Register for Erotic Engineering 101
Inside this workshop we'll do three things:
1️⃣ Locate Your Zones
We’ll locate your Zone of Desire in contrast with your Zone of Competence. This helps us get clarity on your fear and income-generating opportunities.
2️⃣ Find Your Framework
Next we’ll create a name for your practice, progress or method; A way of working that is uniquely yours. We’ll name your framework of congruence.
3️⃣ Discover Your Offer
Lastly, we’ll discover the type of offer you want to create using your framework.
Join us October 13th, 2026 at 12pm EST
Erotic Engineering is the art and science of creating frameworks for income-generating offers. Learn how to create yours in this Erotic workshop.
“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)
Photographer: Jack Mitchell
The Erotic Engineering Retreat
A 6-week retreat for creating, selling and stewarding an erotic worldbuilding offer.
6
Weeks starting October 19th, 2026
6
Workshops every Tuesday at 12pm EST
6
Open Studios every Thursday at 12PM EST
1
Income Generating Offer
Join us inside The Erotic Engineering Retreat where you will learn the spells and strategies of black feminist worldbuilding to create, market and sell an income generating offer aligned with your values and creative practice.
Want to learn more about the retreat before enrolling? Join us in the Erotic Engineering 101 Workshop.
Create
Inside the Erotic Engineering Retreat, first you will create an income-generating offer and framework using a combination of your creative skills and desires.
Sell
Next you'll learn storytelling strategies to sell your offer using a combination of creative dispatches and an editorial calendar you can commit to.
Steward
Lastly, you will leave the retreat with an income-generating offer, framework and sales strategy. You'll emerge from the retreat understanding creating an income stream you control is responsible stewardship over your ancestral gifts.
The Erotic Engineering fall retreat runs from October 19th to December 11th, 2026, with live sessions every Tuesday and Thursday at 12PM EST.
November 23rd to the 27th will be a rest week.
The Erotic Engineering Compass
Common meanings and uses for the word “compass”: navigational tool, drawing instrument, boundaries or scope, musical range, moral code.
The Retreat
The Erotic Engineering Retreat is informed by a 6-step black feminist worldbuilding framework designed to help you create, sell and steward an income-generating offer without severing your Erotic spirit from your labor.
Rooted in storytelling and speculative practice, this compass takes the form of a circle so you can return to it again and again as your practice evolves. Instead of a one-time launch formula, this is a worldbuilding technology you can practice inside of across a lifetime. Across 6 modules, you’ll move through 3 essential milestones that transform desire into sustainable income: Identify Your Framework, Offer Your Framework, Sell Your Framework.
The Worldbuilder's Handbook
The Worldbuilder’s Handbook is your companion through the retreat and long after it ends.
Built directly from Seeda School’s worldbuilding framework and informed by Black feminist praxis, this handbook guides you through all 9 modules with depth and precision. Each chapter includes worksheets, templates, toolkits, frameworks, checklists and prompts designed to help you develop, market and sell your creative offer step by step.
It’s a living tool you’ll return to as your work expands, your income grows and your world evolves.
The Worldbuilder’s Handbook supports you in building an offer that can hold your desire, your body and your labor now, and for years to come.
WEEK 1
Remember Your Desire
With the help of Audre Lorde’s “Uses of The Erotic, The Erotic As Power” we learn how to stop outsourcing our direction to algorithms, urgency or external validation and reconnect with the desire that can actually sustain our labor. By the end of this week, you know what you’re building and why it’s worth protecting.
WEEK 2
Map Your Ecosystem
We study along Akwaeke Emezi’s Dear Senthuran: A Black Spirit Memoir in order to do a Creative Ecosystem Audit and draw a skills map with divine audacity. You see your skills, experiences and curiosities as a coherent ecosystem instead of a list of unfinished projects. You leave this week knowing what stays sacred, what’s ready to be shared and what can responsibly generate income.
WEEK 3
Decide On Offer
In Week 3 we allow Octavia Butler to inspire us to make our own worlds and write ourselves in. You make a clear, grounded decision about what you’re selling without self-betrayal or over-thinking. By the end of this week, you have an offer that honors your capacity, your politics and your desire for creative agency related to your income.
WEEK 4
Create The Culture
Through a bell hooks "love ethic" you define the values, boundaries and relational norms of the world you’re building so your work attracts aligned participants. This week replaces people-pleasing with discernment and makes your offer feel safe for you to steward and safe for others to participate in.
WEEK 5
Clarify The Characters
We imagine our dream offer participants like N.K. Jemisin imagines characters. You get crystal clear on who this work is for, and who it’s not, without trying to be everything for everyone. By the end of this week, you know how to speak directly to the people who are ready to invest, instead of anticipate free labor.
WEEK 6
Create The Framework
We study Torkwase Dyson’s practice of “Black Compositional Thought” to learn how to communicate our work in a way that feels honest, compelling and grounded in our lived experience. This week teaches you how to build your own framework and gives you language that builds trust, making asking for money feel like a easeful part of the practice.
WEEK 7
Systemize The Sales
We study Legacy Russell’s manifesto on Glitch Feminism to inform our choices in software platforms and systems that support our online practices and our bodies. By the end of this week, you have a simple, sustainable sales cycle reflecting your desires and integrity.
WEEK 8
Commit To Cadence
In search of ceremony we study the practice of Alexis Pauline Gumbs to establish a rhythm for sharing our work that feels devotional rather than depleting. This week replaces exhausting output cycles with consistency that compounds trust, audience and revenue over time.
WEEK 9
Invite The People
Just as Toni Morrison invited her readers into her stories, you will practice inviting people into your work, directly, clearly and without apology. By the end of this week, you'll have an offer you’re ready to invite the people into and welcome money without shame, perfectionism, over-promising and over-delivering.
The Retreat Outcome
You will emerge from this retreat with an offer, yes.
But what's more is you'll emerge with your own worldbuilding framework for turning your desire into income you control.
This is how creative lives of refusal are built.
The Worldbuilder's Handbook
The Worldbuilder’s Handbook is your companion through the retreat and long after it ends.
Built directly from Seeda School’s worldbuilding framework and informed by Black feminist praxis, this handbook guides you through all 9 modules with depth and precision. Each chapter includes worksheets, templates, toolkits, frameworks, checklists and prompts designed to help you develop, market and sell your creative offer step by step.
It’s a living tool you’ll return to as your work expands, your income grows and your world evolves.
The Worldbuilder’s Handbook supports you in building an offer that can hold your desire, your body and your labor now, and for years to come.
The Worldbuilder's Handbook
The Worldbuilder’s Handbook is your companion through the retreat and long after it ends.
Built directly from Seeda School’s worldbuilding framework and informed by Black feminist praxis, this handbook guides you through all 9 modules with depth and precision. Each chapter includes worksheets, templates, toolkits, frameworks, checklists and prompts designed to help you develop, market and sell your creative offer step by step.
It’s a living tool you’ll return to as your work expands, your income grows and your world evolves.
The Worldbuilder’s Handbook supports you in building an offer that can hold your desire, your body and your labor now, and for years to come.
Every chapter of The Worldbuilder’s Handbook features the black feminist whose work we study inside the retreat to build new worlds. Pictured from left to right: Audre Lorde, Akwaeke Emezi, Octavia Butler, bell hooks, N.K. Jemisin, Torkwase Dyson, Legacy Russell, Alexis Pauline Gumbs and Toni Morrison.
What Seeda School Worldbuilders Are Saying
"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, 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
“What if it is not an experiment, this creative life of refusal. This rarely institutionally-funded disloyal life of practice for a world as yet unnamable. This insistence on transformation when the bank account screams “conform.” What if this life as an independent experimental artist is not itself an independent experiment? What if it’s an interdependent ceremony?”
— Alexis Pauline Gumbs, "The God of Everyday", Topical Cream
The Seed A World Retreat Is For You If…
You’ve been the one who holds everything together for everyone else and you’re starting to wonder what your care could build if it were finally resourced.
You’re tired of being brilliant, principled and perpetually precarious. You know that clarity around your income generating skills is part of ending that cycle.
You know how to work hard, stay late and give generously, but you’re ready to release the belief that exhaustion is the entry fee for belonging.
You’ve undercharged not because your work lacks value, but because your care has been so expansive you forgot to include yourself in it.
Your devotion to black feminist values runs deep, yet you know the value of your labor has outpaced your current compensation. You are ready to stop treating money as a "necessary evil" and start relating to it as a site of ancestral stewardship, provision and futurity.
You understand your price is a boundary, not a virtue signal and you're ready to price your offerings with integrity that honors your skills, time and material needs.
You are deeply committed to collective liberation and understand prioritizing sustainability is not a betrayal of that commitment, but its continuation.
You are ready to replace self-sacrifice with an income ecosystem and transform your devotion from a site of depletion into a site of power.
You are ready to speak about money with the same militancy, clarity and honesty you bring to your art and practice of liberation.
I know it feels virtuous to say “I don’t have a dream job, because I don’t dream of labor”. But what if we did?…
You’ll call in the most erotic job title and description you can imagine and we’ll use that data to get to work.
The Seed A World Retreat
Seed A World at Your Own Pace and Power
Seed A World in alignment with your capacity, timezone and learning style.
Join us inside this flexible 9-week retreat where you'll develop, structure and sell your income generating creative offer aligned with your desire and values.
Inside this retreat you will learn how to practice through a Sankofa sensibility to self and how you serve your community.
We'll use the creative skills that you already have, the desire that refuses to leave and the ancestral inheritance that has always been yours to steward.
The Seed A World Retreat helps you:
- Clarify your desire and your values
- Develop your income-generating offer in alignment with your desire and your values
- Create and launch a sacred sales system in alignment with your desire and your values
Enroll
Seed A World Retreat Payment Plans
Enroll using these payment options and receive access to all the support and resources listed above!
What Seeda School Worldbuilders Are Saying
“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
Meet Your Worldbuilding Guide
I’m Ayana Zaire Cotton (she/they), a black feminist worldbuilder, writer, erotic engineer and business architect devoted to helping black feminist artists, academics and activists build lives and livelihoods rooted in desire. My work lives at the intersection of spell and strategy, poetry and plumbing, eroticism and engineering. I don’t teach pedagogy I haven’t practiced. I teach from embodiment and the transformations, initiations and experiments that made my work sustainable, resourced and sovereign.
Through Seeda School, I support worldbuilders who are done relying on institutions, gatekeepers or permission slips from the old world. Together, we treat creative practice as non-negotiable ceremony and offer development as a pathway (out of many) to sustain our work on our own terms.
I help worldbuilders clarify their offers, develop values-aligned sales systems and build recurring revenue that funds their writing, research and worldmaking without sacrificing integrity, pleasure or political clarity.
For over a decade, I’ve launched art projects, social sculptures and speculative frameworks that doubled as businesses and books — circulating resources while staying rooted in desire. If you’re ready to stop outsourcing your power, step into self-agency and let your work be resourced by the people it’s for, this is an invitation to say "yes" to your offer and the world it makes possible.
Photograph by Stephen Miller. Custom workwear created by Ayana Zaire Cotton from her previous business, Zaire Studio.
Website
About Seeda School
Seeda School is located in Cykofa, a parallel universe suspended amongst the past and the future where cornrows are cryptography keys, data farms are data forests, the weaving loom is a computer and chain link fencing from demolished prisons is used as architectural membrane woven with plant life.
Seeda School is animated by a black feminist, abolitionist imagination.
We specialize in black feminist speculative practice, worldbuilding, business development and labor studies.
Our mission is to make revolution irresistible1 through the framework of black feminist worldbuilding.
Our vision is a generation of present, paid, powerhouses building infrastructures of mutual aid supported by cooperative labor.
SEED DATA
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“As a culture worker who belongs to an oppressed people my job is to make revolution irresistible.” ― Toni Cade Bambara, Conversations with Toni Cade Bambara (2012), edited by Thabiti Lewis
WHETHER YOU'RE BUILDING AN OFFER OR A BUSINESS, WE NEED IT.
"Business as usual" is collapsing. We need new offerings for the new world. What offering or business will you build for the worlds we need, not in the future, but now?
“Abolition is not absence, it is presence. What the world will become already exists in fragments and pieces, experiments and possibilities. So those who feel in their gut deep anxiety that abolition means knock it all down, scorch the earth and start something new, let that go. Abolition is building the future from the present, in all of the ways we can.”
— Ruth Wilson Gilmore
Worldbuilding Creative Offer Ideas
1:MANY OFFER
Take aspiring city-based gardeners through a 12-week journey of ideas, strategies and methods for establishing a gardening and food sovereignty practice at home and at the community level.
$1,111
ARTIFACT OFFER
Create a zine on how you created a mutual aid infrastructure of childcare supported by chosen family, neighbors and community members.
$10
1:1 OFFER
Combine your astrology practice with your years of experience with community facilitation and offer astrology readings introducing folks to their role and calling in collective liberation.
$500 PER READING
DONE FOR YOU SERVICE OFFER
Experienced facilitator with a growing disinterest in non-profit work? Offer community agreements consulting and leadership coaching on restorative justice practices for decision makers inside of organizations.
5-FIGURE MINIMUM ENGAGEMENT RATE
1:MANY OFFER
Public scholar with a Substack or Patreon and want to dive deeper with your community? Wrap your current research practice into a syllabus and create an annual membership with live discussion sessions, recommended readings and a national network of student organized, "pop-up" study groups in public libraries.
$3,000
1:MANY + ARTIFACT OFFER
A paid newsletter publishing a black sci-fi short story every week, culminating in a self-published book.
$7/MONTH
1:MANY OFFER
A 4-week collage course using childhood photos for collective healing and re-memory.
$475
1:MANY + DONE FOR YOU SERVICE OFFER
A professional development fellowship for black designers desiring intergenerational, interdisciplinary mentorship and skill-sharing.
$199/MONTH
1:MANY + ARTIFACT OFFER
An oral history podcast documenting the stories of your block. Each season culminates in a "Neighborhood Yearbook" featuring portraits of your neighbors, their stories, emergency contacts and mutual aid they can offer.
MONTHLY PODCAST SPONSORSHIP FROM LOCAL BUSINESSES
1:1 OFFER
Black feminist book doula services for industry experts working on their debut publication geared to politically engaged readers.
$10,000-$25,000
1:MANY OFFER
A 3-month Cooperative Economics business incubator offering organizational architecture and governance strategy for aspiring coop founders.
$5,000
1:MANY + DONE FOR YOU SERVICE OFFER
A hair braiding service inviting clients to use the length of time in the chair to free-write. Clients meet virtually once a month to share their writing.
$275-$575
“The grammar of black feminist futurity is a performance of a future that hasn’t happened yet but must. It is an attachment to a belief in what should be true, which impels us to realize that aspiration. It’s the power to imagine beyond current fact and to envision that which is not, but must be. It’s a politics of prefiguration that involves living the future now.”
— Tina Campt, “Quiet Soundings: The Grammar of Black Futurity”, Listening to Images (2017), p. 17.
Pictured: Grada Kilomba in Conversation with Tina Campt
What is the frequency of the payment plan?
Do you offer scholarships?
Do you offer refunds?
Is Seeda School open to non-Black worldbuilders?
What Seeda School Worldbuilders Are Saying
"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
“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
Chinyere Erondu, Fall 2023
"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.”
“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
Taylor Rae, 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.”
"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 both the Seed a World Retreat and the Treehouse 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
"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, Spring 2024
“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
