Sleepawake Immersive

Update your nervous system for a life of flourishing
2026 Dates:
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February 5-12th - Applications due January 23rd
Near Santa Cruz, CA

July 19-26th - Early bird applications due March 13th
Near Mendocino, CA
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Can't make these dates?
41% of attendees reported Sleepawake Camp
the single most transformative experience of their lives

Unearth, investigate, and rewire the unconscious patterns holding you back from  a life of flourishing

Sleepawake Immersive is an 8-day retreat that helps you recognize the internal patterns that are quietly (or glaringly) constraining your life – and shift them so that your choices, relationships, and daily experience reflect the richest possibilities for your life. 

"Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate." – Jung

Our deepest hurts were often created in relationships -- so that's where we work with them

Rather than approaching personal growth through individual or 1:1 tools (such as therapy, meditation, or journaling), at Sleepawake Immersive, we investigate and update our unconscious patterns in the context of peer relationships and groups. Each day, the retreat cohort will explore a curated progression of six aspects of experience that we think are fundamental to wellbeing, all through interactive activities and experiments. We'll provide just enough intellectual context to know clearly what territory we are entering, and then focus on the embodied practices of directly updating our nervous systems.

Everything is opt-in, and our facilitation team will always respect your pacing and choice.

Emotional & Relational Intelligence

Know how to work with your emotions and trust them as deep intelligence; learn how to connect and communicate more deeply.

Mental Maps
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Learn how consciousness evolves through life, and how to work with stress patterns in your mind and body.

Embodiment

Awaken the power and pleasure that lays dormant in your body, and strengthen your interoception and somatic tracking.

Creative Expression

Sing and dance like everybody’s watching and enjoy your unique way of doing it.

Self-Awareness

Deepen your metacognition and expand the range of responses available to you under stress.

Physical Health

Learn how to feel joyous in your body.

Explore the Curriculum
"I broke through decades of shame and judgement and found a deep well of unconditional love and acceptance." 
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- Jason, 2024 Sleepawake Camper
Get the application

A day at Sleepawake Immersive

‍Though some individual days may differ, a typical day at Sleepawake Immersive will look like:

8:00am-9:00am: Breakfast
9:00am-9:30am: Small group check ins
9:30am-10:00am: Full group physical activity and opening circle
10:00am-12:30pm: Experiential emotional relational curriculum
12:30pm-1:30pm: Lunch break
1:30pm-5:30pm: Experiential emotional relational curriculum
5:30pm-7:00pm: Dinner break
7:00pm-7:15pm: Full group daily reflection
7:15pm-9:00pm: Creative expression & embodiment curriculum
9:00pm-10:00pm: Open time (often used for hanging out, group singalongs, journaling, or early bed)

How does Sleepawake work?

"Sleepawake gives you an opportunity to test your hypothesis about yourself and how you relate to the world in a safe and powerful container. It gave me the opportunity to conduct empirical analyses on various aspects of myself, such as how people perceive me, what they feel resistance to telling me, how they limit themselves around me. It also allowed me to uncover latent truths about myself, such as what I would do if I was completely unrestricted in my expression. You are under the instruction of highly competent facilitators who give you frameworks for conducting interpersonal and intrapersonal experiments so that you are updating your models for the world and yourself in ways that help you move out of illusion and live in a more grounded, embodied reality." - 2025 Sleepawake Immersive attendee

Feeling curious?

Book a short call with our facilitators to explore your questions

Schedule a Call

At Sleepawake Immersive, you might:

Uncover deep gratitude for your grief, anger, and fear

and learn to hear their loving wisdom about what you want and need

Untangle limiting beliefs and conditioned patterns

and begin asking for what you really want across all aspects of life

Find self love and groundedness in your boundaries

and learn to set loving boundaries in your most important relationships

Open your creative flow

and find out how many others run into the same fears and judgements as you

Sleepawake attendees reported

51%

increase in relationship satisfaction

41%

increase in willingness to set a boundary with someone in your life

100%

reduction from severe anxiety to moderate or mild

Our modalities

One of Sleepawake's unique strengths is standing outside any particular modality or institution. We draw from inspiring work of many lineages, but fundamentally care about what feels significant and powerful for you. At our programs, you'll be introduced to a wide range of modalities, exercises, and practices -- so you can find the ones that open doors for your process right now.

Our facilitation team draws on modalities and frameworks including: Byron Katie’s The Work, Peter Levine’s Somatic Experiencing, Alexander Lowen’s Bioenergetics, Integral Theory, Emotional Resolution, Doug Tataryn's Bio-Emotive Framework, and Tibetan Buddhist meditation practices. Our facilitators also bring a deep appreciation of the evolution of consciousness and the sources of human suffering and joy.

Together, our facilitation team brings

40+

years of meditation practice

2,000+

hours co-facilitating relational programs

100+

collective years of being friends with each other

Meet the facilitators

Cat and Jeff have been exploring and experimenting with group process together since 2018. They will be joined by Danjo and Sarah, who have been facilitators at Sleepawake since 2022 and 2023. The retreat will be capped at 32 attendees.  

Catherine Tweedie, PHD

Cat Tweedie, Ph.D., is a facilitator, meditation teacher, and an experimenter in support of collective wellness and joy. Cat has facilitated groups around leadership and thriving since 2008 including at Fortune 500 companies, non-profits, and public institutions.

Cat was an All-American pole vaulter in college, earned her PhD at MIT in Materials Science and Engineering, and traveled the world designing and facilitating transformational change projects from police force culture, waste management in India, to women's leadership for corporate executives.

At 37, a sudden physical breakdown lasting over a year challenged her fundamental layers of identity and had her grapple with being completely dependent on family and community. This experience was a turning point in learning to honor needs and the pain of uncertainty, fear, dissapointment, heartbreak with greater steadiness and compassion.

She is now a cofounder & lead facilitator at Sleepawake Camp. Her embodiment-focused teaching weaves multiple lineages and 25 years of meditation practice. Her primary teachers include Patrick Conner, Dustin DiPerna, energy practice with Lynda Caesara, Core Energetics with JoAnn Lavascio, and collective trauma studies with Thomas Huebl.

At home in Oregon, she lives with her husband and two children where she leads local women’s circles, creates metal sculpture art, and is amazed by life. Click to email cat@sleepawake.camp or listen to a podcast episode with her.

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Catherine Tweedie, PHD

Cofounder & Lead Facilitator, energetic teacher

Jeff Lieberman, MSx2

Jeff received four degrees at MIT (Physics, Math, Mech E and Robotics). He hosted “Time Warp” on the Discovery Channel about the wonders of science, and made large-scale art for 15 years.

By external measures, he was incredibly successful. But inside, something was missing. This disconnect led him to a deep depression in high school, and chronic pain for almost 20 years after that.

Jeff learned quantum mechanics before learning about his emotions. He marvels at the fact that we can measure the external universe to 10-decimal accuracy, but most of us don’t learn about our insides: our emotions, what leads to flourishing, how to take great care of ourselves. Years of personal exploration transformed him, leading to a determination to not have the road to joy be difficult for others to find.

He has spent the last 15 years training in meditation, personal development, and group dynamics for well being, facilitating high school students through a 3-week intensive and adults through an 18-month program. His teachers and spiritual influences include Anna-Lisa Adelberg, Dustin DiPerna, Daniel P. Brown, Joann Lovascio, Gian-Carlo Rota, and Nisargadatta. He speaks around the world on the topics of art, science, education, healing, and consciousness. See more of his work at bea.st.

Click to email jeff@sleepawake.camp

‍

Jeff Lieberman, MSx2

Cofounder & Lead Facilitator, emotional artist, physicist

Danjo Paluska

Dan was lucky enough to grow up in a small town in Michigan and run around outside getting dirty and scraped up. He has a deep love of hands-on problem solving and exploration that spans the range from robots to basket weaving. His heart craves service and connection in this human experience.

Dan got his fifteen minutes of fame from building robots in research labs at MIT(BS,MS,ABD,IBS) and in art spaces around the world. Despite this success, he frequently found himself using excessive intoxicants to let go. Slowly and awkwardly he began to explore various spiritual, therapeutic, and local craft traditions.

Currently Dan splits his time between Cambridge, where he is chief robotics officer at Pickle Robot Company, and Maine, where he hosts workshops in earthen oven building and spends a lot of quiet time celebrating the small and slow.

Dan loves playing music with others. Dan loves doing cartwheels and is happy to teach you how. He is always looking for more opportunities to dance with others and still be able to go to bed by 9…

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Danjo Paluska

Problem solver, connector, holder of absolute wonder

Sarah Cruse

Sarah Cruse has learned to come home to the moment.  As a young repressed and depressed adult, trying to find her way out of patterns of personal and familial trauma, she found poetry and discovered the healing power of embodied truth, authentic voice and creative expression.  Through spoken word, theater, singing, and sound exploration, she discovered an internal river of emergence.  It is a deep listening, a profound wellspring of self-expression, a pathway towards healing that changed her life forever.  Sarah now supports people and communities in activating their own inner creative pathways.  She is currently a practitioner of energetic medicine, sound healing and trauma clearing, the lead singer of her band Yaya’s Kitchen, and a channel for a wise, humorous and loving character named Granny.  Sarah believes in the brilliance of collaborative intelligence, and the generosity of the collective heart that guides us all.  

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Sarah Cruse

Musician, healer, and truth teller

Hear from Cat & Jeff

Jeff Lieberman and Cat Tweedie

Wondering if this is right for you?

Book a short call to explore your curiosities with our facilitators

Schedule a Call

Life at Sleepawake Camp

Sleepawake Camp was our first program, and is a 30 day version of Sleepawake Immersive.

What past attendees say

"Sleepawake was the most incredible gift I've ever received. Every day, I felt invited to embrace and love the full breadth and depth of my experience. With this invitation, I started a new relationship with many parts of myself."

"I have never felt so encouraged, loved, and held through all of my messiness and most raw version of self."

"I will be harvesting the seeds that were planted and watered at Sleepawake for years to come...If you have the opportunity to go to this camp.....it's like winning the lottery!"

"I’ve never experienced such safety to feel all of what I am feeling."

"I have never felt so free in my humanness and self expression. Any way that I wanted to show up was perfect and accepted. I was so deeply met, seen and held in my pain. I cannot rave and thank the facilitators enough for the gift that they gave. My life is only enhanced and more rich after attending camp."

"There are few shifts more profound than to go from being suspicious of your every thought and feeling to having a deep trust of yourself. I feel tremendously more confident about everything in my life... my relationships, my work, my emotions, etc. I've gone from anxiously waiting for whatever is around the corner to striving confidently into each new challenge."

Get the application

Investment

Scholarships

$300-$3,000

If the full tuition and room & board would create financial strain, we encourage you to fill out the financial aid section of the application. Once we understand your situation, we'll work with you to determine a need-based scholarship.
‍
‍About 50% of each cohort receives a scholarship.

Tuition

$2,500

Early bird discount of $250 available on applications submitted before the early bird deadline

Room & Board

$1,000 - $1,600

Room and board includes 8 days of housing and three meals per day catered by a professional kitchen staff, as well as our use of meeting spaces and exclusive access to acres of beautiful forest surrounding the venue. Options vary based on venue and are subject to availability.

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"After Sleepawake, I feel like a different person. I’m so much more confident and powerful. I feel capable of taking care of myself."
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- 2023 Sleepawake Camper

Frequently Expressed Curiosities

How can I request a payment plan or financial aid?

The application process includes some questions about your financial situation and the support you would need to be able to attend. If you request financial aid in your application, we'll include an offer in your acceptance letter.

What's the application process like?

We make sure each person who comes to the program is a good fit and is ready to receive the gifts this program has to offer. To do this, we have an application with a few short answer questions, followed by a 30 minute interview. The process takes under an hour, spread over 1-3 weeks.

How do you determine how much Sleepawake Immersive costs?

We work backwards to set the tuition price to reflect what we're investing to run the retreat. That investment includes the venue rental, food, modest facilitator wages, a small kitchen staff, operational costs for the organization, and a very small marketing budget (<5%).
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When will Sleepawake Immersive take place?

Sleepawake Immersive will be from February 5 - 12th near Santa Cruz, CA. The only other regular Sleepawake Immersive of 2026 will be July 19-26th near Mendocino, CA.

Is Sleepawake Immersive suitable for attendees with histories of trauma?

We rely on the intelligence of participants with histories of trauma to introspect and decide for themselves whether attending this program is supportive of wherever they are in their healing journey, and take full responsibility for their decisions to attend and participate throughout the program. There's no one-size-fits-all answer to whether or not Sleepawake Immersive is supportive to someone with a history of trauma. If you'd like to explore this question further, our facilitators are available to have a conversation about your specific circumstances and whether this program might be a good fit for your specific journey.

Is there internet access at Sleepawake Immersive?

We find it is deeply supportive to attendees' growth to stay present and off of technology while in attendance at our programs. Sleepawake Immersive is an off-grid retreat, meaning attendees do not use their phones or the internet once the program starts. Alumni often reflect that staying off-grid is a rewarding experiment for them and meaningfully impacted their experience of the program.

For specific obligations or emergency situations, internet and phone access is easily available. If you anticipate needing internet or phone access while at Sleepawake Immersive, let us know in a discovery call or your interview.

What modality does Sleepawake use?

Sleepawake doesn't use a specific program, modality, or theory of practice. Instead, it uses many! The combined experience of our team allows us to embrace all sorts of practices and use them in tandem.

Some of our team's experience includes Byron Katie’s The Work, Peter Levine’s Somatic Experiencing, Alexander Lowen’s Bioenergetics, Integral Theory, as well as a deep appreciation of the evolution of consciousness and the sources of human suffering and joy.

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Made with love and gratitude by past campers.