To step into a Witness Community is to step into a different way of being with yourself and with others. Most communities rely on hierarchy — someone knows, someone doesn’t; some are better, others are not.
In contrast, a Witness Community is not about performance, answers, or authority-over. A Witness Community is about presence — and about the courage to listen with your whole being, to honor the truth of another as you honor your own, and to trust that personal transformation unfolds in its own rhythm.
Witnessing is not passive. Witnessing is not withdrawal or indifference.
Witnessing is active presence without control — a way of learning and becoming together that honors diversity, nurtures trust, and resists the impulse to fix or dominate. In this community, you are asked to bring yourself fully, to hold others respectfully, and to let go of the demand for certainty.
A Witness Community is not built on answers, but on inquiry. Not on hierarchy, but on resonance. Not on fixing, but on honoring what is unfolding. This foundation shapes both the agreements you enter and the values you live when you join.
What does it mean to Witness?
To witness is to be fully present with yourself or another without needing to change, correct, solve, or improve what is unfolding for either person.
As a Witness, you are actively present, observing, and listening, without control or opinion, for both yourself and for others.
Witnessing is an act of listening with your whole being — body, mind, heart, and soul — while allowing space for truth to arise on its own terms and in its own rhythm.
Witnessing is neither passive nor avoidance.
Witnessing is active presence without control.
To witness someone means:
- You listen without trying to shape, interpret, or explain their experience.
- You reflect without inserting your own agenda
- You trust that what they’re discovering is worthy — even if it’s unfinished, uncertain, uncomfortable, or makes no sense to you.
To witness yourself means:
- You show up honestly, without performance.
- You allow your own truth to emerge in the moment.
- You resist the urge to immediately explain, justify, or package what’s raw, uncertain, or unexpected.
What is a Witness Community?
In a Witness Community, each participant joins the community to learn in common unity as a witness for self and other.
A Witness Community is a collaborative learning environment where no one is above, beneath, or outside another.
Through a shared vision of inquiry, we hold space for learning to happen within each and between each — in the shared breath, the open pause, and the honest reflection.
There are no experts, no spectators, and no right answers to compete over.
Rather the community motion is a walk-pause-walk rhythm with presence, inquiry, witnessing, integration, and becoming as focus, experience, and path. To walk is to experience life as it is in the moment. To pause is to allow What Is in the moment without judgment, explanation or immediate resolution.
The right or perfect answer is set aside in favor of learning peace with the unknown, the uncertain, and the unexpected. This allows personal deepening within the pause and breath within the walk without needing to solve, fix, or explain.
Authority is not denied. Instead, authority is transformed from external dominance to acknowledgement of the Power Within of each community member. Thus each person is their own authority of their personal truth.
Personal truth lives in connection with community agreements. The agreements are the terms of participation within the Witness Community. The agreements form the context of the relationship of the individual with the group and within the group. The agreements protect the community so everyone can do their deepest work without harm.
Each participant is the authority of their own truth. Within a shared witness community, personal truth lives alongside the truths of others and within the structure holding the work.
Without a hierarchy, witness community thrives with the concept of leadership as stewardship. In this perspective, the leader does not have authority over. Instead the leader has both charge and responsibility for tending to the energetic coherence of the community and developing the content of community inquiry.
Leadership as Stewardship
In a Witness Community, leadership is not about hierarchy or control. It is about stewardship — tending to the integrity, honoring the agreements, and guiding the community with presence and care. A steward leads by witnessing, not by dominating, holding the center so that each member may bring forward their truth. To do this, the leader:
- Honors, respects, and witnesses the community
- Leads within the dynamics of Power With and Power Within
- Tenders the energetic coherence of the community
- Holds the center of the community’s sacred space.
- Guides without controlling
- Honors all voices
- Holds boundaries and agreements for both the community and the individual
- Brings topics for learning, discovery, and release
- Establishes and maintains shared values
- Acknowledges when there is resistance or denial by either the group or a participant
- Cultivates comfort with uncertainty, the unknown, and the unexpected.
- Maintains confidentiality of the community and the individual
Within the Akashic Records Intensive, Cheryl Marlene is the community leader. As described, Cheryl serves as steward of the Intensive — managing both content and process, honoring boundaries, and guiding without control. Members agree to allow personal redirection from Cheryl when needed to preserve the integrity of the Intensive.
Stepping Into Witness Community
When you choose to join a Witness Community, you enter into shared agreements that honor both your truth and the truths of others. These commitments are not restrictions, but protections — creating the conditions where deep work can unfold with safety, reverence, and respect. They are how you declare readiness to learn, to witness, and to grow together in trust. Community agreements include:
- Be present and engaged from center
- Listen with whole being
- Speak from personal experience
- Ask questions to open space and possibility
- Allow uncertainty and discomfort without rushing to resolution
- Trust the rhythm of personal truth, even when unfamiliar
- Hold shared stories with care, reverence, and confidentiality
- Take responsibility for personal energy, presence, and participation
- Resist the urge to fix, advise, or rescue others
- Stay connected at the edge, where transformation stirs and the unknown beckons
- Acknowledge others grow at their own pace, without comparison or impatience
- Remain open to change through resonance with the unexpected
Why This Matters
Most learning communities are built on hierarchy. Someone knows, someone doesn’t. There’s a right answer, there’s a wrong answer.
Additionally, hierarchy breeds a disempowered sense of responsibility and the idea that one joins a community to elevate by always producing the right answer. This supports the outdated habit that telling others when they are wrong and offering to fix them is appropriate community behavior.
In a witness community, everyone is whole, worthy, and complete. No fixing needed. No reparation of brokenness. No need to offer solutions to others.
To join a witness community, hierarchy is unlearned. Within the boundaries of the witness, the understanding is responsibility is for self. And that no one — including self — needs fixing.
As witness, this means don’t offer advice, opinion, or judgment. Don’t offer help. Don’t presume to know better about someone than they know themselves.
You wait to be asked and respond to direct questions. Pay attention to your own process and your own questions. In group, you reflect what you are experiencing in real time.
When the going gets tough, ask for input, for assistance, for clarity. And then process for self — maybe out loud to the group, maybe within self-awareness.
Ultimately, witnessing is how truth finds room to breathe. This is how you learn to trust your own voice and your own inner awareness of personal truth. And it is how we honor the voices of everyone.
By claiming this perspective of community, the direction of the witness allows the community to form as a consciously-held, multidimensional, supportive collaboration with experience and learning at the threshold of the unknown.
Witness Community Core Values
At the heart of a Witness Community are the values that guide how you show up, how you relate to others, and how you deepen into truth. These are not rules for compliance, but invitations into a way of being that honors presence, trust, and transformation. They are the ground from which the community draws strength and the rhythm that makes growth possible.
1. The Power of Presence
Come as you are, engaged from within, present to yourself and to others. Presence is truth. Presence is you saying you are ready to go deep, explore truth, and step into your becoming.
2. Witnessing and Listening
Witness without judgment. Listen with your whole being — body, heart, mind, and soul. A witness honors another’s truth without needing to guide, correct, or rescue, allowing what is expressed to be fully seen, felt, and heard.
3. Power With and Power Within
Honor the authority of truth as it arises within all. True leadership emerges as coherence and stewardship, never control. Strength comes when each person stands in their own knowing and insight is shared in mutual respect.
4. Diversity of Truth
Recognize there is no single right answer. Each truth adds depth, and strength comes from the interplay of many perspectives. Together, the tapestry of understanding becomes richer than any solitary thread.
5. Compassion and Non-Judgment
Remember that everyone is in process. Choose compassion, especially when others act from fear. Release judgment in favor of curiosity, flexibility, and generosity.
6. Inquiry Over Persuasion
Ask questions that open to possibility rather than persuade or debate. Treat inquiry as an act of reverence — an invitation into deeper truth, a way of exploring rather than correcting.
7. Trust in Timing
Trust the rhythm and timing of insight and integration. Growth comes not from pressure but from reflection, resonance, and readiness.
8. Welcome Silence, Discomfort, and Resistance
Silence, pause, and discomfort are part of the process. Resistance is not failure but a doorway — a threshold to deeper awareness, shift, and becoming.
9. Hold Stories with Reverence
Receive the stories of others with care, confidentiality, and reverence. Each story is a gift — not authority, not comparison — but truth offered into the circle of becoming.
10. Share Responsibility for Coherence
A Witness Community is a living cauldron tended by all. While leadership stewards the energy, every member shares responsibility for maintaining presence, integrity and inquiry.
11. Integration Requires Rhythm
Learning is not just ingesting content or completing assignment. Learning is integration which fuels becoming. Growth unfolds in rhythm — walk and pause, expression and reflection. Honor the rhythm that lets becoming settle into lived experience.
12. Safety in Presence
Safety is not comfort at all costs, but the ground that makes vulnerability and risk possible. Presence holds the sacred space where you may bring forward the edge of who you are.
13. Responsibility for Self
Attend to your own energy and presence. Stay connected at the edge where transformation stirs. Use what arises within you as an invitation to your own becoming, without projecting unresolved work onto others or feeling the push to fix another.
14. Accept Guidance and Agreements
Accept redirection when needed to maintain coherence. Honor the commitments that make this community possible — including your agreements with the Akashic Records, with Cheryl, and with yourself. Communicate directly with Cheryl when challenge or resistance arises, so that truth may meet truth.
Final Words
To join a Witness Community is to commit to more than learning a skill or gaining knowledge. It is to enter a living exchange where truth is honored, difference is welcomed, and presence is the ground of transformation. It is to stand at the threshold of the unknown and discover that you do not need to fix, prove, or perform — you need only to be present, to listen, to witness.
This way of community is rare in a world that prizes answers and hierarchy. Yet it is here, in the rhythm of walk and pause, in the practice of Power With and Power Within, that new possibilities emerge. Here you learn to trust your voice, to honor the truths of others, and to live inside the sacred balance of freedom and responsibility.
A Witness Community is not a container you enter; it is a shared act of becoming. By claiming your place within it, you join in creating a space where transformation is possible — not through control, but through presence, resonance, and reverence.
Witness Community Resources:
Alongside these ideas are resources — writings and reflections that open new doorways of understanding. They offer you deeper language for what it means to witness, to live truth in community, and to resist the pull of hierarchy and control. Both the values and the resources exist to support you in walking the path of becoming within a Witness Community.
Cheryl Marlene
Cheryl Marlene
Cheryl Marlene
Cheryl Marlene
Cheryl Marlene
Cheryl Marlene
Witness Community is the heart of the Akashic Records Intensive.
To explore more, download the free Akashic Records Intensive Agreements guide — your introduction to what it means to witness, to live truth in community, and to step into the path of becoming.
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