The soul lives there where it loves, rather than in the body which it animates.

The soul does not live by the body, but, on the contrary, gives it life, and lives by love in that which it loves.

For beside this life of love which it lives in God Who loves it, the soul has its radical and natural life in God, like all created things, according to the saying of St. Paul: “In Him we live, and move, and are”, that is, our life, motion, and being is in God.

St. John also says that all that was made was life in God: “That which was made, in Him was life”

When the soul sees that its natural life is in God through the being He has given it, and its spiritual life also because of the love it bears Him, it breaks forth into lamentations, complaining that so frail a life in a mortal body should have the power to hinder it from the fruition of the true, real, and delicious life, which it lives in God by nature and by love.

Earnestly, therefore, does the soul insist upon this. It tells us that it suffers between two contradictions – its natural life in the body, and its spiritual life in God…The soul living this double life is of necessity in great pain.

For the painful life hinders the delicious, so that the natural life is as death, seeing that it deprives the soul of its spiritual life, wherein is its whole being and life by nature, and all its operations and feelings by love.

John of the Cross (1542-1591): Spiritual Canticle, Stanza 8, 2-3.