The Powerhouse Portal
A 4-week private container for artists, academics & founders becoming the present, paid, powerhouses their work and audience have been waiting for.
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IMAGE: Torkwase Dyson, Liquid a Place, Desert X, Palm Desert
Learn More About The Powerhouse Portal
4
WEEKS
1:1
SESSIONS
$2,500
INVESTMENT
5
SPOTS
You don’t need more ideas.
You don’t need another workshop.
You don’t need to “learn marketing.”
You need to become the worldbuilder who can hold the life your desire is asking for.
The Powerhouse Portal exists for worldbuilders who are standing at the edge of a threshold between who they have been and who they know they are becoming.
This is not identity activation and sacred strategy for beginners.
This is not mindset work divorced from money.
This is not hustle culture wrapped in a black feminist framework or better aesthetics.
This is identity activation + business infrastructure for worldbuilders whose brilliance has outpaced their current container.
The Powerhouse Portal Is For You If…
You are an artist, academic or founder uninterested in relying on artist grants, the university or venture capital to financially fund your worldbuilding vision.
You are tired of being the best-kept secret in your field or community.
You feel the friction of living in a timeline and life that no longer match the audacious ambition you’re no longer afraid to admit.
You have a creative ecosystem of ideas, frameworks, and offerings, but no clear system to monetize them.
You are done externalizing your power, performing smallness, waiting for permission, or explaining yourself to funders who don’t share the lived experience of who your work serves.
You want private access to a guide who understands the power of transmuting fear into desire, ideas into money, and money into worlds.
You are ready to be taken seriously — including by yourself. You are ready to be a present, paid, powerhouse.
Beyond clarity, if you are craving creative initiation fit for a worldbuilding powerhouse — you’re in the right place.
The Real Problem Isn’t Strategy.
It’s Identity Lag.
Most worldbuilders stuck at an income plateau are not under-skilled.
They are under-embodied.
Their desire has outgrown their self-concept.
Their vision has outpaced their nervous system.
Their work is ready — but they are still negotiating with an old identity.
The Powerhouse Portal closes that gap.
The Scared House Identity vs. The Power House Identity1
Most people are trying to scale their work from a Scared House nervous system. The Powerhouse Portal teaches you how to rebuild the internal architecture first.
The Scared House
In many ways, what I call the “Scared Child House” is not an actual place — it is a somatic architecture. A psychic blueprint. A structure built by our younger selves who had to be strategic, intuitive, academically excellent and watchdog-sensitive just to stay safe
Your childhood home, especially one shaped by corporal punishment, emotional unavailability, eldest-daughter responsibility, and hypervigilance, wires the nervous system to equate:
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Visibility → Danger
Being seen feels exposing, risky, or unsafe.
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Desire → Disobedience
Wanting feels selfish, threatening, or wrong.
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Responsibility → Punishment
Responsibility feels heavy, forced, or resented.Â
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Needing → Burdening
Asking feels shameful or dangerous to relationships.Â
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Receiving → Risk
Money, praise, or support feel destabilizing.
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Expansion → Exposure
Growth triggers fear, hypervigilance, or collapse.
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Vulnerability → Violence
Openness once led to harm or punishment.
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This creates a Scared House internal architecture, where your body may be grown but your nervous system is still bracing.
Power House
A Power House internal architecture is not about bravado, dominance, or having it all figured out. It is what emerges when safety is restored to the body and desire is no longer treated as a threat.Â
In a Power House nervous system, your body learns that:
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Visibility → Safety + Influence
Being seen no longer feels like exposure — it feels like orientation, leadership, and connection.
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Desire → Direction
Wanting is not disobedience; it is information. Desire becomes a compass instead of a liability.
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Responsibility → Authority
Responsibility is no longer punishment — it is chosen stewardship over your life, work, and money.
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Needing → Relational Intelligence
Need is no longer shameful; it becomes a skill. You know how to ask, receive, and resource yourself.
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Receiving → Regulation
Money, support, pleasure, and praise no longer dysregulate you — they settle into the body as evidence of the incalculable value you offer through your existence2.
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Expansion → Capacity
Growth is not a threat; it is something your nervous system knows how to hold and metabolize.
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Vulnerability → Power
Openness no longer equals danger. Vulnerability becomes a site of intimacy, trust, and leadership.
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A Power House internal architecture allows your body to catch up to your vision.
You are no longer bracing for impact.
You are building with intention.
The Powerhouse Portal exists to help you move from a Scared House architecture, built for survival, into a Power House architecture designed for leadership, wealth, and visibility.
SEED DATA- "Switching Houses From Scared Child House To Erotic Power House: How Corporal Punishment in Childhood Impacts Desire" by Ayana Zaire Cotton, published on the Seeda School Substack, December 9th, 2025
- Seed A World Retreat Alumni nènè myriam konaté invited us to imagine our existence as the offer in one of Seeda School's Open Studio sessions and that has been our grounding north star ever since. Check out their, clap back manifest(o), a 9-week personal excavation offer in service of fugitive practice(s).
The Transformation
Inside The Powerhouse Portal
Acknowledge and collapse with care the identity that got you here, but may not be able to get you where you want to do.
BLESS AND RELEASE
Activate the Powerhouse identity that can hold visibility, money, and leadership.
ACTIVATE AND RELATE
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Design or refine a revenue-generating offer rooted in your desire.
ROOT AND RECEIVEÂ
Build a simple, values-aligned sales system you can repeat every month.
COMMIT TO A CADENCE
Develop a visibility rhythm that feels embodied, not extractive and unsustainable.
BREATHE INTO VISIBILITY
Leave with a 90-day plan aligned with the worldbuilder you have activated.
PLAN AND LAUNCH
This is not surface-level confidence. This is structural self-trust.
How The Portal Works
Weekly 1:1 Sessions (60 minutes each)
Each week blends identity work and business architecture — because they are inseparable.
WEEK 1:
Identity Calibration
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We release the Scared House identity and stabilize the Power House self.
This is nervous system work, lineage work, and desire actualization work.
WEEK 2:
Offer ArchitectureÂ
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We design or refine a clear, compelling offer you can sell now. Where you are with the embodied wisdom and creative assets you already have.
Framework, story, pricing, positioning, boundaries — handled.
WEEK 3:Â
Visibility & Audience Engine
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We clarify your voice, message, and platform strategy so showing up feels erotic and sustainable. This is where we land on your list building weekly dispatch as a newsletter or podcast.
WEEK 4:Â
Sales System & Powerhouse Plan
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We build a repeatable, values-aligned rhythm and system for growing, nurturing and selling to your ideal audience member, student or customer and a 90-day roadmap for income growth.
Beyond Weekly Support
The Powerhouse Portal
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A digital dashboard hosting our session recordings and your weekly groundwork such as your future self template, offer framework, weekly dispatch, sales system and 90-day Powerhouse Plan.
Unlimited Discord Support
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You are not left alone between sessions.
Send me a text or voice memo and engage with Seeda School's global community of worldbuilders.
This is where real-time integration and momentum happen.
Full Access to the Seeda School Library
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Frameworks, templates, breathwork meditations, and curriculum rooted in Black feminist worldbuilding and erotic power.
This is foundational infrastructure, not bonus fluff.
The library includes the Seed A World Retreat which has supported hundreds of worldbuilders with launching income generating creative offers.
A Personalized 90-Day Powerhouse Plan
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Your personal Powerhouse Blueprint, Offer Architecture, Weekly Dispatch, Repeatable Sales System and Launch Timeline.
You leave knowing exactly what to do next — and who you are doing it as.
Meet Your Worldbuilding Guide
I’m Ayana Zaire Cotton — a Black feminist worldbuilder, writer, and business architect devoted to helping artists, academics, and founders build lives and livelihoods rooted in desire. My work lives at the intersection of spell and strategy, poetry and plumbing, erotic truth and structural rigor. I don’t teach theory I haven’t lived. I teach from embodiment — from the identity shifts, initiations, and experiments that made my work sustainable, resourced, and sovereign.
Through Seeda School, I support worldbuilders who are done waiting on institutions, gatekeepers, or permission slips from the old world. Together, we treat creative practice as non-negotiable ceremony and business-building as a liberatory technology. I help clients 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 — learning how to circulate resources while staying rooted in desire. If you’re ready to stop outsourcing belief, step into self-leadership, and let your work be resourced by the people it’s for, this is an invitation to say yes…not just to an offer, but to the world you’re here to build.
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Photograph by Stephen Miller. Custom workwear created by Ayana Zaire Cotton.
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 a practice space for worldbuilding, business development and self-actualization through a black feminist framework. Our mission is to make revolution irresistible through the framework of black feminist worldbuilding. Our vision is a generation of interlocking, abundantly resourced black feminist offers and businesses.
"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
The Investment
Why This Work Is Different
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Most containers focus on:
- mindset or money
- healing or business
- creativity or strategy
The Powerhouse Portal holds both sides of the initiation.
Your identity initiates you.
Your business initiates your clients.
This is a closed loop of meaning, magic, and money.
ApplyÂ
“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.”Â
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 — Audre Lorde, "Uses of the Erotic, The Erotic As Power" (1978)
This Is Not For You If...
You want passive consumption instead of responsibility and accountability.
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You can find affirmations online for free — inside this container affirmation meets the work of actualization.
You are not ready to be seen or paid yet.
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This is a no judgement zone, I was here for years as an artist and inside that season it served me to experiment inside the privacy of my studio and allow my work to serve me first.
You are satisfied with the status quo.
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You don’t align with a black feminist politic and aren’t interested in doing business differently.
It Is Safe To Trust Your Desire
Your desire is more powerful than your fear.
Your desire is data.
Your curiosity is an invitation.
Your felt sense of resonance with the identity of a Powerhouse is a signal.
If something in you is saying this is it, that voice deserves your attention.
Apply to the Powerhouse Portal
This is an application-based container to ensure alignment and readiness.
Apply HereIf accepted, you will receive onboarding details and next steps.
One Last Thing…
You are not wanting “too much”, you are not asking for “too much”, you are not “too much”.
You’re more than enough for the folks who have been looking for and waiting on your offer.
You are not behind.
You are not confused.
You are early in your next era.
The Powerhouse Portal is where you step fully into it.
Clarifying questions before applying? Get in touch.
Email MeWhat Alumni Are Saying About Seeda School
"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."
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— Jasmyne Gilbert
"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!
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
"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.
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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.
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Today, just two weeks after the Retreat's end, I started softly launching my program. I may not have been here without the Retreat!
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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
“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.
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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.
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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.
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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 BrownÂ
"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.
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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.
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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
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“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
"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
“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."
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— 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
