I have to disagree with your views on the body. My experience over the past 19 years of healing is that the body is vital, and most illness is the result of disconnection or disidentification with the physical form. "I am body, mind, emotions and spirit.
I will try to share with you my experience on this question.
The fist time I heard the sentence : "you are not the body, the mind , the emotions", it was about ten years ago. I read it in a book of Nisargadatta Maharaj, a contemporary Indian spiritual teacher.
At this time, this sentence had a great impact on me.
I felt that there was something true in it but that it was not possible to intellectually understand it.
So I just let the sentence act on me.
Like a melody which turns and returns in your head, the sentence turned and returned in my head for months.
I did not try to control this event, but welcomed it, like a friend who would like to tell you a secret but doesn't know how to express it.
And slowly, the sentence acted on me, until the melody vanished.
I will now to try to share my present point of view on the question of identification with the body-mind.
Before being a visual-mental representation, the body is a sensation.
You can feel it, touch it, and the palette of sensations is wide: warm, hot, dense, transparent, dark, clear, etc...
Also some parts, such as the brain, can be felt: sensing the vibration of the brain like subtle waves, the density of the brain.
The question arises: how could I feel something if I am it?
We can experience something only because there is a knower of it, something which perceives, a perceiver.
So the question is: "what is perceiving?", "where the sensation appears and disappears?", "what is the background in which the sensation appears and disappears?".
If we don't try to answer these questions intellectually, a natural space is revealed.
A space in which the perceptions unfold themselves, find their whole dimension.
In such a perspective, we could experience that the body is in us.
It is not a rejection of the body but an integration of the body in its total dimension.
Only in a wide and open space can the body can fully revealed itself.
We could say that the body is an expression. an extension of consciousness:
When you speak about the illness being a result of disconnection with the physical form, it sounds right.
We usually live in a state of escaping.
When you have a feeling of melancholia, that you would like to return to your true home (in a figurative meaning), it is usually a sign that consciousness does not dwell properly in the body.
When consciousness is really fit into the body, the body is fluent, relaxed, with a feeling of transparency.
There is no more need to escape or to go anywhere.
The body awareness means a sensitive body, not fixed in some patterns of defenses and resistances.
When you drive your car, even if you are a very good driver who loves his car, who takes care of it like a mother/father takes care of a child, even if you know how to use the full possibilities of your car, you know that you are not it. You can say that you are the owner of the car, but you cannot say that you are the car. Even if the car is not here, you know yourself as existing.
To take yourself for a car would be reductionist.
To take yourself for a body would also be reductionist.
In order to be free of the body, we first need to accept it.
In acceptance, the body finds its own rhythm and can fully express its wisdom.
When you love somebody, you give him/her the possibilities of freely expressing him or herself.
It is the same thing with the body.
When we clearly understand this relationship to the body, we can transpose it to the mind.
Thoughts are not so different from the physical body. It is only a different quality of vibration.
Thoughts can also be observed.
They emerge within the observation like water drops appear on the petal of a rose.
They exist only because they are in you.
Like the letters exist only because of the white sheet lying behind.
Without this neutral background, the letters would not exist. The black points constituting the letter appear black because of the white background.
As the movement is recognized as movement because of your immobility, the thought is recognized as itself because you are the silent knower of it.
The sensation is also recognized as a sensation because you are the silent knower of it.
The notes of a melody affirm their existence because of the silence which is between, during, before and after the note.
If the emphasis is not on the note but on the silence behind the note, the note is no more limited but occupies the whole space.
If the emphasis is not on the body itself but on the background in which the body appears, the body is no longer limited, and you discover yourself to be free of the body.
If the emphasis is not on the thought itself but on the background in which the thought appears, you discover yourself to be free of the mind.
This freedom is not separated from your being.
Being is freedom, spontaneity and creativity.
Nobody is free, but freedom is.
From the Spiramed Internet Forum , May 31, 1997