About
Study after study — including an 80-year study at Harvard, the longest-running study of human happiness ever conducted — finds that it is the quality of our relationships that most shapes our overall sense of well-being and purpose.
Yet across the roughly 20,000 hours most of us spend in school, almost none of it goes toward how to actually build high-quality relationships. The word education comes from educe: to bring out or develop. Education should bring out and develop what we consider most important — which makes it a painful irony how few of those hours touch what matters most to our well-being:
At Sleepawake, we offer one path toward a deep-seated sense of well-being.
The nervous system doesn't update through understanding alone. It updates through embodied, relational experience that provides evidence your old predictions are no longer accurate.
When you explore a boundary in therapy, you gain valuable insight, but your nervous system processes it as a single, isolated event. When you practice setting boundaries with 20 different people, your nervous system begins to generalize that setting boundaries can be safe across relationships.
This is the missing piece between insight and integration.
At Sleepawake programs, you'll have the opportunity to practice the moves your nervous system learned weren't safe: setting boundaries, feeling anger without destroying relationships, asking for what you want without apologizing, staying present in conflict instead of shutting down, sharing your uncertainty instead of performing competence.
This embodied practice is how your nervous system can update — and how you can actually open previously unavailable possibilities for your life.
Our story
Jeff Lieberman and Cat Tweedie met at MIT. Both went on to conventionally successful careers — doctoral research, management consulting, large-scale art, a Discovery Channel show that got Jeff recognized on the street. Through all of it, something was missing. Neither had ever been taught how to have high-quality relationships, with themselves or anyone else, and neither could easily reach the deep well-being and sense of purpose that was supposedly the point of all the rest.
So they each went looking, for years: meditation lineages, somatic and emotional work, Core Energetics, and long apprenticeships with teachers. In 2021 they cofounded Sleepawake out of a heartfelt desire to make this work more accessible in the modern world, and a conviction about the role it has to play in this particular moment.
In 2022, with a team of facilitators, they ran the first-ever Sleepawake Camp: a 30-day program for people aged 18–25. A bootcamp, but one for the mind, heart, body, and spirit. Then they studied it with pre/post measures, four months out (results below).
After every program since, the curriculum and the format have changed. What all that iteration has landed on is what we run today: an ecosystem of complementary week-long retreats and shorter workshops. We are still running new experiments, and no two retreats are the same as we continue improving.
2021
Sleepawake founded
2022
First 30-day camp, ages 18–25
Today
Week-long retreats & workshops
Evidence
These figures come from the first-ever 30-day camp.
Pre/post self-report measures collected from campers before the program and again four months out; significance tested at p<0.05 or better.
See the full resultsWe aren't here to “fix” anything about you. We teach you skills, and provide you the space and community to practice what serves you.
Williamsburg, NYC
August 29 – September 4
A workshop every day for a week. Come to just a few or all of them — they make a complete arc from identity, emotional regulation, and vulnerability to desire, conflict, and creativity.
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Mendocino, CA
2027 dates coming soon
An 8-day immersive to rewire your unconscious patterns and open up to the life you know is possible.
Learn more
Mendocino, CA
2027 dates coming soon
Rewire your nervous system to access new, more vibrant possibilities for your life.
Learn moreWe hold trust, reverence, and curiosity for the emotions and sensations that come up. If what's coming up is resistance to a particular activity, we will always respect and support your "no". (Really! Sometimes people have come and said no to every single thing for the first many days of the retreat — we welcome and encourage this).
We cannot update our embodied beliefs about relationships outside of the context of real relationships. We are here to update our nervous system through real experiences in connection with other people. Alongside the curriculum, there will be chances for the unique experiments you want to run: what might happen if you showed up in a way you've never allowed yourself to be?
We know that support is necessary to open to the vulnerable depths where our nervous systems are actually on the edge of change. We invest heavily in building a sturdy environment where this deep work can be fully met and supported, and we learn by regulating with others the skill of reliably self-regulating.
You will get out of this experience what you put in. We'll offer many invitations, and it will always be up to you to step in and bring it.
We learn from the ways that others' nervous systems respond differently than ours do. These are pointers to places we can be more free. Everyone at Sleepawake programs — staff and participants — are inspirations to one another on the breadth of human experience.
Explore the programs, or help fund a scholarship so someone else can come.
