Seven breaths in, something cold switched on in the middle of my chest.

I was lying in bed, testing an idea I didn’t trust. “Let’s see if this really changes anything,” I’d told myself. Then the coolness started, as if someone had set a miniature cooler behind my breastbone, and it spread from the inside out until I could feel it across my whole chest.

“Whoa,” I said to the ceiling. “I can actually physically feel it.”

I was young then. I had just opened a stir-fry noodle shop in Chihuahua where customers built their own noodle boxes. My cousin was my right hand, and every night after closing I drove him home. On one of those drives he handed me a few printed pages, a single chapter of Yogi Ramacharaka called “Thought Dynamics.”