“Skilful witnessing creates an increasing sense of ever-present calm even when under multiple forms of stress. We find ourself increasingly “always ok”, nothing we can’t handle”
Dear Integral Meditators,
This week’s article looks at the relationship between witnessing practice & your fundamental sense of freedom. It’s a slighly edited verson of something I wrote in 2013, witnessing practice is something that just gets deeper & better over time. It was working well for me in 2013, but the experience I have now 14 years later is undoubtedly richer & better!
This week’s chakras & non-duality meditation sessions: Wednesday @ 7.30pm SG time, at 5.30pm, Saturday afternoon, & noon at Space2B. The subject will be ‘Third chakra – Confidence, power, union with mind’.
Heads up for the new series’ for September are out, The weekday & Saturday ‘ Meditations for transforming negativity & stress into energy, positivity & empowerment sessions.
In the spirit of liberation,
Toby
The Way to be ok, always – liberation and the Witness-Self
Cultivating the experience of the witness-self means cultivating your experience of self as a detached observer of your mind, body and life experiences, as opposed to having your sense of self totally caught up in them.
The witness or observer self has three main qualities:
- It witnesses our life with detached awareness
- It has no physical or mental form, it is merely formless awareness
- It is the ultimate subject of our awareness, the irreducible ‘I’
The path to liberation from pain and suffering has an enormous amount to do with the cultivation of the witness self.
To the extent that we are able to detach (not dissociate) ourself from our pain we can control it. If we can detach ourself from our pleasure we can engage it without clinging to it and thus avoid the experience of pain that happens when we are separated from that pleasure.
In meditation we cultivate and strengthen the witness self, but it is important to understand that the witness self is present with and available to us right now, whatever stage of development we are at. Hee are two short stories that illustrate this in a slightly funny way:
As a fifteen year old at school I had a friend the same age (let’s call him Tony) who went out with a seventeen year old girl. She left Tony for an older boy who was a mutual friend. Tony subsequently told me the story of how he had confronted the older boy, shouting and screaming at him in an emotional outburst. He then told me, looking slightly sheepish about how he had felt that there was a part of him watching the whole episode (including himself screaming and shouting) that was not upset at all, but felt detached and calm. That “watcher” that he had experienced amidst his emotional outburst was his witness self.
Later I had a female friend at collage who similarly discovered that her boyfriend had been having an affair with another woman whilst away at university. Again with a similar sense of sheepish confusion she described to me how she had shouted and screamed at her boyfriend whilst simultaneously feeling that a part of her was observing the situation with total calm and detachment. Like my friend Tony, my female friend had found herself aware of her witness self at the same time as she experienced, and was identified with, her emotional turmoil.
So, with meditation we cultivate awareness of this witness self, making it increasingly “front and center” of our daily experience, finding an increasing sense of ever-present calm even when under multiple forms of stress. We find ourself increasingly “always ok”, nothing we can’t handle.
Reading this some people may think that cultivating the witness self may make us cold, uncaring, emotionally mono-syllabic and so on. The reality is however that when practised in an integrated, balanced way, centring our awareness in the witness increases our capacity to enjoy deeper and more positively a wider range of emotion, pleasure, happiness and wellbeing. You could say that it liberates us to a whole new level of the human experience. We leap in and out of our roles with playful freedom.
A final point; being centred in the witness self also liberates us substantially from the fear of making mistakes, looking foolish, taking an appropriate chance. So, whilst finding an experience of liberation through the detachment of the witness, we concurrently find a new way of engaging in our world and human experience more freely and dynamically.
Related reading: Witnessing – Being That Which is Not
© Toby Ouvry 2026, you are welcome to use or share this article, but please cite Toby as the source and include reference to his website www.tobyouvry.com
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