Erica Mulford

Stress Formations. Something I've noticed since I started working with Thomas was the way I was perceiving suffering, the way I was relating to it. Most of my life I was carving a path out of marble. One where I wanted to chip away at the unnecessary pieces - namely any form of suffering. I wanted to mold it into a more manageable sculpture, something that could mostly lean to one side, the positive side, where the goal was to reduce and diminish suffering. With this mindset I viewed suffering as a personal thing, as if it's something personal to me that I need to overcome, and its presence indicates something about me. It changed how I defined myself, how I defined my "day" in light of this suffering, and the quality of my relationships. The suffering was a major reference point for my well-being. Rather than referring to the stillness, or as Chris Wilde mentioned in a previous post asking my "whole self" the question of how I was doing, I would refer to the response from the noise's perspective. I referred to the suffering to tell me so many things about myself and how my day unfolded. This was an open secret I hid from myself in plain sight - the presence or absence of suffering is what I valued most. When suffering became personal and my life was secretly centered around it, it felt overwhelming. I'm not foreign to the feeling of overwhelm, buildup in the body, buildup in the mind, and the resulting behaviors or ways of being after that overwhelm - including resulting indulgent emotions. The main "feeling" I felt most of my life was pure anxiety. Until one day the anxiety bubble popped and underneath it was an endless load of shame I didn't know was under the surface, but under that shame was a very surprising stillness...a stillness that didn't mind anything that was on the surface. An undisturbed stillness in which the thoughts appeared, the backdrop of our experience. I saw in that moment how my entire life I had defended anxiety and its existence within me concealed by stories I called healing. My efforts to manage it were actually maintaining it. I believed in the stress, in the overwhelm, I believed in it's necessity. I met Thomas a few months later and we've continued to have conversations about this lingering habit of overwhelm, remnants of what wasn't seen. I would find myself again almost defending its presence to him, but over time I started being open to the fact that maybe he's onto something, maybe I'm still not seeing something, maybe I needed to listen more fully. In the last few weeks I've been seeing the meaningfulness in the suffering. ~When I thought it was personal, I thought I needed to get rid of it. ~When I see it as universal but appearing within me, it's usefulness now extends to the entire world. ~When I suffer, it has very little to do with me, and much more with what results need to occur as a byproduct of that suffering through me. The moment suffering is seen to be impersonal and even immensely useful, it can be looked at, approached, within the curious, open-mind and whole-hearted expanse of our being. The noise is no longer taken to be who I am, it no longer acts as the primary reference point to define my well-being. And that very suffering contributes to the well-being of everything and everyone around me.. From this light, how can suffering be seen as anything other than pure, innocent love? Suffering is no longer suffering.