A new lease on life
There is a depth to this expression. If you rent a house, you may have to sign a lease. You don’t own the house but pay money for the use of it. You enter into covenants (a very “biblical” word for lawyers to use) to pay your rent and look after the house the way the owner wants it, and if you don’t comply with the covenants, you can be thrown out.
We have our bodies on lease. We inhabit those bodies and we pay rent, in the form of feeling. We experience pain, of a physical, emotional or psychological nature and pay our rent by feeling that pain. Like the covenants in the lease, we have to accept that we are bound by the covenants and must pay the rent.
Note that I do not use the word “suffering”. A lawyer will regularly use the expression “pain and suffering” when describing what happened to his client in the car accident. Pain and suffering are not synonymous, so our wordy lawyer isn’t being tautologous after all. Pain happens. We have to accept it. We’ve got to pay the rent. However we don’t have to suffer. In yogic philosophy, suffering happens when we identify with the “pain body”. When you break a bone, or get a toothache, of course it hurts. That’s the natural consequence of having a body. It’s got nerves. They will experience pain sometimes, maybe a lot of the time. Its not you, though. You are not your pain, whether that pain is coming from your broken finger, your giant abscess under your tooth or generated by your own mind. Of course you are feeling that pain, but it is your choice whether you permit that pain to rule you or whether you can get your mind (where, after all, you are experiencing the pain, not actually in the tooth) to move through the pain into freedom on the other side of that pain.
Let your breath be your guide through the pain. Breathe through it, not into it.
Om Shanti 21/11/2019
