Our Waking Dream

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.

What helps you keep going with something you care about—not for a week, but long enough to bring it to life?

On August 31, Jupiter in Leo trines Saturn retrograde in Aries for the first of three times. Jupiter brings expansion, passion, creativity, and possibility into conversation with Saturn’s structure, discipline, limitations, and devotion. The following day, Mars in Cancer squares Saturn, bringing another piece into the picture: care. What does the human being doing all this creating need in order to continue?

In this episode of Our Waking Dream, spiritual strategist and leadership mentor Coco Swanson explores what it takes to trust our instincts and follow through on our desires and our mission. We look at passion and pleasure as sources of energy, the possibility that some of our limitations may be helping us, and what changes when care becomes part of agency.

Bring your journal. We’ll explore:

• What do I want to bring to life? And what about it makes me feel more alive?

• Where could I let passion, pleasure, and love become more centralized fuel rather than something I postpone until the work is done?

• What do I love enough to keep showing up for?

• What limitations might be helping me—and how?

• What do I need to feel emotionally resourced?

• Where might more structure, discipline, or devotion help bring my dreams to life?

We’ll also work with simple practices for bringing more care and passion into the way we work: taking micro-resourcing breaks, following the part of a project that has energy, and noticing where we have enough agency to make the conditions around us a little more human.

What happens when care and passion become part of how we work rather than what we get when we’re finished?

Maybe follow-through isn’t only about asking more of ourselves. Maybe it’s also about learning how to feed the human doing the work.

Join upcoming free Solutions Labs and receive new episodes, practices, and writings:

https://cocoswanson.com/solutions-labs

What happens when the life you thought you wanted doesn’t quite fit anymore?

You’ve changed. The world has changed. Maybe you’re exhausted, questioning your direction, or realizing that some of what you’ve been carrying simply doesn’t matter to you the way it once did.

This week on Our Waking Dream, leadership mentor and spiritual strategist Coco Swanson explores the upcoming Pisces Full Moon lunar eclipse as a powerful reset around intuition, letting go, service, imagination, and what we choose to devote ourselves to now.

With the Moon in Pisces opposite the Sun and Mercury in Virgo, and Uranus in Gemini shaking up the conversation, this eclipse invites us to loosen old ideas about what life should look like—and dream beyond what we already know how to make happen.

Journal inquiries:

1- What have you outgrown but haven’t given yourself permission to let go of?

2- What—or who—do you really care about now?

3- When you let go of ideas about what your life should look like, what are you naturally called toward or inspired by?

4- How devoted are you to bringing what your heart is speaking into form?

Coco also shares practices for strengthening intuition and tending your dreams—not just personal dreams, but what you dream of for the world at large .

Your dreams don’t have to make money. They just need to make your heart sing.

To join a free Solutions Lab and receive new episodes, practices, writings, and offerings:

cocoswanson.com/solutions-labs

#PiscesEclipse #PiscesFullMoon #LunarEclipse #Astrology2026 #Intuition

What if what brings you pleasure isn’t a distraction from what matters—but information about where you’re meant to go next?

Especially in difficult times, it’s important to know the difference between a heart that needs care and a heart that’s ready to lead. Sometimes we need to rest, grieve, cry, or receive support. And sometimes there’s a YES underneath it all—something we love, something that brings us alive, something asking us to follow it.

This week on Our Waking Dream, Coco Swanson explores a beautiful moment of harmony in the sky as Venus in Libra sextiles Jupiter in Leo and Mercury in Leo trines Saturn in Aries. Along with the astrology, she shares journal inquiries and embodied practices for following pleasure, strengthening joy, practicing compassion—and giving our YES somewhere to go.

Journal inquiries:

What does a full-bodied YES feel like for me? Conversely, how do I know when my heart needs care—to cry, rest, grieve, or heal?

What do I authentically love? What brings me the most joy and pleasure?

What if my pleasure is pointing me toward my purpose? What would I do about it?

Where could what brings me alive also be of service?

Sometimes your heart needs care. Sometimes your heart is ready to lead. Learning the difference changes everything.

Bring whatever dilemmas or problems are alive for you to a free Solutions Lab, held every other Sunday. Bring what weighs you down, watch them shift, and leave with new tools.

cocoswanson.com/solutions-labs

For ongoing practices, live experiences, meditations, and deeper support, explore the full ecosystem at cocoswanson.com.

#Astrology #JupiterInLeo #VenusInLibra #EmotionalIntelligence #SomaticPractices