What it is to bear witness?

To bear witness is a potent act. To bear witness is an antidote to helplessness, it is a testimony to our interconnectedness, and it relieves us of complicity because we allow ourselves to actually see the suffering of the world everywhere. None of us are exempt from the trials of this life. We can’t say “we are all one” and then say “but only when it feels good”.

It is the least we can do for those experiencing tremendous suffering. It takes just a few moments a day, to actually see what is going on and allow our hearts to be opened. To not look away at times of such crisis is what bearing witness asks us to do: it asks us neither to fix nor to withdraw in fear. To bear witness reminds us that there but for grace, go any of us.

We may look at our screens many times a day and see the difficult times this planet is in, but do we see? Will we turn away or will we bear witness? Technology makes more of a demand on us to look, see, and acknowledge what’s so, but we do have still have the free will to turn toward or turn away.

Will we do the inner work required to meet the “barriers to love” within ourselves the poet Rumi speaks about, the barriers to seeing what’s so, with well resourced hearts? If the answer is yes, then our inner work becomes a form of activism: a form of activism that respects all beings.

The reason to do our inner work is to discover that we have so much more to offer the world than our pain, that our hearts are vast, and that we can bear witness to both the love and the suffering of this world.