Our Waking Dream

What happens when we stop projecting our pain onto one another? This Scorpio New Moon arrives in the final days of Mercury and Venus retrograde, stirring the deeper waters of our relationships, emotional patterns, and the ways we perceive ourselves and each other. I’ve just witnessed an extraordinary couple of weeks in Italy. Illness, hospitalization, emotional triggers, and old patterns surfacing...

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 relat...

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 sensatio...

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 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: breat...

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 stren...

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 ti...

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 w...

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 interrup...

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, bri...

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 luna...

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 b...

What happens when we give ourselves enough room to fully feel the heartbreak, fear, anger, grief—all of it? Does the heart have a natural pathway back to joy? Do our lives actually make room for that process? And when we do process what we’re carrying, does it move and reconcile—or do we find ourselves recycling the same feelings and stories again and again? In this episode of Our Waking Dream, sp...

How does your life begin to change as your heart softens and heals? On July 26, the Lunar Nodes shifted into Leo and Aquarius, beginning an 18-month journey that will continue through March 2028. In this episode of Our Waking Dream , leadership mentor, somatic expert, and visionary Coco Swanson explores what it means to consciously heal and integrate the places where the heart has learned to close...

Where have you unknowingly handed your power to someone or something else? If your imagination were no longer consumed by what’s broken, what would you create? We are in one of the most significant astrological turning points of the year. As the lunar nodes begin a new 18-month journey through Aquarius and Leo, an Aquarius Full Moon joins Pluto opposite Jupiter, alongside a sky full of powerful tr...

What naturally leaves you feeling more resourced than when you began? What happens when we suspend analysis long enough to begin studying what genuinely resources us? What happens when we commit to creating gentle containers for vulnerability so we can begin practicing following our hearts? Right now, a rare relationship between Jupiter, Pluto, Neptune, and Uranus creates an exceptionally supporti...

Who have you frozen in time from their worst moment? Conflict hurts. People disappoint us. We disappoint each other. And sometimes, long after the conflict itself has passed, we continue carrying the resentment, rehearsing what happened, gathering support for our side, and seeing the person through the lens of the worst thing they did. What happens to our relationships, our families, our workplace...

How’s your heart these days? Open? Hopeful? Tender? Guarded? Scared? Contracted? And how can you tell? How could any of us make it this far through life without learning to protect our hearts? Heartbreak, rejection, grief, disappointment, criticism, and loss leave their marks. We learn to guard ourselves, seek approval, compare, hide, perform, or dim our own light. Yet what happens when those prot...

Who’s tired of feeling like every disagreement becomes a battle? Whether it’s with a partner, family member, friend, colleague, or even yourself, conflict has a way of making us feel certain, defensive, and disconnected. But what if conflict isn’t the problem? What if it has something to teach us? What if the very places we feel the most activated are also the places with the greatest potential fo...

What kind of atmosphere follows you into a room? Culture isn’t something reserved for workplaces, governments, or social movements. It’s present in the conversation we have with ourselves when we make a mistake. It’s present in the way families handle disagreement, the way friendships hold joy and grief, and the way teams navigate pressure, change, and conflict. Whether we realize it or not, we ar...

Is self-care central in your life? Because you are very central in your life. How have your needs changed in the past season or two? Not what you needed a year ago. Not what worked before burnout, heartbreak, illness, parenthood, menopause, success, failure, or change. What do you need now? And do your habits, relationships, boundaries, and daily rhythms reflect what you know about yourself? As th...

What baggage are you ready to put down? A heartbreak. A disappointment. A betrayal. A misunderstanding. A story you’ve told so many times it has begun shaping how you see yourself, another person, or the future. As we move toward the Gemini New Moon on June 14 and continue navigating Uranus squaring the Nodes, we’re invited to examine not only what happened, but the interpretations, judgments, ass...

What happens to your body after ten minutes of scrolling? Uranus squares the Nodes on June 11, bringing a period of rapid change around information, perception, communication, technology, and the future we imagine together. In this episode of Our Waking Dream, spiritual strategist and leadership mentor Coco Swanson explores what happens when information enters the nervous system, how fear narrows...

Pressure changes us. It changes behavior. It changes perception. It changes communication. It changes how we treat ourselves and one another. As Mars squares Pluto on May 26, many of us may notice ourselves becoming more reactive, emotionally charged, exhausted, controlling, defensive, or deeply certain that we are right and someone else is wrong. This astrology tends to expose what happens inside...

We are living in an extraordinarily accelerated time. Who's feeling mentally overstimulated, emotionally fragmented, creatively scattered, exhausted, flooded by nonstop information, or disconnected from what genuinely makes them feel alive. Gemini season amplifies movement in the nervous system. Curiosity increases. Ideas multiply. Conversations speed up. Information expands. Possibilities branch...