Welcome to Turbo Scorpio season! If you've been caught in old emotional narratives, rehearsing arguments, or feeling the weight of what's happening in the world, this week's Our Waking Dream is for you.

With Mercury stationing retrograde in Scorpio, Venus retrograde moving back into Libra following her cazimi, and the Taurus Full Moon illuminating the Scorpio–Taurus axis, we're exploring the relationship between our emotional underworld, our patterns of relating, and our capacity to transform what we're carrying.

Scorpio invites us into the shadowy material of our lives: the emotions, projections, desires, and stories that can hold enormous power over our experience. Venus and Mercury retrograde bring opportunities to revisit how we perceive, communicate, love, and exchange energy. And Taurus reminds us that transformation doesn't have to remain an intellectual or spiritual exercise. We have bodies. We're made of Earth. We can move.

This week I'm teaching two experiments in emotional alchemy: Stirring the Cauldron, using movement, breath, and imagination to transform emotional charge, and Earth Alchemy, bringing our dilemmas into contact with the Earth and practicing releasing what we think we know.

We'll also explore what these practices might make possible in our relationships, leadership, workplaces, and communities. Because when we learn to work with our emotional experience, we can bring something different into the situations we're trying to change.

I'm Coco Swanson, a leadership mentor and spiritual strategist working across somatic healing, energy medicine, emotional intelligence, and culture change.

https://cocoswanson.com

What if conflict could become one of our greatest tools for transformation? When someone gets under our skin, we can spend an extraordinary amount of energy analyzing what they did, defending our position, and replaying the argument. But the reaction itself can hold the evolutionary material.

This week on Our Waking Dream, I’m sharing a practice for working with emotional triggers through sensation, breath, sound, movement, and compassionate inquiry.

Rather than simply managing conflict, what if we learned to use it? To discover something about ourselves, interrupt familiar patterns, and create new possibilities in our relationships? Sometimes we find our way closer to each other. Sometimes we discover how to part with greater understanding.

Have a problem you’re wrestling with? Bring it to my free Solutions Lab. We explore life’s dilemmas together and experiment with new ways of meeting them. I also work privately with individuals and leaders and offer an ongoing Leadership Studio.

Come explore: cocoswanson.com

This week’s astrology: Pluto direct in Aquarius, Venus retrograde in Scorpio square Pluto, and Mercury preparing to retrograde.

Change is afloat. Personally, professionally and collectively.

So where is your energy going—and how can you use it to become more empowered during times of change?

This week on Our Waking Dream, we work with four human capacities: embodiment, emotional intelligence, heart wisdom and our ability to dream and imagine. We also look at the current retrograde season—Pluto, Neptune, Saturn, Uranus and Venus—and what is being revisited, reworked and prepared for change.

We finish with a practice for working with a problem through the body and sound, and four journal inquiries:

1. Where is my energy being drained right now? What is draining it, and what is feeding it?

2. What is being asked in my life to be revisited, reworked or reviewed?

3. What am I carrying emotionally, or in my heart, that I would rather not direct my future?

4. What do I want to use my energy for?

I’ve spent nearly thirty years exploring how we develop the human capacities that shape how we live, relate, lead and create.

Leadership Studio, Solutions Lab + working with me: cocoswanson.com