the body is a vehicle for the soul, for awareness, for “me” yet it is also a cage, a room, a house that holds in the spirit. without the body we cannot seem to experience and see things and travel, yet due to the body we cannot move faster and we have to compromise and take care of aches and pains. no wonder our relationships to our bodies seem forever paradoxical, loving and strained, punitive and rewarding, all at the same time.
our bodies have limitations, they hurt, they age, they become infected, they stop working… in a spiritual sense perhaps birth and death are coming into and leaving from the body.
consciousness and awareness seems to be ahead of the body, it is not separate, yet it seems to be able to transcend the body. we can imagine running even when we’re not, we can fantasize about intimacy even when there is none physically, we can invent scenarios and react to them.
yet we suffer when our mind is where our body cannot be or our body is where our mind doesn’t want to be. suffering happens when we are in a place we don’t want to be.
so it makes sense that when we get caught in suffering, we want to abandon our bodies. we want to abandon “reality”- the solid material-ness or is-ness of things that cannot seem to change as easily as our souls can dream. perhaps that is what suicide is.
yet it is this act of wanting to leave parts of ourselves, of fighting with out inner selves, of abandoning either our souls or our bodies, seem to create even more suffering. after all a civil war always depletes the country and leaves it weaker, or split into multiple parts. integration, with all parts intact, is what jung would call individuation. embodying our bodies and materializing our souls seems to be the spiritual quest.
From world weary woman, 
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the paradox of being 