My heart  was heavy yesterday.  I spent several hours filling out administrative forms for my children to attend school and daycare.  Almost every form asked for an emergency contact.  No one I have known for more than a month is regularly in town.  In the space for family information, I wrote that my children’s father now lives in another country.  He left in December, and he has not called yet.  I am wondering now if he will ever call.  My three year old keeps asking me when he is going to daddy’s house.

Memories I had pushed out of my mind returned, painfully.  I didn’t realize how much sadness I had recently left behind.  When I was in the hospital just a month ago, the staff asked me again and again for an emergency contact, and I said to the nurse, “How about you?  If I had an emergency contact, I wouldn’t be here!”

Within days of leaving the hospital, I participated in a three-day retreat on tummo with Khachab Rinpoche.  Tummo is the Tibetan Buddhist practice of generating intense body heat using elaborate imagery, posture, and precise gestures.  Tibetans often spend months or years on the practice.  Three full days was just an introduction.

Monks use the practice to survive the harsh cold of mountainous regions.  A practice to generate warmth in the midst of cold seemed apropos.  Much of my graduate research has focused on the physical warmth we experience in response to social bonding and positive regard, and the physical cold that results when we feel alone.  Our abstract concepts for our social milieu alter our body temperature.

When we feel alone, we look outside ourselves for warmth.  The tummo practice taught me that I could generate warmth without a heat source.

Body heat, however, is not the primary purpose.  The underlying objective is to generate bliss.  Part of the practice involves imaginging divine nectar dripping down from the crown through the central channel into fire in the navel.  The bliss is a natural part of awareness opened up or made clear by the imagery and bodily movements.  Long story!

I was reminded of an image I saw during meditation two years ago, an odd shape on the back of my head: an upward facing crescent with a dot.  I had never seen it before, but I learned that the symbol represents the Bindu chakra supposedly located at the back of the head.

This chakra is associated with the release of a mystical substance called amrit or nectar which generates bliss as it drips down the back of the throat and into the fire in the navel.  That was about as much new age hooha as I could stomach, no pun intended, but the fact that the image appeared during my meditation before I saw it anywhere was very enticing and got my attention.

Yesterday, with painful memories fresh in my mind, I struggled with a mixture of grief, anger and resentment, and guilt for feeling anger and resentment.  Being alone is like snuggling up with an ice sickle.  Being rejected is like being impaled by it.

Despite the pain, or probably because of it, something magical happened when I felt there was absolutely no one.  Something alchemic.

When all sounds have ceased, you can finally hear your heartbeat.  When the city lights are far away, you can finally see the glow of the galaxy.  When loved ones have disappeared, and you have nothing left to hold on to, you can finally sense the Divine.

People began to appear in my life with unbelievable love in their hearts and a twinkle in their eye, as if the Divine were looking out at me through their eyes.  When I fall, a net is cast.  When I jump, the ground appears.

In case of emergency, contact:  The Divine Beloved

In the midst of my sadness yesterday, while trying to find an address on the internet, this image popped up, a photograph published in the San Franscisco Chronicle of an actual upside down rainbow:

An hour later, I received an email which, quite randomly, included the following photograph of a sunset under the crescent moon over the North Pole:

As if to say: In the harsh cold, feeling alone and abandoned, you find within you great warmth and Divine bliss.

As I opened more fully to the pain, I was consumed by calm pleasure.  Hours of it.  I couldn’t understand it.  I didn’t really do anything to make it happen.  The bliss and tranquility was far beyond what I would have anticipated for the evening.  As I lie in bed on my way to sleep, I felt so blissful and peaceful that no thoughts arose in my mind.  I was dumbfounded.  All pervasive contentment, deep healing, love, warmth.  Coming from somewhere.  Palpable.  I focused my awareness on the source of the love and said thank you.