Savasana is where everything gets suspicious. Not suspicious in a bad way — suspicious in the way of something you can’t quite account for. You finish the last posture. You lie down. The sweat is still cooling. And then, for some practitioners, there’s a moment that doesn’t fit the usual frame: a sense of dissolution, of the boundary between where you end and where the room begins becoming briefly negotiable. Most people file it under “relaxation response” or “endorphins” and move on. A few don’t. Anirban Bandyopadhyay is a senior scientist at the National Institute for Materials Science in Japan, and he would tell you that the sensation is not mystical — it’s mechanical. The mechanism just happens to be the quantum structure of the…

In the summer of 1996, my cousins and I buried a time capsule in my parents’ backyard. My mother is the oldest of seven sisters. Five of those six sisters got pregnant within about a year of each other. I was the only boy in that batch. Due to our close proximity in age—and one of my aunt’s early passing—we spent a lot of time together in the summers. I loved the summer. On the rural dirt roads and sandy private beaches of Colonial Beach, Virginia, for three months every year, I felt less like an only child and more like a sibling. I have brothers, but they were out of the house by the time I was ten. Colonial Beach gave me peers my…