Why must you see every downturn as a punishment? Perhaps, on the contrary, it became time for you to receive greater things from Above.
Only that, like a metal spring, you must first become small before you can unleash your power.
Like an olive, you must allow yourself to be crushed to discover your oil.
Like a seed, you must first come down from your tree and lose yourself within the earth so you can sprout and grow into a mighty oak.
Perhaps all these troubles of yours are G‑d's way of helping you along that path, helping you become small.
And if so, the remedy is obvious: Make yourself small on your own and relieve Him of the task.
Truth be told, you can do the job much better on your own—far less painfully and with faster results.
The Rebbe, in a letter to a businessperson.
We humans have learned to identify with our bodies. We are delusional because of the mingling of the conscious self with the insentient body.
The body is nothing of itself, as can be seen by how it acts when the soul leaves it. Like Grandfather’s clock it stops short, never to move again. The soul is the consciousness of the body, and is itself dependent on the Creator, aka G-d, the ONLY actual Self there is. All of this exists in the Divine Mind.
The Divine Self projects as what we call the soul, and the soul “experiments” in the body. During a lifetime we have the opportunity, through trial and error, to develop and mature. Everything we perceive is the result of the sensory report in the brain: pictures, sounds, tastes, smells, what we can feel (touch), and the world appears to be as we perceive it. All of us have similar bodies and so “share this world”. It looks and feels “real”, but we imagine with our sensations pleasurable or painful, “punishment/reward. This is ego.