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

Venus is retrograde through Scorpio and Libra from October 3 through November 13, and these forty days give us a lot to work with.

Scorpio takes us into the underbelly: shadow, projection, jealousy, resentment, power and intimacy. Then Venus moves back into Libra, where we look at relationship, reciprocity, harmony and where we’ve moved out of balance.

This week we work with three practices: breathe into the charge, find your shadow, and create space before acting.

If you want to take it into your journal:

1. Who or what am I triggered by right now?
2. What specifically about them bothers me?
3. What am I feeling—anger, fear, jealousy, hurt, disgust, resentment?
4. Where do I feel it in my body?
5. Do I need more space? What would give me some breathing room?
6. What transformative practice could I use to move the emotional energy?

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

My work brings together embodiment, healing, spirituality, leadership, business and culture—and turns what we learn into something we can live.

cocoswanson.com

We spend extraordinary amounts of time, money and attention developing our external technology. What about our absolutely incredible internal technology?

Our ability to be embodied, to recognize and work with our emotions, to access our hearts, to imagine and dream, to be in relationship, and to create together can easily be overlooked in our culture.

These are capacities we can practice and strengthen.

From 2025 through 2027, all of the outer planets are changing signs. Pluto in Aquarius brings questions of technology, power, networks and how we participate in the collective. Uranus in Gemini disrupts and reinvents how we communicate, learn and exchange information. Saturn and Neptune in Aries bring us into questions of agency—what we imagine, what we initiate and what we bring into form.

This week on Our Waking Dream, we experiment with some of this together through the body, emotions, heart, imagination and our relationships with one another. I’ve spent nearly thirty years bringing together healing, embodiment, leadership, spirituality, business and culture, exploring how what we learn becomes part of how we live—through the bumps and bruises, the changes we choose and the ones we don’t, how we love and lead, and what we imagine and create together.

cocoswanson.com

Can You Become More Yourself and Stay in Relationship? Who are you when you feel most like yourself? And what happens to your relationships as you become more of that person?

This week we’re working with identity, relationship, and the versions of ourselves we’ve become along the way. Some of those versions may have helped us belong, stay connected, feel safe, or simply get through a particular time in our lives. We don’t have to make them wrong in order to let them change.

The Aries Full Moon brings us into a beautiful tension between I AM and WE ARE. How do I know what I want when I’m feeling everybody and everything? How do I stay connected to myself without disconnecting from you? What happens to us if I change?

We’ll work with the body, breath, sticks and stones, and the Moon in a practice for meeting what feels outdated without rejecting it. What if an old version of you doesn’t need to be pushed away? Maybe it needs to be seen, celebrated, and given permission to change.

Journal Inquiries to explore

• Who are you when you feel most like yourself?

• Where do you feel least like yourself? What changes

• What versions of you feel outdated or ready to be released?

• What do you want when you’re not accounting for what everybody else wants?

• How might becoming more yourself change the way you relate?

Maybe becoming more ourselves sometimes requires becoming less certain about who we’ve been.

"I’m open to change. I’m open to being changed."

Hi, I’m Coco Swanson. I’m a leadership mentor and spiritual strategist. For nearly 30 years, I’ve worked with the body, emotions, relationships, energy, meditation, astrology, leadership, and the many strange and beautiful ways we humans grow. Our Waking Dream is where we get to explore it all together.

What happens when something in a relationship activates you—and your mind immediately starts trying to figure out what happened, who was right, and what it all means? Our relationships can bring us face-to-face with parts of ourselves we might not otherwise see.

Welcome to shadow work. :)

This week on Our Waking Dream, spiritual strategist and leadership mentor Coco Swanson explores a different way of meeting what gets activated in us: through sound.

Not singing. Not performing. Not trying to sound pretty. Hum. Sigh. Tone. Growl. Make a weird noise. Notice what happens. Sound creates vibration, giving us a way to shift what’s happening inside our bodies without always having to think our way through it.

We have some strong astrological aspects behind this exploration. Mercury in Libra moves through a Grand Air Trine with Uranus in Gemini and Pluto in Aquarius, while Venus in Scorpio approaches her first of three squares to Pluto—a deeper cycle around relationships, intimacy, desire, power, projection and transformation.

Not everything that activates us is ours. Sometimes we need a boundary. Sometimes something genuinely isn’t okay. But sometimes another person touches something old—a wound, fear, family pattern, belief, or part of ourselves we haven’t completely met yet.

Journal inquiries:

• What am I really activated by right now?

• What about it feels most enraging, annoying, frustrating or sad?

• What might this be showing me? Where do I feel it in my body?

• What do I need—space, support, safety, a boundary?

• What could help me move this energy rather than immediately think my way through it?

Our relationships can be some of our greatest teachers. So can our bodies. So can the parts of ourselves we’d rather not look at.

And sometimes the way in is making a strange noise in your kitchen. :)

Want somewhere to practice this work? Join Coco inside Leadership Studio, an ongoing space for practicing the capacities we use to live, relate, create and lead.

Want to try the work first? Bring what you’re navigating to Solutions Lab, Coco’s free live gathering every other Sunday.

Want to go deeper? Book a private Clarity Session, explore longer-term mentorship, or bring Coco into your team or organization.

Explore everything at cocoswanson.com

#ShadowWork #Astrology2026 #EmotionalTriggers #Relationships #OurWakingDream

Where are you spending your attention—and what are you feeding with it? We scroll without meaning to. Pick up the phone without remembering why. Take in enormous amounts of information and somehow end up feeling less connected to the life right in front of us.

Our devices are extraordinarily good at capturing attention. Life often asks for it much more quietly. A notification knows how to interrupt us. A relationship often doesn’t. A body can whisper for months. A garden doesn’t send a push notification. Neither does a dream.

With the Virgo New Moon arriving September 10/11, this episode of Our Waking Dream explores attention as a resource, listening as a practice of care, and what changes when we begin noticing what our lives are quietly asking for.

Spiritual strategist and leadership mentor Coco Swanson explores three ways of listening: to the body, to where our attention is going, and to another human being without deciding in advance what they need.

If something in your own life has been asking for attention, you can work privately with Coco in a Clarity Session. Or, if you’re looking for an ongoing place to practice living, relating, creating and leading with more awareness and choice, join Leadership Studio. Explore ways to work with Coco: cocoswanson.com

Journal inquiries from this week:

• How much of my attention is going into a little black box—and how much toward the living world around me?

• What in my life would flourish with a little more of my attention?

• What has been whispering while something louder has had my focus?

• If attention is something I feed my life with, what do I want to feed more deliberately?

Caring for life isn’t always dramatic. Often it’s listening closely enough to notice what needs tending—and doing it again tomorrow.