Bearing Witness: The not so simple skill of being present without judgment

For most of my professional career, I prided myself in operating with a sense of urgency, especially in my line of work developing products for people suffering with disease. With this same sense of urgency, I felt a calling towards hospice work and this past year I joined Capital Caring Health as a hospice volunteer. My first patient passed away within weeks of our initial encounter and three more have died in the past few months. The sense of urgency to do something for a person in their last days has made hospice work so challenging (and rewarding) for me, because what it teaches me is that sometimes doing something means doing nothing. 

Every week, I visit with patients and learn what it means to put aside the need to do something and simply be present. Often, sitting next to a dying person, I am forced to let go of my fix-it mindset and replace it with a curious mind, absent of judgment, and with an openness to support in whatever form is needed in the moment. This is what I’ve come to know as the act of Bearing Witness.

Through hospice work, I continually learn to practice Bearing Witness, a technique that along with my colleagues we are adapting into an ideation process that we call Bearing Witness Design (BWD). BWD emphasizes experiential empathy in order to develop highly impactful solutions that improve the human condition. Whereas by traditional Human-Centered-Design, the aim is to understand and solve for people’s needs, Bearing Witness Design incorporates a non-judgemental experiential dimension prior to the solving phase that enables us to begin to emotionally experience people’s needs.