Picture of flyer for The Power Within Reading Series
My final zine page
My final anatomical drawing of the lungs
My final anatomical drawing of the brain
Where does your power come from?
For The Power Within project, we were to study a biological system that we felt connected to how we feel powerful in our bodies. We learned about the complexity of the body and the beauty that comes along with this complexity. By focusing on specific organs, tissues, and cells, we were able to dive deeper into the things about ourselves that we find important or related to our story that we wrote in our humanities class, overall bettering our understanding of ourselves and how to stay healthy.
My connection
The respiratory system is made up of bronchioles, the lungs, airways, the throat, the mouth, the nose, etc. I choose the diaphragm as my biological connection for many reasons, but all of them relate somehow to my “religion” that I was raised in where the solar plexus chakra represents power. It is the muscle that pulls the air in and pushes the air out. When controlling the diaphragm, you control the the speed of your breath or volume of your voice, two things that in my life I have used to calm or stand up for myself. I like that it is a voluntary muscle because I can decide how I use it. I can feel it within me at all times, and even when I do not focus on my power, it is always keeping me alive and healthy underneath my conscious thought. In my story, I talk about breathing with intention and breath in general a lot when describing my emotional state. I also use the word diaphragm when talking about trying to calm myself down and describe the breathing techniques that my mom taught me when I was little. I decided to show this in my zine by including a drawing of the lungs and brain which show the connection between my breathing and my emotional health. Although my organ of choice was the diaphragm, I thought that the lungs and brain were a more relatable and decipherable way to represent my message.