Our fear invites us into the rites of passage, experiential learning, and embodied pedagogical opportunities unique to our current needs and life journey.

The question is, what does fear want to teach us?

We embrace fear and reasonable doubt because it teaches us WHERE and HOW we long to be RESOURCED — no matter the season of life we’re navigating.

You might want to get a pen and paper. Inside this episode I’ll teach you how to use Erotic Engineering to collaborate with fear to actualize your desire in 3 steps.

Resources

• Apply To The Powerhouse Portal for 1:1 Erotic Engineering Support: https://www.seedaschool.com/ph
• Tune into my “Off The Grid” conversation with Amelia Hruby: https://offthegrid.fun/shownotes/ayana-zaire-cotton-ai-shame
• Subscribe to the Substack: https://seedaschool.substack.com/
• Cover Art: Carrie Mae Weems, “Portrait of a Woman Who Has Fallen from Grace and into the Hands of Evil” (1988)

Make a daily decision to commit to your dream.

Make a daily decision to commit to your truth.

Make a daily decision to commit to your power.

We can decide we already belong at any time.

That daily decision is the practice of aligning your desire with your capacity.

This practice is what I like to call, Erotic Engineering.

Resources

• Apply To The Powerhouse Portal for 1:1 Erotic Engineering Support: https://inhodj7ezvc.typeform.com/to/s0Si8w6E
• Subscribe to the Seeda School Substack: ⁠⁠⁠https://seedaschool.substack.com/⁠⁠⁠
• Cover Art: Kodachrome image of Zora Neale Hurston taken 1946 July 18 by Carl Van Vechten (Source: Yale Collections)

I’m seeing a lot of folks call for the public shaming of AI-users and AI-defenders. While that gets a lot of social media engagement and while I understand the righteous rage, the frustration, the moral outrage…I also know shame doesn’t work. It’s sticky but not effective. Shame induces silence, but self-respect induces power. What we need right now is to ground down and root in our collective power. Our worker power. That’s why I recorded this episode.

Resources

• Join Us In The Laboratory of Erotic Engineering: ⁠https://www.seedaschool.com/lab⁠
• Subscribe to the Seeda School Substack: ⁠⁠https://seedaschool.substack.com/⁠⁠
• Follow Ayana on Instagram: ⁠⁠⁠@ayzaco⁠⁠⁠
• Follow Ayana on Threads: ⁠⁠⁠@ayzaco⁠⁠⁠
• Follow Seeda School on Instagram: ⁠⁠⁠@seedaschool⁠⁠
• Follow Seeda School on TikTok: ⁠@seedaschool⁠

Citations

• Cover Art: Jack Whitten, Dead Reckoning I (1980) “In 1980, starting with Dead Reckoning, it was the first time I stood up to do a painting in ten years. It felt good. It felt good to come up off the floor and stand straight…Dead Reckoning is a term I had first heard when I was at Tuskegee, when I was with the Air Force ROTC. It deals with navigation. I remember the instructor explaining, at a certain point, as he put it, “If some shit happens,” [laughs] he says, “you have to make a decision.” Which is your best chance for survival? Do you continue on your present course? Or do you turn around and go back? That was the first time I’d heard that term, “dead reckoning.” Another version is that you throw away all your navigational tools. Get rid of all your tools. Learn to plot, to navigate, no tools. Just go by your heart, go by your feeling. It’s a rich term.” — Jack Whitten (Source: MoMA)

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.

Resources

• Learn More and Apply The Powerhouse Portal to Work Together 1:1: https://www.seedaschool.com/ph
• Enroll Into The Laboratory of Erotic Engineering Membership: https://www.seedaschool.com/lab
• Subscribe to the Seeda School Substack: ⁠https://seedaschool.substack.com/⁠
• Follow Ayana on Instagram: ⁠⁠@ayzaco⁠⁠
• Follow Ayana on Threads: ⁠⁠@ayzaco⁠⁠
• Follow Seeda School on Instagram: ⁠⁠@seedaschool⁠
• Follow Seeda School on TikTok: @seedaschool

Citations

• “Switching Houses From Scared Child House To Erotic Power House: How Corporal Punishment in Childhood Impacts Desire” by Ayana Zaire Cotton
• Seed 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 Marie
• Cover 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 Framework

Register for free Discovery Workshop: Seed A Sales System Rooted In The Truth Of Your Desired Income

Your 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.

Resources

• Learn more and enroll into The Laboratory of Erotic Engineering: https://www.seedaschool.com/lab
• Learn more and book a free Desire Discovery Call for 1:1 Erotic Engineering: https://www.seedaschool.com/engineer
• Subscribe to the Seeda School Substack: ⁠https://seedaschool.substack.com/⁠
• Follow Ayana on Instagram: ⁠⁠@ayzaco⁠⁠
• Follow Ayana on Threads: ⁠⁠@ayzaco⁠⁠
• Follow Seeda School on Instagram: ⁠⁠@seedaschool⁠

Citations

• Mexican 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. Spillers
• Beloved (1987) by Toni Morrison
• Victor Strecher talks about his SPACE framework inside the “Love 2.0: How to Fix Your Marriage, Part 2” Hidden Brain episode published October 6, 2025
• Cover 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.

Resources

• Register for free to the brand new workshop, “Erotically Engineer Your Paid Creative Offering”: https://www.seedaschool.com/offer
• Subscribe to the Seeda School Substack: ⁠https://seedaschool.substack.com/⁠
• Follow Ayana on Instagram: ⁠⁠@ayzaco⁠⁠
• Follow Ayana on Threads: ⁠⁠@ayzaco⁠⁠
• Follow Seeda School on Instagram: ⁠⁠@seedaschool⁠

Citations

• “White Supremacy Culture” by Tema Okun
• The Nap Ministry Post on Threads
• “The dream is the truth. Then they act and do things accordingly.” — Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God
• Cover 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.

Resources

• Register for free to the brand new workshop, “Erotically Engineer Your Paid Creative Offering”: https://www.seedaschool.com/offer
• Subscribe to the Seeda School Substack: ⁠https://seedaschool.substack.com/⁠
• Follow Ayana on Instagram: ⁠⁠@ayzaco⁠⁠
• Follow Ayana on Threads: ⁠⁠@ayzaco⁠⁠
• Follow Seeda School on Instagram: ⁠⁠@seedaschool⁠

Citations

• Cover 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.

Resources

• Learn 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/lab
• Subscribe to the Seeda School Substack: ⁠https://seedaschool.substack.com/⁠
• Follow Ayana on Instagram: ⁠⁠@ayzaco⁠⁠
• Follow Ayana on Threads: ⁠⁠@ayzaco⁠⁠
• Follow Seeda School on Instagram: ⁠⁠@seedaschool⁠

Citations

• “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.

Resources

• Register 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-workshop
• Subscribe to the Seeda School Substack: ⁠https://seedaschool.substack.com/⁠
• Follow Ayana on Instagram: ⁠⁠@ayzaco⁠⁠
• Follow Ayana on Threads: ⁠⁠@ayzaco⁠⁠
• Follow Seeda School on Instagram: ⁠⁠@seedaschool⁠

Citations

• Audre Lorde, "Uses of the Erotic, The Erotic As Power" (1978)
• Stack Overflow
• Cover 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)