For The Worldbuilders

My intention inside this episode is to honor all the work you’ve done this year by offering a Winter Solstice spell, inviting you to get curious about the somatic architecture you’re dreaming from inside your next season. But above all, in this episode I want to celebrate you. Over the past 5 years you have held the overlapping grief of witnessing public lynchings by the hands of the police, a global pandemic we’re still inside of, wildfires and other continuous climate crises and witnessing genocide and humanitarian crises from Palestine to Sudan — not to name the domestic and relational ruptures you’ve tended to on more intimate scales, the new cities moved to, the new homes and communities you’ve had to build. And look at you, still choosing vulnerability, still choosing relation, still choosing love, still choosing to believe in yourself and your values and by extension — still choosing to believe in us. For that I am recording this episode to say thank you. This is my offering of gratitude.ResourcesLearn More and Apply The Powerhouse Portal to Work Together 1:1: https://www.seedaschool.com/phEnroll Into The Laboratory of Erotic Engineering Membership: https://www.seedaschool.com/labSubscribe to the Seeda School Substack: ⁠https://seedaschool.substack.com/⁠Follow Ayana on Instagram: ⁠⁠@ayzaco⁠⁠Follow Ayana on Threads: ⁠⁠@ayzaco⁠⁠Follow Seeda School on Instagram: ⁠⁠@seedaschool⁠Follow Seeda School on TikTok: @seedaschoolCitations“Switching Houses From Scared Child House To Erotic Power House: How Corporal Punishment in Childhood Impacts Desire” by Ayana Zaire CottonSeed A World Retreat Alumni nènè myriam konaté invited us to imagine our existence as the offer in one of Seeda School's Open Studio sessions and that has been our grounding north star ever since. Check out their, clap back manifest(o), a 9-week personal excavation offer in service of fugitive practice(s).“Tend to the scared child first” post by Sonya Renee Taylor“Because I Love You” by Lex MarieCover Art: Betye Saar, Black Girl’s Window (1969) Saar has acknowledged the self-referential nature of the assemblage: “Even at the time, I knew it was autobiographical,” she has said. “We’d had the Watts Riots and the Black revolution. Also that was the year of my divorce. So in addition to the occult subject matter there was political and also personal content.” (Source: MoMA)

Read full newsletter: Why You Don’t Have What You Want — The Missing Link In The Be, Do, Have FrameworkRegister for free Discovery Workshop: Seed A Sales System Rooted In The Truth Of Your Desired IncomeYour cosmic desire steadies the ground as it shifts beneath your feet inside the work of transforming the stories you identify with — providing a much needed update to the “Be ➡️ Do ➡️ Have” framework into “Desire ➡️ Be ➡️ Do ➡️ Have”. As with everything we must ground inside desire first, so let’s start there.What’s your cosmic desire?How will it help hold the identity shifting work you’re being called into in this season of your business and worldbuilding practice?How do we practice remembering knowing what we want isn’t nearly as powerful as knowing why we want it?Reflecting on these questions is the Worldbuilder’s Way. These are the exact questions we answer inside the new Seeda School discovery workshop, “Seed A Sales System Rooted In The Truth Of Your Desired Income”. Register today to join us.

This podcast episode is about integration. How do we go forward with all the colonial code, bumping up against the remembrance of our ancestral code? How do we integrate the concrete and the care? The cop in our head and the kid in our heart? How do we invite our fear and our spirit to the table? How might we act as the compassionate mediator? How might that compassionate mediation facilitate a practice of making art? My intention behind recording this episode is to wade inside of some of these questions with you.ResourcesLearn more and enroll into The Laboratory of Erotic Engineering: https://www.seedaschool.com/labLearn more and book a free Desire Discovery Call for 1:1 Erotic Engineering: https://www.seedaschool.com/engineerSubscribe to the Seeda School Substack: ⁠https://seedaschool.substack.com/⁠Follow Ayana on Instagram: ⁠⁠@ayzaco⁠⁠Follow Ayana on Threads: ⁠⁠@ayzaco⁠⁠Follow Seeda School on Instagram: ⁠⁠@seedaschool⁠CitationsMexican artist Pedro Reyes believes in art’s functionality...“Truth, Lee and Elaw practiced what Phyllis Mack calls “spiritual theatre.” — Jayna Brown writing about Sojourner Truth in “Along the Psychic Highway: Black Women Mystics and Utopias of the Ecstatic”, Black Utopias: Speculative Life and the Music of Other Worlds, pg. 28 (2021)The Flesh of the Matter: A Critical Forum on Hortense Spillers (2024) edited by Margo Natalie Crawford and C. Riley Snorton“Moving On Down the Line: Variations on the African-American Sermon” by Hortense J. SpillersBeloved (1987) by Toni MorrisonVictor Strecher talks about his SPACE framework inside the “Love 2.0: How to Fix Your Marriage, Part 2” Hidden Brain episode published October 6, 2025Cover Art: Simone Leigh (b. 1967, Chicago), Georgia Mae (2017), Medium: Salt-glazed stoneware, porcelain, and resin, Dimensions: 34 1/4 × 14 3/4 × 15 inches (87 × 37.5 × 38.1 cm) Source: Guggenheim Museum

My intention inside this episode is to invite us to re-calibrate inside our desire. As we search for safety, predictability and control, we can find ourselves impulsively grabbing for the tools of white supremacy culture in an attempt to catch our breath and find our footing once more. We extend deep compassion to ourselves for this reflex, with fascism, state sanctioned violence and the question of survival riding the air, it is no surprise that we may breathe in fear with our latest inhale. Inside this episode we exhale, remembering the tools of white supremacy culture are incompatible with the worlds we are building. The classrooms we’re spinning up in mid air, the apothecaries getting their start in our gardens growing into neighborhood pharmacies, the basements we’re turning into movie theaters streaming love, love, love. And before we know it, we’re impulsively picking up tools of a different kind. Tools for tending to a culture of care, where black life is sacred and shared vulnerability is more appealing than isolating in fear.ResourcesRegister for free to the brand new workshop, “Erotically Engineer Your Paid Creative Offering”: https://www.seedaschool.com/offerSubscribe to the Seeda School Substack: ⁠https://seedaschool.substack.com/⁠Follow Ayana on Instagram: ⁠⁠@ayzaco⁠⁠Follow Ayana on Threads: ⁠⁠@ayzaco⁠⁠Follow Seeda School on Instagram: ⁠⁠@seedaschool⁠Citations“White Supremacy Culture” by Tema OkunThe Nap Ministry Post on Threads“The dream is the truth. Then they act and do things accordingly.” — Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching GodCover Art: Love Jones Film Still (1997)

My intention inside this episode is invite you to consider how you might create an additional stream of income using the erotic skills already alive in your creative practice. This episode is for you if you are currently relying on income from one of three sources: 1) Artist Grants, 2) A College or University or 3) Full-time or part-time work with an organization (be it an institution, non-profit, or otherwise). Maybe you’re relying on income from a mix of all 3 but want to introduce a stream of income that you control. A stream of income in alignment with your Zone of Desire and the creative work you must do anyway. Whether you are an artist, academic or facilitator, you have developed a tolerance for creative improvisation, creative resourcefulness and even creative risk. What might it look and feel like to apply those creative skills to developing a paid offer as an additional income stream whose faucet you can turn on and off at any time? My intention inside today’s episode is to explore that question with you.ResourcesRegister for free to the brand new workshop, “Erotically Engineer Your Paid Creative Offering”: https://www.seedaschool.com/offerSubscribe to the Seeda School Substack: ⁠https://seedaschool.substack.com/⁠Follow Ayana on Instagram: ⁠⁠@ayzaco⁠⁠Follow Ayana on Threads: ⁠⁠@ayzaco⁠⁠Follow Seeda School on Instagram: ⁠⁠@seedaschool⁠CitationsCover Art: Basket-maker Martha Cayetano. Source: “Exquisite Gullah-Geechee Baskets Are Now on Etsy” published on Hyperallergic

My intention inside this episode is to remind you of that big, juicy, audacious creative vision that is all your own. That desire commensurate with the expanse of your power. That idea, project or offer that only feels intimidating because it is a threat to colonial order and the colonized part of us might be sacred of it. As it should be, but let’s rest in the fact that this is natural and impermanent. Just like fear is an indication of desire, so is the avoidance of our own audacity. Avoidance is different than procrastination. We procrastinate on certain tasks, because the stakes are usually low. We avoid our audacity, because the stakes are higher than they’ve ever been. Sometimes we avoid answering the call of our audacious desire because we know it will demand the sort of transformation that changes everything and perhaps that is entirely the point.ResourcesLearn More and Enroll Into the Laboratory of Erotic Engineering to Join Us Inside the Upcoming Workshop, "Create It, Not In The Future, But Now": https://www.seedaschool.com/labSubscribe to the Seeda School Substack: ⁠https://seedaschool.substack.com/⁠Follow Ayana on Instagram: ⁠⁠@ayzaco⁠⁠Follow Ayana on Threads: ⁠⁠@ayzaco⁠⁠Follow Seeda School on Instagram: ⁠⁠@seedaschool⁠Citations“In the context of such enormous structural violence, how was it possible to imagine that a beautiful life is possible? Even more unthinkable was the idea that one might create it, not in the future, but now.” — Saidiya Hartman (Source: Regard for One Another: A Conversation Between Rizvana Bradley and Saidiya Hartman published via the Los Angeles Review of Books on October 8, 2019)Cover Art: Stills from Oscar Micheaux, Swing! (1938) (Library of Congress) (Source: “A Book of Necessary, Speculative Narratives for the Anonymous Black Women of History” by Sarah Rose Sharp, published via Hyperallergic on April 15th, 2019)

Erotic Engineering is a wild field of study and practice that uses the erotic as power to design a life rooted in desire. Inside this practice the desire we center is both personal and collective. Erotic Engineering pulls from the work of black feminist poetry, literature and worldbuilding which provides the material we use to create new belief systems that scaffold lives in deeper alignment with our values. It is a method for actualizing desire and putting language to the longings of our interior worlds in order to transform our material world.ResourcesRegister for the Erotic Engineering Workshop, “Discover The Daily Habits Aligned With Your Zone of Desire” happening Tuesday, August 19th at 12pm EST: https://www.seedaschool.com/erotic-workshopSubscribe to the Seeda School Substack: ⁠https://seedaschool.substack.com/⁠Follow Ayana on Instagram: ⁠⁠@ayzaco⁠⁠Follow Ayana on Threads: ⁠⁠@ayzaco⁠⁠Follow Seeda School on Instagram: ⁠⁠@seedaschool⁠CitationsAudre Lorde, "Uses of the Erotic, The Erotic As Power" (1978)Stack OverflowCover Art: Barbara Chase-Riboud, La Musica Red Parkway / Josephine Red (2007), materials: bronze with red patina and silk dimensions: 73 x 49 x 19 inches (185 x 124 x 48 cm). American artist, novelist, and poet Barbara Chase-Riboud (b. 1939) creates abstract, fluid metal forms that, combined with fibers, comprise a unique visual language. (Source: Glenstone)

My intention behind this episode is to invite you to seed a public creative practice through, what we call in Seeda School, “weekly dispatches” for time accountability or “creative dispatches” for time freedom. Whatever your desired relationship with time — committing to a cadence of newsletters, podcasts or videos, as dispatches becomes a public ritual of staying close to yourself. A sacred ceremony of bi-directional witnessing.Inside this sacred witnessing ceremony we don’t need your “professionalism” we need your poetry. We don’t need your cynicism, we need your care. We don’t need your cool, we need your conviction. At times it can feel easier to write for cover letters, grant applications, school applications or memos on the job because professional development rarely requires our honesty. Some career-conscious spaces even encourage our lies, asking us to leave our politics at the door as if that’s even possible. It can feel harder to write for ourselves and seed a public practice through creative writing, because our poetry demands our truth. Our poetry demands that we acknowledge our pleasure and politics as the only starting points we need to create work worthy of our breath. Inside this episode I share spells for doing exactly that.ResourcesRegister for the free Worldbuilding Workshop to learn more about Seeda School’s 1:1 Coaching: https://www.seedaschool.com/coachingSubscribe to the Seeda School Substack: ⁠https://seedaschool.substack.com/⁠Follow Ayana on Instagram: ⁠⁠@ayzaco⁠⁠Follow Ayana on Threads: ⁠⁠@ayzaco⁠⁠Follow Seeda School on Instagram: ⁠⁠@seedaschool⁠Citations“Suicidal Ideation On The Subway: Taking Me To A World Beyond The Cul-De-Sac” by Ayana Zaire CottonJames Baldwin to Maya Angelou, “If I love you and I duck it, I die” inside “Conversation with a Native Son”“I write best when I stop trying to be brilliant and start trying to be honest.“ — Yrsa Daley-WardAlexis Pauline Gumbs, “We didn’t come here to be right, we came here to love” in Stars and Stars with IsaOcean Vuong in an interview with Sarah Ferguson for 7.30 ABCCover Art: Black and White Photograph of Maya Angelou Writing

Creative actualization demands sacrifice. There’s a saying that goes something like this, “you can have whatever you want, and if you don’t have it you either don’t want it or you’re bargaining over the price”. Now justified political critiques aside, I reference this quote to ask: In what ways are we bargaining over the price of actualizing our desire? Inside this episode I reflect alongside you and the 4 seasons of creative initiation: remembrance, surrender, sacrifice and erotic expression. Sometimes these seasons happen in order, sometimes they are non-linear. Which stage are you in? Will you allow yourself to believe it’s exactly where you’re supposed to be in this season? Let’s stop devising creative ways to get out of taking our own medicine. My intention behind recording this episode is to invite us to allow ourselves to be exactly where we are, willing students of all the wisdom embedded in our current season of transformation and initiation.ResourcesLet’s Work Together 1:1 On Launching Your Public Creative Practice in 8 Weeks (Enrollment Closes July 17th, 2025): https://www.seedaschool.com/coachingSubscribe to the Seeda School Substack: ⁠https://seedaschool.substack.com/⁠Follow Ayana on Instagram: ⁠⁠@ayzaco⁠⁠Follow Ayana on Threads: ⁠⁠@ayzaco⁠⁠Follow Seeda School on Instagram: ⁠⁠@seedaschool⁠CitationsAudre Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic, The Erotic As Power” (1978)Cover Art: She Kept Her Conjuring Table Very Neat, 1990, Renee Stout (American, born 1958), mixed media. (Source: Virginia Museum of Fine Arts⁠)

At first this episode was titled “There Is No Rigor In Perfection, There Is Rigor In Your Play”. In a recent episode of one of my favorite podcasts Hidden Brain, psychologist Paul Bloom describes why play is an essential choreography of aliveness for most human and non-human species. He says it’s essential because it’s a container for “safe practice”. I keep thinking about this phrase, “safe practice”. Oftentimes perfectionism is mistaken for rigor. These two are NOT the same. Perfectionism stops us from starting, rigor invites us to try. The fear rooted in perfectionism is an indication of feeling unsafe inside our practice. My intention inside this episode is to offer spells for cultivating a felt sense of safety inside our practice through rigorous play. ResourcesLet’s Work Together 1:1 On Launching Your Newsletter in 8 Weeks: https://www.seedaschool.com/coachingSubscribe to the Seeda School Substack: ⁠https://seedaschool.substack.com/⁠Follow Ayana on Instagram: ⁠⁠@ayzaco⁠⁠Follow Ayana on Threads: ⁠⁠@ayzaco⁠⁠Follow Seeda School on Instagram: ⁠⁠@seedaschool⁠Citations“God Owes Me A Favor: Let’s Collectively Call It In” by Ayana Zaire Cotton“Ouch! That Feels Great”, Hidden Brain Podcast Episode with psychologist Paul Bloom and Shankar VedantamAlexis Pauline Gumbs on Finding CeremonyZora Neale Hurston, “The Dream is the Truth” in Their Eyes Were Watching Godnènè myriam konaté's Substack, Instagram and Manifest(o) RetreatOcean Vuong on being "summoned, despite yourself"Cover Art: Lorna Simpson, did time elapse (2024) Materials: Acrylic and screenprint on gessoed fiberglass Dimensions: 259.1 x 365.8 x 3.5 cm / 102 x 144 x 1 3/8 in. "Together, Simpson’s incandescent paintings draw attention to the danger hidden in beauty and, conversely, the beauty hidden in danger. Bringing us face to face with phenomena rarely witnessed by the human eye, they ask us to locate ourselves in the context of the cosmos." (Source: Hauser & Wirth)

You know that meme that’s going around saying “propaganda i'm not falling for”? Well the propaganda we’re not falling for is the discourse that says we need to quit our day jobs in order to be “real artists”, “real diviners”, “real entrepreneurs”. Or whatever, because truth is…we can be working full-time inside our passion and still be in misalignment with the sometimes uncomfortable and terrifying invitations of our creative spirit. My intention behind recording this podcast episode is to invite us to explore how we might bring our full witchy-ness into our work. Less about the "what" of what we do and more about the "how". How do we show up in the fullness of our power, how do we maintain boundaries that support our bodies and how do we refuse to sever ourselves from our spirit for work misaligned with our values? We’ll explore all this and more in today’s episode.ResourcesLet’s Work Together 1:1 On Your Creative Offer: https://www.seedaschool.com/coachingSubscribe to the Seeda School Substack: ⁠https://seedaschool.substack.com/⁠Follow Ayana on Instagram: ⁠⁠@ayzaco⁠⁠Follow Ayana on Threads: ⁠⁠@ayzaco⁠⁠Follow Seeda School on Instagram: ⁠⁠@seedaschool⁠CitationsCover Art: Julie Dash, Daughters of the Dust (Film Still), 1991

My intention behind recording this podcast episode is to ask: are we in a season of seeding or reaping? Are we clinging to the energy of survival mode when spirit is inviting us to breathe and take in the garden we’ve built — enjoying the fruits of our labor and perhaps using them to create the next dish, recipe or project with ease. Perhaps we cling to the energy of survival mode and invent fires to put out because we’re clinging to a feeling of control and certainty. But what if change and transformation don’t have to be disorienting and destabilizing, what if we can relax into the process instead? What if the practice is about using what we have on hand to create an offering and trusting that, that is more than enough, trusting that that is plenty? These are the questions we’re going to explore in today’s episode.ResourcesLearn More and Enroll into the Seed A World Retreat: https://www.seedaschool.com/programSubscribe to the Seeda School Substack: ⁠https://seedaschool.substack.com/⁠Follow Ayana on Instagram: ⁠⁠@ayzaco⁠⁠Follow Ayana on Threads: ⁠⁠@ayzaco⁠⁠Follow Seeda School on Instagram: ⁠⁠@seedaschool⁠CitationsA Process for Finding Purpose: Do THIS to Build the Life You Want with Jay Shetty on the Mel Robbins PodcastThe Combahee River Collective StatementArthur Jafa: Sequencing the Notes | Art21 "Extended Play"This Japanese Shrine Has Been Torn Down And Rebuilt Every 20 Years for the Past Millennium by Rachel NuwerCover Photo: Elizabeth Catlett, El Abrazo, 1978, Mackey Twins Art Gallery, © Elizabeth Catlett Family Trust / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2023, photo: Frank Sperling

My intention behind recording this episode is to humbly invite us to consider what got us to our current reality might not get us to our wildest dreams. Maybe it was ambition, external validation or the perceived safety of playing small inside our own dreams that got us here but these postures of practice are too hollow to strike this moment and inspire long-lasting change. What if we dreamed from inside the sturdy validation of love instead? A regenerative force of motivation we can sustain over a lifetime, expanding into actualized dreams too wild for words. Upon further inspection, through the looking glass of interdependence, we see it is love that got us here and it’s love that will get us there, to worlds as yet unnamable.ResourcesEnroll in the Seed A World Retreat or Register for the Worldbuilding Workshop to Learn More: https://www.seedaschool.com/programSubscribe to the Seeda School Substack: ⁠https://seedaschool.substack.com/⁠Follow Ayana on Instagram: ⁠⁠@ayzaco⁠⁠Follow Ayana on Threads: ⁠⁠@ayzaco⁠⁠Follow Seeda School on Instagram: ⁠⁠@seedaschool⁠CitationsThe Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House by Audre LordeKaren M. Rose’s (IG: @empresskarenmrose) Libra Full Moon PostAlexis Pauline Gumbs on The Black Studies PodcastCover Photo: “Anna Julia Cooper: Educator, Writer and Intellectual” (Source: National Museum of African American History and Culture)

I am recording this episode for the push through artists who have worked so hard, for so long that they don’t even know what their max capacity is — every year presents new challenges, requiring new limits, seemingly stretching into infinity. I am recording this episode for those who delight in the rigor of a challenge and experience an erotic charge when spirit is inviting them into the next growth spurt or learning curve. I am recording this episode for those of us who are getting on our Zoom while grieving, because we desperately want to hit pause but the bills keep coming. I see you. I’ve been each of these worldbuilders, sometimes all at once. How do we know when a season is requiring our strength or our stillness? This is the question I hope to unpack in today’s episode.ResourcesRegister for the Free 2-Part Worldbuilding Workshop Series and Download the Spring 2025 Syllabus: https://www.seedaschool.com/programSubscribe to the Seeda School Substack: ⁠https://seedaschool.substack.com/⁠Follow Ayana on Instagram: ⁠⁠@ayzaco⁠⁠Follow Ayana on Threads: ⁠⁠@ayzaco⁠⁠Follow Seeda School on Instagram: ⁠⁠@seedaschool⁠CitationsDivining Poets: Clifton — A Quotable Deck from Turtle Point PressRest Is Resistance: A Manifesto by Tricia HerseyCare Manual: Dreaming Care into Being by kamra sadia hakimWhat It Takes to Heal: How Transforming Ourselves Can Change the World by Prentis HemphillThe Last of Us on HBOCover Art: Somaya Critchlow, Untitled (Rope and Moon), 2018, Materials: Oil on Canvas, Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.8 in (21 x 14.8 cm)

You don’t need more affirmations. But perhaps, like many of us, you are desiring tools, skills and strategies for navigating the seasons where your faith starts to feel foolish and the results you wished for are taking longer than the ego can bear. In this episode we explore navigating suspicion around our creative commitments and the temptation to give up inside the messy middle. We remember the potency of our creative power activates when we’re lost, not when we know the way. How do we remain steadfast inside our commitments while facing the grief, fear and uncertainty of our time? How do we trade the misleading allure of instant gratification with the sturdy sense of alignment that arises when we choose the practice of closing the gap between our values and our actions everyday, as Mariame Kaba invites us to do? How do we release all our “shoulds” and stay in the game long enough to learn what comes next? These are the questions we explore inside today’s episode.ResourcesRegister for the Free 2-Part Worldbuilding Workshop Series and Download the Spring 2025 Syllabus: https://www.seedaschool.com/programSubscribe to the Seeda School Substack: ⁠https://seedaschool.substack.com/⁠Follow Ayana on Instagram: ⁠⁠@ayzaco⁠⁠Follow Ayana on Threads: ⁠⁠@ayzaco⁠⁠Follow Seeda School on Instagram: ⁠⁠@seedaschool⁠Citations“for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf” is a 1976 work by Ntozake Shange. It consists of a series of poetic monologues to be accompanied by dance movements and music, a form which Shange coined the word choreopoem to describe. It tells the stories of seven women who have suffered oppression in a racist and sexist society.“What Does It Take to Sustain the Lives of Black Feminists While We Are Alive?: Defining Affirmation Banking & Overcoming the Expected Humility of Accepting It” by Kay Brown of Assemblage: Baby’s BreathFaculty Spotlight: Graphic Designer and Musician Wesley Taylor, Emphasizes Design Justice, Community Building“It Is Working—You Just Can’t See It Yet” (Substack) and “225: Stop Quitting Too Soon” (Podcast) by Myleik TeeleVictoria Monét on taking the streets instead of the highway and one of my favorite songs of hers, Hollywood feat. Earth, Wind and FireCover Art: Betelhem Makonnen, "conjugated keyboard" (2020) Materials: Keyboard, tumbled rocks, Dimensions: 12.6" x 14.8" x 1 “

Our favorite black feminist was most likely an entrepreneur because for many of our ancestors black feminist entrepreneurship was simply a synonym for “the practice of surviving with our dignity in tact”. Many of us have heard the stories if we listened closely, the auntie, uncles and cousins who spun up hair salons, barbershops, daycares, restaurants and classrooms inside living rooms, kitchens, gardens and basements. Businesses that experimented with mutual aid and refused to replicate the carceral choreographies they might have witness or experienced in their neighborhoods or at their jobs. These stories are not new, disability and complex trauma sometimes renders us unable or unwilling to hold "traditional jobs". Entrepreneurship and creative lives of refusal aren't always born out of courage, sometimes they're born out of necessity and needs capitalism just can't hold. What creative strategies can black feminism teach us about surviving systems designed to fail us?ResourcesRegister for the Free 2-Part Worldbuilding Workshop Series and Download the Spring 2025 Syllabus: https://www.seedaschool.com/programSubscribe to the Seeda School Substack: ⁠https://seedaschool.substack.com/⁠Follow Ayana on Instagram: ⁠⁠@ayzaco⁠⁠Follow Ayana on Threads: ⁠⁠@ayzaco⁠⁠Follow Seeda School on Instagram: ⁠⁠@seedaschool⁠CitationsFreedom Farm CooperativeWhy Harriet Tubman Is a ‘Powerful’ Choice for American Currency'Nurse, Spy, Cook:' How Harriet Tubman Found Freedom Through FoodSojourner Truth, "I Sell the Shadow to Support the Substance”Sankofa SymbolBlack Utopias: Speculative Life & the Music of Other Worlds by Jayna BrownCover Art: Lauren Halsey, Untitled (Parliament) (detail), 2021. Digital collage. Source: MFA Boston

Rigor doesn’t equal hard work and ease doesn’t equal work that is easy. Asking for help, refusing to resent our capacity, honoring the needs of our body and moving at the speed of creative flow is rigorous work that might require practice if our learned impulse is to habitually bring ourselves to the edge of our capacity in order to feel worthy of the ease of our creative expression. Our art flows out of us like our breath, sometimes the hardest work is to let and protect it.ResourcesRegister for the Free 2-Part Worldbuilding Workshop Series: https://www.seedaschool.com/programSubscribe to the Seeda School Substack: ⁠https://seedaschool.substack.com/⁠Follow Ayana on Instagram: ⁠⁠@ayzaco⁠⁠Follow Ayana on Threads: ⁠⁠@ayzaco⁠⁠Follow Seeda School on Instagram: ⁠⁠@seedaschool⁠Citations“you’re not a perfectionist, you’re internalizing capitalism” meme by Ariana Brown (@arianathepoet)Cover Art: Book Scan from Your Satisfaction Is Our Future (2017) by Ayana Zaire Cotton

My intention inside this episode is to reflect, alongside you, on my own journey toward softening inside the sacred practice of bearing witness — both to myself and to each other’s becoming. Witnessing myself was painful at first. I was confronted with all the ways I had invented masks sacrificing my comfort while prioritizing the comfort of others, who oftentimes were loved ones. Parents, friends, partners, co-workers, peers, teachers, family members, roommates, the list goes on. When confronting all the layers I had assembled out of survival, I realized I was unrecognizable to myself. I cycled through periods of shame, rage, grief, and ultimately grounded inside compassion. When I stopped running from my authentic self, I was able to face her and in that stillness become a compassionate witness. No longer afraid of my own darkness, longings and desires — terrified that they were threats to my survival — another way forward opened. Inside this compassionate witnessing I realized all my fears held keys to something beyond survival, something like belonging. Through this witness work I began to create safety inside myself. Through this witness work I began to collaborate with loved ones, instead of hide from them, and created safety in my home. Then it spilled over to our neighbors, our streets, our schools. But it started with bearing witness inside the sacred act of coming home to myself again and again. My intention inside this episode is to remind us, worldbuilding happens on various scales of intimacy.ResourcesDownload the Creative Offer Questionnaire to Oneself: ⁠https://www.seedaschool.com/questionnaire⁠Subscribe to the Seeda School Substack: ⁠https://seedaschool.substack.com/⁠Follow Ayana on Instagram: ⁠⁠@ayzaco⁠⁠Follow Ayana on Threads: ⁠⁠@ayzaco⁠⁠Follow Seeda School on Instagram: ⁠⁠@seedaschool⁠CitationsDear Mazie, exhibition curated by Amber EsseivaDear Mazie, program “IT’S ALL OUT OF MY ARMS: An Activated Honoring”“Dropping the Mask”, Hidden Brain episodeBrendane A. Tynes’s Instagram post on mirror and witness workKaren M. Rose’s Instagram post on Venus retrograde, mirror work and ancestral venerationCover Art: Written (2021) by Lorna Simpson. Materials: Collage on paper Dimensions: 15 15/16 x 11 1/16 in (40.5 x 28.1 cm)

My intention inside this episode is to invite us to put some respect on our nervous system. We have done the journaling, we’ve cultivated all our embodiment practices on our walks and by the water. We’ve done the divination, breath and mirror work to bring us to this moment where our nervous system is prepared to hold us at our next level of practice. There are new invitations, new calls, new assignments we desire to expand into, but moving in fear might be sneakily disguising itself as “honoring our nervous system”. Our craving for predictable outcomes and comfort can encourage us to play small inside the vision for our creative practices and lives. Inside this episode I invite us to consider the ways we can honor our nervous system by welcoming the transformative discomfort of desire.ResourcesDownload the Creative Offer Questionnaire to Oneself: ⁠https://www.seedaschool.com/questionnaire⁠Subscribe to the Seeda School Substack: ⁠https://seedaschool.substack.com/⁠Follow Ayana on Instagram: ⁠⁠@ayzaco⁠⁠Follow Ayana on Threads: ⁠⁠@ayzaco⁠⁠Follow Seeda School on Instagram: ⁠⁠@seedaschool⁠CitationsMyleik Teele’s Podcast — 219: Do The Work: Stop Researching, Start Moving“June Jordan Solves the Energy Crisis: Love is Lifeforce” (March 23, 2016) by Alexis Pauline Gumbs published by The Feminist WireCover Art: Nick Cave (b. 1959, Fulton, MO; lives and works in Chicago, IL), Soundsuit Series

My intention inside this episode is to ground us inside the reality that we are constantly changing. Our motivations are changing. Our values might be experiencing a re-boot. And the things that kept us going in the past might no longer be a reliable fuel source. Instead of resenting or resisting our desire to slow down, prioritize our most meaningful relationships, or operate from a place of wholeness….What if we used these changes in our capacity, goals and desires as our new navigation tools and fuel to get us where we actually want to go instead of the destinations we were told to go in search of a false sense of safety? In this episode I’m going to share 5 approaches for staying motivated when ambition rooted in external validation has left your body.Resources Download the Creative Offer Questionnaire to Oneself: ⁠https://www.seedaschool.com/questionnaire⁠ Subscribe to the Seeda School Substack: ⁠https://seedaschool.substack.com/⁠ Follow Ayana on Instagram: ⁠⁠@ayzaco⁠⁠ Follow Seeda School on Instagram: ⁠⁠@seedaschool⁠Citations “i am not done yet” by Lucille Clifton. Published in Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir 1969-1980, 1987 Cover Art: Kerry James Marshall, When Frustration Threatens Desire (1990), Dimensions: 81 5/16 x 73 1/16 x 2 inches, Materials: Acrylic and collage on canvas