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.