You are far too creative to be waiting on a "yes" from outside yourself. The only "yes" you need is your own.
Let’s work together 1:1 on expanding time spent inside your Zone of Desire through seeding your newsletter, selling your income generating offer or systemizing your existing creative offer for recurring revenue.
Say Yes
Why Are You Reading This?
A SEEDA SCHOOL MANIFESTO
You are a worldbuilder who understands…
The mysterious artist archetype is tired. We can’t pay you if we can’t find you.
Being solely dependent on sources outside of our creative practice to fund our creative practice is a not the most erotic strategy.
Surrendering our entire financial reality to brand deals, art institutions, film production companies, record labels, publishers or universities is no longer acceptable.
Having our material survival hinging on the health of empire is a non-negotiable. A hard line. A boundary. An erotic no.
Access to our own breath is no longer up for debate on the congress or conference floor.
We may not feel ready, but we are prepared to breathe by any means necessary.
"I Sell the Shadow to Support the Substance"
— Sojourner Truth (1864)
But How?
THE 3 WORLDBUILDING COACHING PATHS INSIDE SEEDA SCHOOL
Seed A Practice
PATH 1: LAUNCH A NEWSLETTER
Seed a public creative practice through, what we call inside 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.
In Path 1: Seed A Practice you will receive support for navigating public pivots in real time. Together we will remember your desire is more powerful than your fear through creating 3 draft dispatches you're logistically and energetically ready to publish. You won’t just be writing, you’ll be transforming through your writing.
Sometimes the body writes what it doesn’t yet know how to say and vice versa which is why we’ll be developing both your writing skills and oratory power to locate your voice inside the safe intimacy of this 1:1 container.
Sell An Offer
PATH 2: LAUNCH AN INCOME GENERATING CREATIVE OFFER
Take us to the juiciest, most expansive version of the world you’re building. Is it a schoolhouse on ancestral land? A bed and breakfast in your hometown for writer’s retreats? A museum ran by the kids of your block? Close your eyes, what do you see, taste, smell, hear? Imagine you are inside the physical manifestation of the world you’re building — where whatever you want to feel free enough to do in this moment is completely permissible. Take us there.
What are you rushing to touch? What are we doing together inside this world, this physical manifestation of your offer? Are we learning, resting, creating, eating, dancing, some unanticipated combination of all five?
In Path 2: Sell An Offer we will use the activities that unfold inside this visualization, this world you’re imagining to inspire the offer we will develop together. An offer you will feel prepared to sell using the sacred sales skills you'll learn inside this container.
Systemize Your Business
PATH 3: LAUNCH A SALES STRATEGY
Are you launching a new offer every 3 months? Are you launching the same offer with vastly different revenue outcomes? Are you done with trading time for money? Are you realizing beyond launching a single offer, you want to build a business, a school, a museum, an institution an organization for the next world?
In Path 3: Systemize Your Business we create a marketing strategy and repeatable sales system for generating recurring revenue you can make financial plans with and fund the audacious worlds you are actualizing.
Your visions are big, because you are big. Your ambition isn't a trauma response, it's an appropriate response to the scale of your desire. In Path 3: Systemize Your Business we don't shy away from taking up the space our power demands. We view it as an invitation into erotic skill development — a summoning to our growth edge, where we feel most alive.
Why Now?
Because we are collectively standing on the business of our breath all at the same time. We understand everything we spend our money on is a vote for our future and we want to spend our money with you.
Sacred Sales Principles
PRINCIPLE 001
Sales is not cringe, cynicism is. We can't pay you if we can't find you. Sales is a sacred invitation into your practice and all it has to offer us. Invite us in.
PRINCIPLE 002
Sales is self-regard. Experimenting with creative ways to welcome resources into your practice is responsible stewardship of your ancestral inheritance.
PRINCIPLE 003
Sales is storytelling. We remember a story more deeply, more sensorially, than we remember an ad. Ads are old world. Stories of our ancient future are now. Approach your sacred sales invitations like you do your art.
PRINCIPLE 004
Sales is erotic. When we are inside the sacred ritual of being sold an offer by an artist we respect and trust, it feels full of dignity and wet with permission. Here is where we all expand, remembering just how big we are.
PRINCIPLE 005
Sales is sincere. You don’t have to be the loudest in the room, but we do have to believe you. And the only way we’ll believe you is if you believe yourself.
PRINCIPLE 006
Sales is worldbuilding. Your offer is a proposal for a new way of learning, working, being and relating. Invite us into your proposal. Give us the opportunity to imagine and practice inside the world not as it is, but as it could be.
“For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. And this fact is only threatening to those women who still define the master’s house as their only source of support.”
— Audre Lorde, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House” (1979)
Money isn’t the "master’s tool", capitalism is. Monetizing our creativity doesn't compromise the integrity of our practice, not being clear on our values does.
“The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings. It is an internal sense of satisfaction to which, once we have experienced it, we know we can aspire. For having experienced the fullness of this depth of feeling and recognizing its power, in honor and self-respect we can require no less of ourselves.”
— Audre Lorde, "Uses of the Erotic, The Erotic As Power" (1978)
The Investment
Limited Seats
$1,800
Payment Plan Available
Register for The Worldbuilding Workshop
Seed A World Rooted in the Truth of Your Desire
AUGUST 19, 2025 @ 12PM EST
Inside this workshop we will use the Element X Quadrant to locate the work rooted in your Zone of Validation vs. your Zone of Desire. Then we will explore 3 ways to expand time spent inside your Zone of Desire through seeding your own newsletter, selling your own creative offer or systemizing your existing creative offer for recurring revenue.
Payment Plan
4 Weekly Payments Of
$500
Limited Seats
"It’s been so incredibly powerful to see the way each prompt, each assignment, each framework, in such a short amount of time, brings the threads of my practice into harmony and makes it so the universe can clearly respond. I can’t even count the number epiphanies I’ve had since I’ve started working with you. Thank you."
Ravon Ruffin, Founder of Citation Studio
This 1:1 Creative Incubator Is For You If...
You have been away from your creative practice for a while and want to come back home to your creative spirit through a newsletter.
PATH 1 WAS DESIGNED FOR YOU
You're done with being 100% financially dependent on brand deals, art institutions, industry gatekeepers or universities. You desire to develop a creative offer you can sell to "turn the facet on" inside your practice whenever it needs a cash infusion.
PATH 2 WAS DESIGNED FOR YOU
You have an exsisting offer you want to scale into a business generating recurring revenue you can make financial plans and build worlds with.
PATH 3 WAS DESIGNED FOR YOU
What's Included?
Inside of this 8-week, 1:1 coaching container you will leave with 4 recordings of your excavating coaching sessions. Along with 3 newsletters to publish, an income generating offer to sell or a marketing strategy to execute for recurring revenue, depending on the coaching path you choose. But most importantly, you’ll leave with reclaimed audacity and trust in your creative practice that was waiting to be re-activated all along.
Four Bi-Weekly 1:1 Sessions
To support you with seeding a writing practice, developing an income generating offer or creating a custom marketing plan and sales cycle.
The Seed A World Retreat
A 9-Week Course facilitating a self-guided creative retreat for launching a newsletter, developing an income generating offer and scaling to replace your primary source of income.
The Worldbuilders Way Toolbox
12 monthly workshops and guided meditations supporting you with spells and strategies for creative marketing aligned with your financial goals and your values.
Meet Your Worldbuilding Coach
Hi, my name is Ayana Zaire Cotton and I'm happy we found eachother.
I help creators build businesses. I coach worldbuilders who are tired of waiting.
Inside Seeda School we remember, just as we experiment with many methods and techniques in our creative practice, we can experiment with many methods and techniques for making money.
What if we didn't have to wait on a brand deal, art institution, film production company, record label, publisher or university to say "yes" to our ideas in order to actualize them? What if the only "yes" we needed was our own?
I have 10+ years of experience launching art projects that doubled as businesses and learned a ton along the way. Most of which I teach inside of Seeda School where we work together to discover and develop your income generating creative offer.
My mission is to help make "starving artist" an oxymoron.
Whether you're done with being financially dependent on industry gatekeepers of the old world and want to create an income generating offer, have been away from your creative practice for a while and desire a creative homecoming through publishing your own newsletter or have an existing offer you want to scale into a business — the first step is always saying "yes".
Let's work together on giving form to your "yes".
Photograph by Stephen Miller. Custom workwear created by Ayana Zaire Cotton.
WebsiteWhat Else Is There To Do?
THERE'S NOTHING LEFT TO DO BUT WORLDBUILD
As a worldbuilder, you dream of building businesses, institutions, systems and economies for the next world. You are engaged in building and maintaining creative shelter for us all as the old world crumbles around us.
As a worldbuilder, you understand attracting resources, financial and otherwise, doesn't compromise our work — not being in alignment with our values does. You are eager to step into responsible stewardship by inviting financial resources into your practice; understanding this allows us to dream inside the worlds you're building long enough to actualize them.
If someone imagined and actualized the old world as we know it, what's stopping us from imagining and actualizing otherwise?
This is creative initiation. This is dreaming at the scale of worldbuilding: remembering your desire, surrendering to your power, sacrificing the old world and practicing erotic expression toward the next world.
What else is there to do?
Saying "Yes" To Erotic Expression
“They express either an effort of the will or a freedom of the will. It's all about choosing. Though granted there's an enormous amount of stuff one cannot choose. But if you own yourself, you can make some types of choices, take certain kinds of risks. There's a wildness that they have, a nice wildness. It has bad effects in society such as the one in which we live. It's pre-Christ in the best sense. It's Eve. When I see this wildness gone in a person, it's sad. This special lack of restraint, […] but when you take away the vocabulary of denigration, what you have is somebody who is fearless and who is comfortable with that fearlessness. It's not about meanness. It's a kind of self-flagellant resistance to certain kinds of control, which is fascinating. Opposed to accepted notions of progress, the lock-step life, they live in the world unreconstructed and that's it.”
— Toni Morrison in Black Women Writers At Work edited by Claudia Tate, p. 125-126.
What Seeda School Worldbuilders Are Saying
“Ayana Zaire Cotton, is, to me, a being whose radically tender ways of loving, teaching, and questioning mirror the revolutionary labours of love of bell hooks, Octavia Butler, Toni Cade Bambara, and the list goes on. Through Seeda School, Ayana plants seeds of responsible hope, of revolutionary reimagining(s), and most importantly, of communal (and personal) pursuit(s) of the erotic into the body, mind, and soul of whoever has the chance to waltz with their teachings, with their being. Being a student of Seeda School is constantly being reminded that one’s desires are needs, and therefore that we — as people — have the power to materialize the conditions we yearn to have in order to thrive, to be free. Receiving teachings and exchanging with Ayana and the lovely beings who tap into their care-full-y crafted [offers] is a blessing that keeps on giving, and I trust that this will remain the case in near and distant futures.”
Gloria-Sherryl François (G L O W Z I), Fall 2023
"11/10 recommend joining The Retreat with Ayana Zaire Cotton. It was deeply transformative: from re-rooting into new affirmations that better support our world-building to having the guidance and community support to actually build the thing. In 9 weeks!
For years, I've worked on creative projects but avoided creating a framework because I was afraid it would feel too contrived for both me and my clients. The Retreat changed that: I now feel clear-minded and excited about guiding others through my process (I have a process!). I can't believe what we were able to create in 9 weeks together, piece by piece, week by week.
The community was one of my favorite parts of The Retreat: it felt living, breathing, and magical. The poetry! The bookish fanfare! The expressions via multi-media! Every week, I felt completely inspired by how the fellow retreaters were translating their interests, desires, and visions into offerings rooted in their rituals, too.
Ayana's teaching structure, content, and language left me feeling focused and encouraged—two vital things you need when you're world-building—after every class, every session, every week. I loved that their entire approach was informed by Black feminist teachings and guides that moved us through each topic. I come back to our Worldbuilder's Handbook daily, if not for the templates, then for the affirmations.
They've created an incredibly important, helpful, and inspiring space to participate in if you want to deeply resource your own world-building. Again, 11/10, y'all."
Karly Borden, Spring 2024
"After grinding for over a decade in the nonprofit sector, I needed support building a viable, self-directed career path to generate income rooted in my values and creativity. The Seed A World Retreat offered both the practical tools and community encouragement I was seeking to heed the creative call I have been feeling. Now I look forward to sharing this work that feels personally terrifying and necessary, and I believe in my ability to do it using the Seeda School tools. During the retreat, Ayana held space with such admirable curiosity and generosity! If you want an experienced, informed, Black feminist, imaginative hype-person to put a loving battery in your back, sign up for the Seed A World Retreat immediately."
— Jasmyne Gilbert, Winter 2024
"The Seeda World Retreat has been instrumental in bringing my coaching program to light. When I joined, I had just drafted my framework and had a fuzzy idea for my offer. Every single week of the Retreat helped me clarify and strengthen my initial ideas. It felt like starting with a block of marble and then sculpting and chiseling until what was truly important emerged.
I loved the structure of the Retreat. It has everything you need to birth your offer and business. We had the tools and time to work autonomously and in-depth. Then, we had our amazing Open Studio Calls, where the communal revolutionary spirit made its magic. In between, the asynchronous support via Discord and email was a guiding light and helped me feel never alone.
Today, just two weeks after the Retreat's end, I started softly launching my program. I may not have been here without the Retreat!
More than this, the 9 weeks together have been a time of creative expansion and personal and political evolution for me. I'll always be immensely grateful to Ayana and the marvelous human beings I was honored to have by my side during this journey."
Giada Centofanti, Coach at Care to Impact, Spring 2024
"Words cannot express enough how grateful I am for the blessing that is both Ayana and Seeda School. Enrolling in the retreat was an immediate yes for me — where the weekly meditations and facilitations from Ayana felt like sacred invitations to return — return to community, return to self, return to Spirit, return to our gardens. Like The Artist's Way, but through a decolonial Black feminist lens, I continue to find Seeda School and its Retreat as an evergreen gift and artistic nourishment that, as a result, enriches the tending of my spiritual and literary practice — The Conflicted Womanist.”
Chinyere Erondu, Fall 2023
“Being led through the Seed A World Retreat by Ayana offered me the sea I know I can rely on to float me above all that attempts to drown me. Each of the nine action steps helped to buoy my practice & deep sense of embodiment utilizing the full power of Audre Lorde's uses of the erotic.
Ayana's excavating groundwork reminds us that the ability to float already resides in the power of our expansive breath. If we can dream it, then it is safe to trust that it is already done for not just ourselves but folks dreaming of the work we are producing.
The world you desire to build already exists within you & the worldbuilding framework helped me realize that our work can support so many others if we break through the fertile ground where we stand alone. In fact, through the worldbuilding framework, Ayana facilitates that we are never truly alone because the Sankofa sensibility circularly connects us to our past, present, & future.
If you're ready to invite folks to wade into the sea of your worldbuilding & transformative offer then sign up! Trust that when it rains it pours & your abundant desires will grow & be witnessed by the outstretched limbs of folks in the Seeda School community with you.”
Kay Brown author of Assemblage: Baby's Breath, Spring 2024
“It was such a pleasure being part of Seeda School retreat and be in community with a cohort of talented, caring and loving souls. This offering is a soothing and refreshing balm to each and everyone wanting to delve deeper into their inner being to bring out unknown treasures to the world. Ayana, the creator and facilitator of the retreat is its living proof. They are a bottomless well of inspiring, exciting, creative, experimental and spirit-led knowledge and I’m deeply grateful for their work and their willingness to share with us all that they know with so much grace and care.”
Keren Lasme, Fall 2023
“I find it difficult to express in words just how impactful the Seeda School Retreat was for me as a clayworker, herbalist, teacher, and activist. Seeda School contextualized our work as multidisciplinary artists in the revolution and helped us all to abandon mentalities of scarcity that are upheld by colonialism and white supremacy. Ayana has put so much time, effort, and care into every piece of her retreat and it shows. Even as someone who already had a creative offer established, I gained so much wisdom from the content and discussions that I am confident will only improve the success of my offers, along with one of the most tender, caring, and uplifting communities that anyone could ask for. I am infinitely grateful for the work Ayana does in bolstering us artists and creating containers for the radical dreaming of better worlds.”
Taylor Rae, Fall 2023
“The Seed A World Retreat offered by Seeda School was an invitation to revisit the primordial womb; a safe and warm place for meaningful growth and expansion of our deepest desires. Ayana's passion and deep community care shone through as she guided/facilitated the cohort to transform the seeds of our deepest desires into tangible and beautiful offerings to the world. The carefully curated Retreat Workbook allowed us to seed, tend to, grow (and prune when necessary) our ideas into structured next steps. I'm so happy to have had the opportunity to commune with other like-minded, community-oriented folk who share the same passion for building worlds that provide ample space and opportunity for radical, free existence and communion.”
— Yen C, Fall 2023
"The Seeda School experience has been such an affirming and generative experience for me. I am often seeking out classes and opportunities to learn new skills, be in process with my peers, and engage in self-development and personal growth. My experience with Seeda School, via Ayana's generous facilitation and framework, felt so deeply aligned with my values, my creative praxis, and my worldview. Guided by the brilliant offerings of Black feminists, Ayana has cultivated such a sacred space with an inspiring cohort of people. Since participating in the cohort, I have revisited the curriculum, and it continues to be a transformative guide as I chart my path forward."
— Jessica Valoris, Winter 2024
"The Seeda School is unlike anything I have experienced before. It's a mix of personal, intimate, and necessary inner groundwork, visioning for the future, and practical tools for business and financial sustainability, all within a liberatory framework of black feminism and worldbuilding. I found it to be such a necessary container for reflecting, visioning, developing ideas, dreaming up possibilities and then bringing them to life with the many tools that are offered throughout the course. Ayana is a brilliant and generous facilitator, and has thoughtfully curated a safe community of support among like-minded artists and creatives. I am telling everyone I know about Seeda School as I feel like all interdisciplinary artists and creatives need this kind of facilitated retreat experience to bring their ideas to life and offer them to the world."
Steph Rue, Winter 2024
“The violence is endless under empire and white supremacy, but so is our capacity to imagine new worlds and to love on each other” – a thought Ayana offered us early on, amid the grief, heartbreak and rage at the apocalypses taking place close and far, is also the best summation of this heart-and-possibilities-expanding retreat. Under Ayana’s effervescent, loving, wise guidance and expansive vision, these 9 weeks were a space for us to practice loving ourselves – breathing through fear, taking our desires, curiosities and oddities seriously, seeing a divine throughline in our journeys, choosing to start without having all the information – in order to answer the call from our people, past and present, and bring about the futures we need today. I told everyone I care about of the gift that is the Seed A World Retreat, looking forward to revisiting our session recordings and completing the worksheets (that I know my life depends on). I am so grateful I followed my intuition (and desire!) and chose to invest in myself through this course. I am grateful and forever charged/changed by this offering, that Ayana had dreamt up and powerfully-beautifully woven into being.”
— Aisha Jandosova, Fall 2023
“Ayana has created a retreat that is immensely valuable. Seeda School has been able to anticipate needs that I was uncovering myself with richness and depth in ways I never expected! I wholeheartedly recommend this retreat for creatives ready to immerse themselves in their hearts desires.”
— Vanessa Murchie, Fall 2023
"Seeda School gathered me and all the threads of my creative practice. I came in with an idea and left with a digital course rooted in ease and pleasure. The workbook is beautifully laid out to include a framework for building out a curriculum, sustainable marketing plan, and sales funnel. Ayana's affirmations each week are a remedy to the uncertainty I experience beginning something new. This retreat has been grounding and deeply supportive."
Brandi Cheyenne Harper, Winter 2024
“This Seed a World Retreat has been been such an eye-opening journey that has shown me that I don't have to fear claiming the things that I am because the current world that I participate in says that I can not be all the things that I am. Ayana, it is clear what you want to put forward - a world where everyone is fully themselves and living in a world of love. I felt that throughout the experience, and felt as if I was being asked to take a chance in believing in and being a part of that type of world - a world built from love. Through a facilitator of love, a community of love, and words/frameworks of love, I felt affirmed and empowered to go on an be the interdisciplinary researcher, director, curator, and writer that I want to be. I feel as though I have so much of the foundational tools and essence from Seed a World and I can wait to launch, and see all the other worlds that are launched from this beautiful retreat.”
— Bo Dautruche, Fall 2023
“Through the Seed A World Retreat, Ayana offers rich, juicy, tangible frameworks for attendees to tap into our deepest desires so that we may then be led by them in our endeavors to develop and share values-driven creative offers. Each retreat session was equal parts meditation, sermon, and playdate. It was an invaluable experience to imagine within a world where Black feminism was the bedrock, where attendees could start replacing self-rejection and scarcity with self trust and generosity, where showing up fully for our practices would sustain our livelihoods in the ways we dream of and deserve. I’m eternally grateful and excited for how what I learned in the Seed A World Retreat will propel me into a more expansive and abundant future.”
— Dkéama Alexis, Fall 2023
"Seeda School is the most nourishing, electric, brilliant, inspired, held space I have been lucky enough to be a part of. I entered the retreat from the depths of a creative winter, and Ayana built the container for a true and revelatory spring. She has architected the balance of structure, rigorous tools, juicy inspiration, accountability, and relational support that will help you (finally) recognize and birth the thing that has been calling you. And more than that, Seeda is the invitation to manifest the luscious version of a life you didn’t know you were allowed to have."
Olivia Vagelos, Winter 2024
"Ayana has created a thriving Black feminist counterpublic that combines the speculative imaginary with the power of presence and action to manifest worlds that exist outside of and beyond oppressive systems, reminding us that we don’t have to cut off any parts of ourselves in the work.
As a participant in the Seed a World Retreat over the past year, I have found that accepting Ayana’s invitation into communal worldbuilding has completely transformed the way I think about both engaging with and funding my creative practice. Their gentle invocation around returning consistently to our work to build a nurturing cadence of outreach via the weekly dispatch, with its focus on curiosity and research, as well as their guidance on developing an income-generating offer has shown me the value of cultivating a creative ecosystem where all parts feed into and nourish each other.
I came for the emphasis on grounding our art in interdisciplinary wildness and opacity. I stay for the soft weave of community that grounds us all together in what Alexis Pauline Gumbs calls “an interdependent ceremony.” Ayana and my fellow worldbuilders are holding each other through this time of escalating genocide and rising fascism worldwide and together we are creating full universes of possibility to, in Christina Sharpe’s words, “imagine otherwise.” Join us?"
Elliott Silverstein, Spring 2024
FAQs
Question not covered below? Feel free to reach out at [email protected] for clarification before enrolling!
