There are two key parts to your psychic economy that get into troublesome knots and a third part that can untangle them:

At the point of birth, the mind, the body, and the witness all exist, but the way they develop and relate to each other changes over time.

The body is an anchoring container of our mind and awareness, it is the seat of instincts, core personality, various kinds of intuition, traumas, and energies (i.e you need a body to pick up on ‘vibes’!). The chemicals, hormones, and imprinted memories in the body influence the thoughts and tendencies of the mind.

The body can be a more or less pleasurable place to ‘live’ in (that is, anchor your attention into) based on our physical and mental health to be brief. Substances can alter bodily states, and so can your thoughts and awareness.

The mind is a more or less effective midwife for truth, clarity, self-awareness, and bodily information.

Initially, it is an open container, a scaffolding without planks and ladders, a substrate of pure awareness; their distinction starts as razor-thin, but the mind gets filled with content over time.

At first, the content is emotional-sensory (bodily) information and experiences and becomes more abstract from there. Identity and attachments are born from this, and then our habitual attention usually gravitates towards the mental space over time.

The mind and body get into a thought-feeling loop that generally sustains a pattern of beliefs, experiences, and emotions over time. Many kinds of suffering and compulsiveness arise from this, as one gets identified with the thought-feeling loops.

Beyond but also within the body-mind loops, is the witness, the oft-forgotten baseline of the experience of life.

The witness is pure awareness. To glimpse its workings, imagine looking into a mirror, except that your body, ‘you’, is not in the reflection. The witness is the clear mirror, however, and wherever it is placed; in this case, it resides in each of our bodies.

The witness is perception without personality, identity, and history; it is closer to an unfiltered lens. Intrinsically, it is timeless, but witnesses time, it is formless, yet observes form, and it is untouched by attachments, yet can immerse its awareness into them.

You ultimately are this part of your being that is untouched by the turbulence of life; the witness can simply turn its attention into itself to de-charge and slow these body-mind loops, such as in meditation, otherwise, it immerses itself in these loops and keeps them going.

Your pure attentive awareness is like an endless body of clean water, whatever you choose to bathe within it (e.g. bodily sensations, thoughts) gradually dissolves away and finds its rest within the inherent flow, ease, and interconnected wholeness of the psyche.