Meeting this Moment: An Evening with Cat Tweedie and Evan Sharp
Many of us want to use our gifts to meet the challenges of this moment in our society and world systems. Many of us also hold an implicit belief that engaging with these collective challenges is inherently draining, and the fear that showing up fully to meet these challenges means signing up for self-sacrifice or burnout.
Tonight we’ll offer an alternative orientation to step into: that meeting these challenges and meeting ourselves with grace and dignity are acts that feed one another. The more we are able to turn towards the places of numbness and suppression within ourselves, the more capacity we build to turn toward and welcome the places of numbness and suppression in others.
When we engage with these challenges from a ground of self-compassion and dignity rather than from a place of scarcity, we are increasingly able to meet the nuances and complexities of these challenges – including feeling how our own sense of burnout impacts our life and those around us. Rather than implicitly signing up for self denial when you engage with your desire to benefit the world, your dedication to meeting yourself deeply with softness and warmth is a crucial element of your wholehearted dedication to service.
This evening is a chance to feel this new way of relating to collective uncertainty and pain — not just understand it — and to be in a room with others who are carrying the same question.
Agenda
This workshop will be cofacilitated by friends and collaborators Cat Tweedie (cofounder & lead facilitator at Sleepawake) and Evan Sharp (cofounder of Pinterest).
5:20 doors open; event starts 5:40
Cat and Evan will speak to their own personal ways of navigating these questions, and how they are currently living this way of relating to themselves and challenges of the world
We’ll have an interactive conversation with Cat and Evan, taking audience questions to engage more deeply with the specific curiosities and desires of the room
We’ll close with breathwork, movement, and exercises to work directly with how the nervous system is holding these beliefs and how it can relate to them in new ways
Facilitators
Evan Sharp grew up the son of park rangers, studied history at the University of Chicago, and landed in architecture school at Columbia. A library that closed at 4pm forced students to hoard images on their laptops. That frustration became Pinterest. But even as the platform grew to touch hundreds of millions of lives, a deeper reckoning was taking shape in him: I came of age into my adolescent powers and was never really initiated into them. I feel like that's true as well for technology. We built these unbelievable superpowers. But the process of initiation — of being held by elders with wisdom and belonging — never happened.
He left. He spent years studying Tibetan Buddhist texts. He tended gardens. He cataloged hundreds of rituals from the world's wisdom traditions. And he arrived at a conviction that would have been unthinkable in Silicon Valley: The wisdom traditions we do have — they are the only ultimate technology on earth.
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, disappointment, 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.
This event is organized by Sleepawake
Sleepawake builds workshops and retreats that help people get better at the human side of life — not in theory, but in practice. From practicing boundaries to meeting grief in community, our programs use facilitated, activity-based exercises to open up new possibilities for your relationships, career, and life. Our facilitation team has decades of experience across group dynamics, body-based practices, inquiry work, and human development. Our facilitator bios are available here, or listen to a podcast episode with our lead facilitators.
More from Sleepawake
Sleepawake Immersive is our 8-day Immersive retreat: https://www.sleepawake.camp
More workshops by Sleepawake:
https://lu.ma/sleepawake-events