When Philosophy Forgets the Body — Three Layers of Freedom

 

possible stillness and inner witnessing amid turmoil.

You hear them everywhere in spiritual circles — in ashrams, in retreats, in threads under photos of sages and sunsets.
“Suffering is a choice.”
“Pain is only resistance.”
“You create your own reality.”
“If you suffer, it’s because you haven’t surrendered.”
And sometimes, said with a knowing smile:
“We ourselves decide — to enjoy or to suffer. Consciousness determines Being, not the other way around.”

The voice sounds peaceful, unshakable, almost divine.
It claims to speak from the summit of realization, but its calm hides a chill — the calm of someone who has forgotten what it feels like to tremble.
It tells you that agony is ignorance, that grief is immaturity, that only identification makes the wound real.
It calls this compassion.

And you want to believe it.
You repeat those words when the days are soft and the world is kind.
They seem harmless then — polished pebbles of wisdom rolling on the tongue.
But life has its own way of testing slogans.

And then the experiment begins.

It begins in an office, perhaps.
Someone mocks you in front of others — a small humiliation, repeated until it stains your days.
You tell yourself not to take it personally, that you can “choose your attitude.”
Yet the body doesn’t ask for your permission: the pulse quickens, the chest tightens, the hands tremble hours later.
You can repeat mantras of detachment, but cortisol doesn’t obey philosophy.

Later, life raises the stakes.
You stand beside a hospital bed and realize the person you love will not recover.
Or a message arrives that ends a friendship you thought was indestructible.
Try telling your heart, in that moment, that pain is optional.
See what the body says back.

And somewhere, far from your own story, there are people whose reality has no metaphor.
A man in a cell with light and noise pounding for days.
A woman forced to listen to laughter while her dignity is stripped away.
For them, “you can choose not to suffer” is not wisdom — it is blasphemy.
It erases the only thing that still testifies to their humanity: that pain is real.

The body is innocent.
It does not philosophize.
It contracts when threatened and softens when held.
To deny that is to deny the ground from which all freedom must arise.

And yet — buried beneath this cruelty, there is a truth: that even within the cage, something in us can remain unbroken.
But that truth is not reached by negating the body; it is reached by listening to it until the listening itself becomes a doorway.
Freedom begins not in transcendence but in tenderness — in allowing the trembling to speak.

In the pages that follow, we will look at this trembling through three lenses —
the physiological, the psychological, and the spiritual —
not to climb away from it, but to understand how freedom and pain, if seen rightly, can coexist without false comfort.

The Body That Has No Choice

When the blow lands — not always a fist, sometimes just a sentence — the body knows first.

Before a thought can form, glands have already opened the floodgates.
Cortisol spills into the bloodstream, the heart begins to drum, muscles tense as if ancient predators still stalk nearby.
Evolution built this orchestra long before language; it does not wait for permission from reason or faith.
To be alive is to have a body that reacts.

This is why cruelty that hides behind “you can choose not to suffer” is so dishonest.
It demands that flesh behave like air, that centuries of adaptation vanish because someone has read a clever line about detachment.
When humiliation repeats day after day — a manager’s sneer, a colleague’s smirk — the body’s chemistry does not distinguish between modern ridicule and prehistoric danger.
It answers every insult with the same alarm meant to save your life.
No mantra can override that reflex; only safety can.

And yet we are taught to distrust these reactions — to treat the racing pulse as failure, the shaking hands as weakness.
We are told that composure equals enlightenment.
But the nervous system is not sin; it is testimony.
It says, Something here is wrong.
To feel the jolt of stress is not to fall from grace; it is to witness the body’s faithfulness to truth.

In moments of sustained threat — bullying, war, loss — the body keeps the score in more literal ways: sleep fragments, digestion falters, immunity weakens.
No amount of “positive thinking” repairs the chemistry of fear.
Only the slow re-learning of safety, the re-entry into warmth and trust, can do that.
Those who preach total freedom from bodily reaction confuse liberation with anesthesia.

Real freedom begins after acknowledgment.
The plane must touch the ground before it can rise.
When we honor the body’s tremor instead of condemning it, something quiet changes inside: compassion replaces contempt, curiosity replaces shame.
And from that gentler soil, higher freedoms — psychological, spiritual — can finally grow without violence.

The Psychological Layer — The Space of Partial Agency

When the first storm inside the body begins to calm, a second landscape becomes visible — the one made of meanings, habits, and inner speech.
Here the question of “choice” starts to acquire a different shape.
We still cannot stop cortisol from flooding, but we can sometimes decide what that flood will mean.

You notice how the mind begins to talk to itself:
“I can’t bear this.”
“They’re destroying me.”
“Maybe I’m worthless.”
Each sentence feeds the chemical fire.
And then, sometimes, another sentence appears — smaller, quieter — “I’m afraid, but I’m still here.”
That single thought does not cancel the pain, but it begins to reorganize it.
Meaning enters the bloodstream as slowly as the stress did.

Viktor Frankl called this the last of the human freedoms: not freedom from circumstance, but freedom within it.
He never said we choose whether or not to suffer; he said that even while suffering, we can decide who we will be.
That difference is everything.
One denies pain; the other dignifies it.

At this level, agency is partial — like a window that opens only a few centimeters, yet enough for air to enter.
We cannot choose not to grieve a loss, but we can choose not to turn grief into hatred.
We cannot choose not to be frightened, but we can choose not to become cruel because of it.
These are the micro-choices through which the psyche slowly reclaims itself.

Still, even this freedom has limits.
No one can stay heroic all the time.
There are days when the will to reinterpret collapses and the world feels flat again.
That, too, is human.
The error of certain “spiritual” voices is to treat these collapses as moral failure instead of fatigue.
But a person who can still weep has not lost their dignity — they have kept it alive by refusing to become numb.

The psychological layer is where suffering begins to acquire shape instead of endlessly echoing through the body.
Here, therapy, friendship, art, and language become forms of oxygen.
They do not lift us out of the storm, but they allow us to breathe inside it.
And sometimes, through that slow breathing, a subtler kind of freedom starts to appear — not as a choice made by thought, but as a quiet witnessing that includes both the trembling and the meaning it carries.

The Spiritual Layer — Awareness That Holds the Storm

There are moments when the mind has done everything it can—understood, reframed, endured—and yet the ache remains.
You have analyzed the injustice, breathed through the panic, written the letter you’ll never send, and still something in you trembles.
That is where the psychological gives way to the spiritual: not an ascent away from pain, but a widening that can hold it.

At this level, freedom stops being an achievement and becomes a seeing.
Awareness does not fix the wound; it simply refuses to turn away.
It watches the body’s chemistry and the mind’s narratives unfold, and it whispers, Even this is within me.
That whisper does not erase cortisol, nor silence the racing thoughts—it includes them.
It is the first hint of a freedom that does not depend on outcomes.

To say “witness the storm” is not to demand serenity on command.
Even seasoned contemplatives sometimes cry out, tremble, or feel rage move through their limbs.
What distinguishes the mature soul is not the absence of these waves, but the absence of denial.
A true witness feels everything and still recognizes the sky through which the clouds pass.
The counterfeit version—the one sold by shallow spirituality—skips this seeing and jumps straight to slogans: “Nothing is real.” “You create your own pain.”
That kind of talk closes the heart and calls it enlightenment.

Real stillness grows only from contact with truth.
It is born the moment awareness stops pretending to be invulnerable.
When you are bullied and the body shakes, the witness does not say, you should not be shaking; it says, this shaking, too, is within Being.
That recognition does not sanctify cruelty or glorify endurance—it simply restores reality’s wholeness.
Nothing is excluded, not even fear.

Very few live in that space constantly; only a siddha can remain unmoved as pain unfolds.
But glimpses are possible for all.
Sometimes they come quietly: in the middle of the night when exhaustion has stripped away pretense, and you realize that beneath all the agitation there is something that has never been touched.
That is not detachment; it is intimacy with the Real.

Here the world is no longer divided into those who suffer and those who have transcended.
There is only the movement of awareness recognizing itself through both—the human and the divine, the trembling and the clarity, the storm and the sky that holds it.

Integration — Three Layers, One Human Being

The body, the mind, the awareness — three movements of one current.
They are not stairs to climb, but circles within circles, turning inside the same field of life.
Freedom is not found by abandoning the lower for the higher; it appears when each layer is seen in its rightful dignity.

The body speaks first.
It knows the world through pulse, breath, contraction.
When it shakes, the task is not to silence it but to listen.
Every tremor says, I want to live.
To honor that instinct is already an act of reverence — the first prayer any creature ever makes.

The mind follows, weaving meanings around the signals of the body.
It can tighten the knot or begin to untie it.
Through reflection, conversation, and art, the mind translates pain into language, giving it shape and direction.
Here we rediscover partial agency — the power to choose a response, even when we cannot choose the situation.
This is where dignity begins to take form: not by erasing pain, but by giving it a voice that does not destroy us.

And then, when both body and mind have spoken, the awareness underneath them is revealed — silent, unprovoked, unoffended.
It has never been bullied, humiliated, or broken, even while witnessing all those experiences passing through.
To sense that stillness does not make us superhuman; it simply restores the vertical axis of being.
We remember that we are not only the frightened animal or the reasoning witness — we are also the space that holds them both.

To live as a whole being is to let these three levels communicate:
the body grounding the soul in reality,
the mind offering interpretation and care,
the awareness opening the window to vastness.
Cut off any one of them, and compassion withers — the intellect turns cruel, the body becomes mechanical, the spirit loses tenderness.

True strength is not the absence of trembling but the capacity to tremble consciously.
When philosophy forgets the body, it becomes arrogance.
When psychology forgets the soul, it becomes technique.
When spirituality forgets the human, it becomes tyranny.

Freedom, then, is not a single act of transcendence but a choreography among these layers:
the flesh sensing truth,
the heart translating it,
the spirit holding it in silence.
To be whole is not to be invulnerable — it is to stay real at every depth, and still keep the lamp lit.