The popular spiritual belief that “the body is a prison” is one I take deep issue with.
At best, it can be a useful starting point of our spiritual journey, at worst it can be an existentially suffocating framework with disturbing psychological, somatic and ecological consequences.
In our modern culture, I like to conceptualize “the spiritual path” as a 3 part journey. The first is rejecting the default culture, and our internalization of it’s messages about the nature of self and reality.
In order to extract ourselves from the matrix of modern culture -with it’s overemphasis on surfaces, appearances and materialist values- a corresponding awareness of the shadow side of these dimensions – death, decay, and emptiness- comes to light. That “the body is a prison” and that “this world of decay must be transcended in order to find spiritual truth” are ideas that motivate us within this stage of “waking up” from our cultural slumber, rather than intrinsic truths. After rejecting the avenues of reality that our culture enticed us into believing would satisfy our existential thirst, we turn away to begin our conscious seeking of a higher, more substantial truth.
The second stage could be considered the realization of that truth. I believe this “realization” process looks different for everybody, as we each approach it from our unique circumstantial angles.
Nevertheless, this realization always opens us up to a magnitude of living and vitality that extends beyond the default cognitive parameters that we began with. And as such, it alters the structure of our experience by shifting the charge with which we identify with the various aspects of our experience. We can say that this structural transformation of our being that unfolds subsequent to our encounter with truth is stage 3 of the “spiritual” process.
One of these major structural shifts that occurs is a somatic re-contextualizing of how much we identify as and within the confines of our physical body. This may sound like an allusion to esoteric dimensions, but it can manifest as simply as loosening an anxious perpetual bracing of the body, and a softening of your attachment to thoughts and feelings that arise “inside” your body. As you develop and refine you conceptual frameworks, its not only that the content of your concepts change, but that your relationship to concepts themselves change. An action is less enacted from the preconception that you as a [subject] are doing something to an [object], but notions of subject, object and action -while still intact- become more transparent, instead giving rise to a present embodied experience without distinct intrinsic demarcations.
From this state of consciousness, where conceptual demarcations between self, action and other become softer, we can see how “the body is a prison” loses it’s resonance. Through no change of the physical facts of the body but rather through a perceptual shift, the body itself, through the spiritual journey, becomes less of a solid, enclosed, isolated, limited, heavy, distinct object and softens into an extension of experience that extends through perceptions, sensations and interactions to touch and commune with the world and other beings. Through transformed perception, it becomes a mode upon the spectrum of experience rather than a limiting enclosure.
Ideas like “the body is a prison” are then understood to apply to a certain conceptual relationship to the body (albeit a popular one), but not intrinsic to it.