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)

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.

Resources

• Register for the free Worldbuilding Workshop to learn more about Seeda School’s 1:1 Coaching: https://www.seedaschool.com/coaching
• 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

• “Suicidal Ideation On The Subway: Taking Me To A World Beyond The Cul-De-Sac” by Ayana Zaire Cotton
• James 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-Ward
• Alexis Pauline Gumbs, “We didn’t come here to be right, we came here to love” in Stars and Stars with Isa
• Ocean Vuong in an interview with Sarah Ferguson for 7.30 ABC
• Cover 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.

Resources

• Let’s Work Together 1:1 On Launching Your Public Creative Practice in 8 Weeks (Enrollment Closes July 17th, 2025): https://www.seedaschool.com/coaching
• 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)
• 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.

Resources

• Let’s Work Together 1:1 On Launching Your Newsletter in 8 Weeks: https://www.seedaschool.com/coaching
• 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

• “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 Vedantam
• Alexis Pauline Gumbs on Finding Ceremony
• Zora Neale Hurston, “The Dream is the Truth” in Their Eyes Were Watching God
• nènè myriam konaté's Substack, Instagram and Manifest(o) Retreat
• Ocean 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.

Resources

• Let’s Work Together 1:1 On Your Creative Offer: https://www.seedaschool.com/coaching
• 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: 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.

Resources

• Learn More and Enroll into the Seed A World Retreat: https://www.seedaschool.com/program
• 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

• A Process for Finding Purpose: Do THIS to Build the Life You Want with Jay Shetty on the Mel Robbins Podcast
• The Combahee River Collective Statement
• Arthur 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 Nuwer
• Cover 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.

Resources

• Enroll in the Seed A World Retreat or Register for the Worldbuilding Workshop to Learn More: https://www.seedaschool.com/program
• 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

• The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House by Audre Lorde
• Karen M. Rose’s (IG: @empresskarenmrose) Libra Full Moon Post
• Alexis Pauline Gumbs on The Black Studies Podcast
• Cover Photo: “Anna Julia Cooper: Educator, Writer and Intellectual” (Source: National Museum of African American History and Culture)