You are the only one who can give yourself permission to pivot.
Let’s work together 1:1 on pivoting from the exhausting avoidance that comes with subconscious creative fear to learning how to collaborate with creative fear to take aligned action.
Let's Begin Again
Launch Your Newsletter in 8 Weeks
Over the course of 8 weeks, let’s work together 1:1 on seeding, deepening or returning to your public creative practice. We will uncover the ways perfectionism might be conveniently masking subconscious fears around worthiness, belonging and the faith our power demands.
The Worlbuilder's Way Compass
The Worldbuilder’s Way reveals the 4 seasons of creative initiation:
- Remembering
- Surrender
- Sacrifice
- Erotic Expression
Most of us stay stuck in seasons 2 and 3 for longer than we want by refusing to surrender control or refusing to give up what's no longer serving us. Through our work together we will unlock permission to pivot through writing exercises that cultivate self trust. Why? Cultivating self trust allows us to access safety inside surrender and clarifies what we are ready to give up in order to take aligned action, pivoting rooted in desire.
Session 1: Seed Your Structure
WEEKS 1-2
We learn to stop running from our ecstasy by giving our play structure. In this session we will create the ground for your play. We will determine your newsletter’s prompt, structure, theme so that you have a framework for organizing and communicating your ideas week to week. Each session has a week in between for creative implementation, integration and initiation through the homework of writing your own personal essay.
HOMEWORK: Write Newsletter #1 + Decide On Your Newsletter Name
Session 2: Practice Self Trust
WEEKS 3-4
Psychologist Paul Bloom describes play as “safe practice”, an essential choreography of aliveness for most human and non-human species. Oftentimes perfectionism is mistaken for rigor. Perfectionism stops us from starting, rigor invites us to try. The fear rooted in perfectionism is an indication of feeling unsafe inside our practice.
Inside this container of “safe practice” we will review and discuss the personal essay you wrote as homework for your newsletter based on the framework you created in session one. This is not a container for critique. This is a container for safe practice and sacred witnessing as you ground in your voice and honor your desire.
HOMEWORK: Write Newsletter #2 + Choose Your Newsletter Provider (Substack, Flodesk, Kit, Kajabi, Mailchimp, Ghost.io, ButtonDown, etc.)
Session 3: Rewrite Your Story
WEEKS 5-6
Building on the structure and self trust established in your first essay, we will review your Session 2 Homework. Inside this session we will observe and discuss how your voice, flow and point of view is emerging or changing. We will create a new story in alignment with the direction you are desiring to pivot and continue to gather insights from the personal narratives you’ve constructed. In this session we are asking, what stories are we ready to compost and release? What do we need to sacrifice to make room for the abundance on the other side of our pivot?
HOMEWORK: Write Newsletter #3 + Publish Newsletter #1 Using Your Chosen Newsletter Provider
Session 4: Celebrate Erotic Expression
WEEKS 7-8
We will reflect from inside your bi-weekly cadence of release and explore how it feels to have published the personal essay from our first session, giving yourself permission to be witnessed inside your pivot. This is how we activate erotic power. By creating your own medicine and allowing yourself to receive it first, your nervous system feels more supported as it regulates around being witnessed beyond the intimacy of this container.
Through our work together we’ve pulled subconscious fears into conscious awareness, allowing us to collaborate with them instead of avoid them. With the embodied understanding that your desire is more powerful than your fear, after our 8 weeks together you will have seeded a bi-weekly writing practice and launched a newsletter powered by the permission you finally gave yourself to pivot.
HOMEWORK: Use the 9-Week Seed A World Course, The Worldbuilder’s Way to Creative Marketing 12-Month Course and Library of Black Feminist Breathwork Meditations for continued support.
“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)
By The End Of 8 Weeks You Will...
Release Subconscious Fear
SEED A MAP TO YOUR DESIRE
Subconscious fear is simply made up of a series of stories we haven’t given ourselves space to question. Through our work together we will name the stories you wish to release and interrogate why you wish to release them. This “why” exposes the pearl of our desire, presenting an opportunity to collaborate with fear to actualize it.
Release Perfectionism
SEED A SERIES OF PERMISSION SLIPS
If I have your consent, I would like to talk to your inner child. Real quick, no one is coming to grade us. No one is coming to punish us. No one is coming to assess our value or worthiness based on how much we can do for them. We are the adults now. In childhood, there may have been safety in our smallness and self-sacrifice, but we can let that go now. There is no salvation in our suffering. There is no redemption in our external validation, because there is nothing to redeemed from. Our sense of self-worth is not something we need to outsource to survive anymore. If we returned to play as our purpose, how would we soften?
As the adults of our full selves, we are the only ones who can give ourselves permission to play. When we release perfection, we finally allow everything to be a poem, exactly as it should be.
Release Your Newsletter
SEED A PUBLIC CREATIVE PRACTICE
We remember no one wants our perfection but white supremacy and use the form of “the personal essay” as a vehicle for creative homecoming. Inside our work together, you will be invited to write 3 poetic stories about what limiting beliefs or outgrown narratives we’re choosing to compost and why.
Another definition of a humble person is one who reminds us just how big we are. Practicing in public is how we go big, how we expand the space of permission in all directions. Creating space, a beloved clearing, more space to transform, more space to breathe, more space to dream, more space to play.
“Do not leave the arena to the fools”
— Toni Cade Bambara
Enroll By July 17th, Get Started July 24th
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Book A Call To Discover Your Zone of Desire
Book a free Discovery Call if you’re ready to give yourself permission to pivot. Inside this call we will use the Element X Quadrant to locate the work rooted in your Zone of External Validation and strategize the ways you can spend more time working inside your Zone of Desire.
Feel ready, but have questions before enrolling into this container?
Book A CallPayment Plan
"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 Container Is For You If You Are In A Season of Transition
Most of the folks who join Seeda School are in a season of transition and are ready to give themselves permission to pivot. Whether that’s pivoting careers, pivoting out of a job, pivoting out of a business or simply pivoting out of an identities or ways of working that no longer serve them.
This container is for you if you feel locked into a career that no longer serves you, but pivoting to a creative practice feels unsafe and irresponsible.
This container is for you if you are a business owner who wants to pivot inside the way you serve your clients without compromising your income.
This container is for you if you have goals of releasing an income generating offer, but want to find your "why" and build an audience aligned with your desire first.
This container is for you if you want to become your own client first and discover the offer in deepest alignment with your true creative goals, not the goals rooted in external validation.
This container is for you if you want to build an audience while you have your job or current financial security so you're publishing from a sturdy place of truth instead of market trends.
This container is for you if your avoidance is becoming more exhausting than taking creative action, but you don't know where or how to start.
Let’s talk about where you are and where your audacious visions are daring you to go.
What's Included?
Inside of this 8-week, 1:1 coaching container you will leave with 4 recordings of your excavating coaching sessions, 3 newsletters to publish, a creative writing practice, and a launched platform for publishing your newsletters and building your audience for future income generating offers. But most importantly, you’ll leave with a reclaimed creative audacity that was waiting to be activated all along.
Four Bi-Weekly 1:1 Sessions
To support you with seeding a writing practice and launching your newsletter
The Seed A World Retreat
A 9-Week Course facilitating a self-guided creative retreat for developing an income generating offer
The Worldbuilders Way Toolbox
12 monthly workshops and guided meditations supporting you with spells and strategies for creative marketing aligned with your values
Meet Your Creative Coach, Guide, Thought Partner and Strategist
Hi, my name is Ayana and I'm happy you're here.
Creative initiation and homecoming are journeys of transformation I’ve been consistently choosing to embark on for as long as I can remember. Certainly over a decade. It comes in cycles.
We could start at recent examples like DISTRIKT Magazine, or Zaire Studio or Seeda Press or Cykofa, the self-published novella co-authored by creative writing software I engineered or Cykofian Ceramics or bitmapped suspension paintings, or the Seed A World Retreat. No matter where we start, every cycle is part of the same spiral — my life and my insistence on work worthy of my breath is the container that gives my practice coherence.
The spiral has it’s own logic in terms of space and time, but trusting it is how I facilitate interdisciplinary permission within myself, and when invited, facilitate it in others.
Interdisciplinary permission is my favorite form of permission to work with because it invites us to interrogate overlapping exterior systems of domination and those we’ve internalized in our own bodies. Interdisciplinary permission asks, what if nothing was off limits? This question is at the scale of imagination we need if we are going to locate the work worthy of our breath and build new worlds.
As I said, the spiral has a quantum logic all its own but 2020 was definitely an inflection point. That’s the year I decided to quit my job in tech, separate with my partner at the time and move into a family owned home in Dawn, Virginia, USA to start this business. The land didn’t have wifi but it was plugged up in a different way. This was land my ancestors were enslaved on, then became free on and decided to stay, with the understanding that freedom and safety are things we make together and tend to daily. Not things we must earn.
I lived on that land with family as neighbors for a 5 mile radius for 2 years. I jokingly call it the education an MFA could’ve never gave me but the truth was this was ancestral homecoming. This was spiritual initiation, this was resuscitation through grief work and creative practice inviting me to release all the stories of safety I was clinging to.
The land, my community and the self trust cultivated through my writing practice taught me everything I needed to know, exactly when I needed to know it.
A 3-month sabbatical, turned into 5 years and counting through Cykofa and the Seed A World Retreat. From a house without wifi in rural Virginia to a six-figure business, I can report: surrendering to the spiral of interdisciplinary permission certainly isn’t the “safest” thing I’ve done but it is the pivot that brought me back home.
Photograph by Stephen Miller
WebsiteWhy Now?
You're ready to seed, deepen or return to your creative practice, you just don't want to do it alone.
You’re longing for a cadence of creating beyond the logics of social media and the metrics of capitalism. You want to engage your future audience and community with, beyond, before the algorithm. You want to give yourself the gift of an archive and leave breadcrumbs for generations forward and back — to find you, to find us — as you find yourself.
You’ve lived long enough to know locating your desire and answering the call is the first step and every step after that is just the practice. In the face of so much uncertainty, change and generative transformation, the groundwork of planting seeds in the everyday and sharing the harvest through our writing week to week, is perhaps the only practice we can control.
Book A CallToni Morrison on The Permission to Express Erotic Wildness
“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.
Enroll By July 17th, Get Started July 24th
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FAQs
Question not covered below? Feel free to reach out at [email protected] for clarification before booking a Discovery Call!
