Permission To Be Wild in Business and Creative Practice

An "Off the Grid" podcast conversation with Amelia Hruby

Dear Worldbuilder,

I’m gently dropping into your inbox on this Wednesday with an update, reminder and announcement!

🌸 Update: Enrollment into the Seed A World Retreat is now open! All the spring energy has been coursing through my body and I’m so, so excited about this upcoming cohort. Ready to bloom with us? Enroll by Friday, April 19th using the code EARLY-SPRING-24 for $100 off.

⚒️ Reminder: Yesterday’s Worldbuilding Workshop felt so expansive and energizing! Thank you, thank you, thank you to everyone who was able to join us and bask in our shared tenderness, vulnerability and imagination. Missed us? No worries at all, we’re doing it again next Thursday! Register for free here and join us in learning how to resource a world rooted in the truth of your needs and ask any questions you have about the upcoming retreat.

🌐 Announcement: Amelia Hruby graciously invited me as a guest on their podcast, Off the Grid where they explore leaving social media without losing all your clients! This felt like such an energizing invitation for a number of reasons. A couple being: 1) I’ve been a long-time listener of the podcast, tuning for affirming guidance as I built Seeda School with spirit and spit. 2) Speaking of spirit, as you know, so much of the worldbuilding work we’re doing — in the medicine room, at the altar, traveling dimension in the salt water of the bathtub, wailing, parenting, studio work, prayer work, breath work — is far too illegible for social media so it felt like an honor to tell the story of the school in a space that unapologetically recognizes social media can not be the only place we connect, while generously giving us strategies, tools and insights to expand our imagination and memory of alternate social landscapes.

This is what Amelia had to say about the episode 👇🏾

This week, I am thrilled to be joined by anti-disciplinary artist, writer, and facilitator for the worldbuilders, Ayana Zaire Cotton of Seeda School.

In this spiralic conversation, Ayana guides us in how to tap into our zone of desire and design creative offers for new worlds in the now.

Tune in to hear about:

• World-building as a Black feminist practice

• Why “niching down” is a colonial technology (& how we can refuse to do it)

• The moments when discipline melts into devotion

• How to find the places where your curiosity rivals your fear

And if that isn't enough to make you press play right now, let me tempt you with some of the amazing wisdom Ayana shares in the conversation.

We don't have to give up the wild, “non-marketable” parts of our practice in order to sustain them. —Ayana Zaire Cotton

I think there there is something to be said about creative constraints and specificity. How do we get super clear on all of the divergent nodes in our work? How do we create messaging and storytelling around the scale of it all? —Ayana Zaire Cotton

The beauty of the practice is the consistency with which we return to it.  —Ayana Zaire Cotton

Once I gave myself permission to actually start imagining from inside the zone of of my desire, I started coming up with all sorts of experiments that I could try. —Ayana Zaire Cotton

It doesn't happen overnight, but it does happen. —Ayana Zaire Cotton

Thank you so much for having me Amelia and special thank you to Seeda School Alum Shivani Bhatia for making the connection that made this conversation possible. We’re building our own worlds and writing ourselves in. Overflowing with gratitude that we could never do it alone even if we wanted to.

With desire,

Ayana