NO.1 Roya Shalchi, 21 - April 27th, 2018.

“I don’t know about the word holy, but something that I hold sacred to myself is my breath. I recently got into meditation and yoga and those make you surrender to your breath instead of surrendering to your mind. I always think to myself that my breath is the most important thing to me, even is someone does something ugly to me, they can’t take my breath away from me. I think that is something that unites us all and the unity of life is inspiring to me. I really believe in the interconnectedness of everything that happens to us. I think that everything is extremely connected beyond reason and I am starting to realize how accepting I am of not knowing an answer. I think that’s something that humans have a really hard time with. We think we are an almighty powerful species but we won’t ever have all the answers and I don’t necessarily know that we need to have them all. It is kind of strange because I am studying to be a scientist so I do have that urge to constantly be searching for answers but I’ve found myself okay with saying that I don’t know sometimes. And I don’t think reading a book and saying it contains the ultimate one truth is even logical. Everybody thinks their book is the book. Others believe in their book just as much as you believe in yours. I don’t know. Sometimes when I meditate I will think of things and feel a strong pull and it’s not necessarily someone speaking to me but more of what you would call intuition. I feel like I have strong intuition and when I was younger I thought that was God. But as I get older and grew away from the Christian religion, I started attributing that pull to myself, and I was like “Roya, this is you.” Or maybe it’s not me. Maybe now I just attribute it to the universe. I feel very intuitive, I just have a hard time distinguishing whether it’s me or a higher power.”