Erotic Engineering is a wild field of study and practice that uses the erotic as power to design a life rooted in desire. Inside this practice the desire we center is both personal and collective. Erotic Engineering pulls from the work of black feminist poetry, literature and worldbuilding which provides the material we use to create new belief systems that scaffold lives in deeper alignment with our values. It is a method for actualizing desire and putting language to the longings of our interior worlds in order to transform our material world.
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My intention behind this episode is to invite you to seed a public creative practice through, what we call in 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.
Inside this sacred witnessing ceremony we don’t need your “professionalism” we need your poetry. We don’t need your cynicism, we need your care. We don’t need your cool, we need your conviction. At times it can feel easier to write for cover letters, grant applications, school applications or memos on the job because professional development rarely requires our honesty. Some career-conscious spaces even encourage our lies, asking us to leave our politics at the door as if that’s even possible. It can feel harder to write for ourselves and seed a public practice through creative writing, because our poetry demands our truth. Our poetry demands that we acknowledge our pleasure and politics as the only starting points we need to create work worthy of our breath. Inside this episode I share spells for doing exactly that.
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Creative actualization demands sacrifice. There’s a saying that goes something like this, “you can have whatever you want, and if you don’t have it you either don’t want it or you’re bargaining over the price”. Now justified political critiques aside, I reference this quote to ask: In what ways are we bargaining over the price of actualizing our desire? Inside this episode I reflect alongside you and the 4 seasons of creative initiation: remembrance, surrender, sacrifice and erotic expression. Sometimes these seasons happen in order, sometimes they are non-linear. Which stage are you in? Will you allow yourself to believe it’s exactly where you’re supposed to be in this season? Let’s stop devising creative ways to get out of taking our own medicine. My intention behind recording this episode is to invite us to allow ourselves to be exactly where we are, willing students of all the wisdom embedded in our current season of transformation and initiation.
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At first this episode was titled “There Is No Rigor In Perfection, There Is Rigor In Your Play”. In a recent episode of one of my favorite podcasts Hidden Brain, psychologist Paul Bloom describes why play is an essential choreography of aliveness for most human and non-human species. He says it’s essential because it’s a container for “safe practice”. I keep thinking about this phrase, “safe practice”. Oftentimes perfectionism is mistaken for rigor. These two are NOT the same. Perfectionism stops us from starting, rigor invites us to try. The fear rooted in perfectionism is an indication of feeling unsafe inside our practice. My intention inside this episode is to offer spells for cultivating a felt sense of safety inside our practice through rigorous play.
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You know that meme that’s going around saying “propaganda i'm not falling for”? Well the propaganda we’re not falling for is the discourse that says we need to quit our day jobs in order to be “real artists”, “real diviners”, “real entrepreneurs”. Or whatever, because truth is…we can be working full-time inside our passion and still be in misalignment with the sometimes uncomfortable and terrifying invitations of our creative spirit. My intention behind recording this podcast episode is to invite us to explore how we might bring our full witchy-ness into our work. Less about the what of what we do and more about the how. How do we show up in the fullness of our power, how do we maintain boundaries that support our bodies and how do we refuse to sever ourselves from our spirit for work misaligned with our values? We’ll explore all this and more in today’s episode.
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My intention behind recording this podcast episode is to ask: are we in a season of seeding or reaping? Are we clinging to the energy of survival mode when spirit is inviting us to breathe and take in the garden we’ve built — enjoying the fruits of our labor and perhaps using them to create the next dish, recipe or project with ease. Perhaps we cling to the energy of survival mode and invent fires to put out because we’re clinging to a feeling of control and certainty. But what if change and transformation don’t have to be disorienting and destabilizing, what if we can relax into the process instead? What if the practice is about using what we have on hand to create an offering and trusting that, that is more than enough, trusting that that is plenty? These are the questions we’re going to explore in today’s episode.
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My intention behind recording this episode is to humbly invite us to consider what got us to our current reality might not get us to our wildest dreams. Maybe it was ambition, external validation or the perceived safety of playing small inside our own dreams that got us here but these postures of practice are too hollow to strike this moment and inspire long-lasting change. What if we dreamed from inside the sturdy validation of love instead? A regenerative force of motivation we can sustain over a lifetime, expanding into actualized dreams too wild for words. Upon further inspection, through the looking glass of interdependence, we see it is love that got us here and it’s love that will get us there, to worlds as yet unnamable.
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I am recording this episode for the push through artists who have worked so hard, for so long that they don’t even know what their max capacity is — every year presents new challenges, requiring new limits, seemingly stretching into infinity. I am recording this episode for those who delight in the rigor of a challenge and experience an erotic charge when spirit is inviting them into the next growth spurt or learning curve. I am recording this episode for those of us who are getting on our Zoom while grieving, because we desperately want to hit pause but the bills keep coming. I see you. I’ve been each of these worldbuilders, sometimes all at once. How do we know when a season is requiring our strength or our stillness? This is the question I hope to unpack in today’s episode.
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You don’t need more affirmations. But perhaps, like many of us, you are desiring tools, skills and strategies for navigating the seasons where your faith starts to feel foolish and the results you wished for are taking longer than the ego can bear. In this episode we explore navigating suspicion around our creative commitments and the temptation to give up inside the messy middle. We remember the potency of our creative power activates when we’re lost, not when we know the way. How do we remain steadfast inside our commitments while facing the grief, fear and uncertainty of our time? How do we trade the misleading allure of instant gratification with the sturdy sense of alignment that arises when we choose the practice of closing the gap between our values and our actions everyday, as Mariame Kaba invites us to do? How do we release all our “shoulds” and stay in the game long enough to learn what comes next? These are the questions we explore inside today’s episode.
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Our favorite black feminist was most likely an entrepreneur because for many of our ancestors black feminist entrepreneurship was simply a synonym for “the practice of surviving with our dignity in tact”. Many of us have heard the stories if we listened closely, the auntie, uncles and cousins who spun up hair salons, barbershops, daycares, restaurants and classrooms inside living rooms, kitchens, gardens and basements. Businesses that experimented with mutual aid and refused to replicate the carceral choreographies they might have witness or experienced in their neighborhoods or at their jobs. These stories are not new, disability and complex trauma sometimes renders us unable or unwilling to hold "traditional jobs". Entrepreneurship and creative lives of refusal aren't always born out of courage, sometimes they're born out of necessity and needs capitalism just can't hold. What creative strategies can black feminism teach us about surviving systems designed to fail us?
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Rigor doesn’t equal hard work and ease doesn’t equal work that is easy. Asking for help, refusing to resent our capacity, honoring the needs of our body and moving at the speed of creative flow is rigorous work that might require practice if our learned impulse is to habitually bring ourselves to the edge of our capacity in order to feel worthy of the ease of our creative expression. Our art flows out of us like our breath, sometimes the hardest work is to let and protect it.
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My intention inside this episode is to reflect, alongside you, on my own journey toward softening inside the sacred practice of bearing witness — both to myself and to each other’s becoming. Witnessing myself was painful at first. I was confronted with all the ways I had invented masks sacrificing my comfort while prioritizing the comfort of others, who oftentimes were loved ones. Parents, friends, partners, co-workers, peers, teachers, family members, roommates, the list goes on. When confronting all the layers I had assembled out of survival, I realized I was unrecognizable to myself. I cycled through periods of shame, rage, grief, and ultimately grounded inside compassion. When I stopped running from my authentic self, I was able to face her and in that stillness become a compassionate witness. No longer afraid of my own darkness, longings and desires — terrified that they were threats to my survival — another way forward opened. Inside this compassionate witnessing I realized all my fears held keys to something beyond survival, something like belonging. Through this witness work I began to create safety inside myself. Through this witness work I began to collaborate with loved ones, instead of hide from them, and created safety in my home. Then it spilled over to our neighbors, our streets, our schools. But it started with bearing witness inside the sacred act of coming home to myself again and again. My intention inside this episode is to remind us, worldbuilding happens on various scales of intimacy.
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My intention inside this episode is to invite us to put some respect on our nervous system. We have done the journaling, we’ve cultivated all our embodiment practices on our walks and by the water. We’ve done the divination, breath and mirror work to bring us to this moment where our nervous system is prepared to hold us at our next level of practice. There are new invitations, new calls, new assignments we desire to expand into, but moving in fear might be sneakily disguising itself as “honoring our nervous system”. Our craving for predictable outcomes and comfort can encourage us to play small inside the vision for our creative practices and lives. Inside this episode I invite us to consider the ways we can honor our nervous system by welcoming the transformative discomfort of desire.
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My intention inside this episode is to ground us inside the reality that we are constantly changing. Our motivations are changing. Our values might be experiencing a re-boot. And the things that kept us going in the past might no longer be a reliable fuel source. Instead of resenting or resisting our desire to slow down, prioritize our most meaningful relationships, or operate from a place of wholeness….What if we used these changes in our capacity, goals and desires as our new navigation tools and fuel to get us where we actually want to go instead of the destinations we were told to go in search of a false sense of safety? In this episode I’m going to share 5 approaches for staying motivated when ambition rooted in external validation has left your body.
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You dream of serving folks through your process not your personhood. You are an artist, not an influencer. But your process can sometimes feel illegible, even to you. We’re clear there are life affirming benefits to illegibility, opacity, poesis and abstraction. We’re also clear if we want to serve communities we care about through a creative offer that resources our practice, there needs to be an outline of the transformative journey we will take them through. This is your framework. In this episode I want to go over the power of frameworks and it’s creative capacity to build worlds that extend far beyond us.
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My intention behind this episode is not only to advocate for the practice of weekly dispatches but to encourage you and empower you with resources to advocate for your song — aka the work that is uniquely yours. Philadelphia-based prison abolitionist Stephanie Keene says people often ask her, “How can I get involved?” Her response is, “Do what it is you're good at”. Right? WE need you inside what you’re good at, which is to say YOU need you inside what you’re good at. What is your daily, weekly, seasonal practice for showing up inside the chorus of collective liberation? Let’s find out together.
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In this episode I’m inviting you into this question with me: “Is It Burnout Or The Energetic Expense Of A Spiritual Breakthrough?” Now let’s be clear, sometimes it really is burn-out. Sometimes, no…a lot of the times, capitalism, the patriarchal refusal to compensate care work and the lack of a state sanctioned social safety net can really bring us to our knees and leave us feeling burned out. I want to acknowledge that, but what I also want to be emphatically clear about acknowledging is sometimes it is spiritual severance, self-denial and self-negation that is at the core of our exhaustion. What creative invitations have you been resisting? Let’s take a look at that and try to answer these questions together.
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In this episode I want to make the case for breaking away from institutions and creating communal containers of healing instead. And because we’re all about the spell and the strategy at Seeda School…it is also my intention to make the argument that if you are already writing countless grants, drafting applications, making pitches and proposals and making bids for fellowship in institutions that sometimes (or usually) gets awarded, then you are already good at sales. Through this episode I want to invite you to turn that skill toward creating deeper pathways of empowerment for yourself and your communities, not institutions who siphon our worldbuilding capacity for their own survival. This episode is about our survival, our collective ability to thrive.
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So who is perfectionism for?
What stops us from hitting publish or inviting folks into an offer?
Are we waiting for the somatic safety, self-trust, or sense of belonging we’ll magically feel on the other side of a new title, degree, or wave of applause?
So often we stall, hesitate on pressing publish, resist releasing an offer we’ve already thought about so much we could design the entire thing in a weekend, because we want to project the patriarchal premise of expertise or “thought leadership”.
But what if we centered our lived experience instead?
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I chose the path of tech and software engineering out of creative curiosity, yes. But on some level, if I’m being real, I also chose it because it would, perhaps, make my parent’s sacrifice mean something. It was impressive, it was something they could brag about on Facebook. And, at the time, my inner child connected being impressive with worthiness. She connected being small with love-ability. She connected following orders with freedom from punishment. She connected suppressing desire with survival.
In this episode we explore the ways our creative practice invites us to make new connections. Because inside the erotic as power, we find our fear based connections can’t hold for long.
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