witnessing
35:10 Phases of Global Social Witnessing Trainings & Invitations