If we could only snap the fetters of the body that bind the feet of the soul, we shall experience a great joy. Then we shall not be miserable because of the body’s sufferings. We shall become free.

The image of the body as “fetters” and the soul as something whose “feet” are bound frames liberation as an inward, spiritual emancipation rather than a change in external circumstances. The quote suggests that suffering becomes misery when consciousness is tightly identified with bodily pain, limitation, and desire; loosening that identification brings “great joy” and a sense of freedom. In this reading, freedom is not the absence of physical hardship but the capacity to remain inwardly unshaken by it—an ascetic, Vedantic, and Gandhian-inflected ideal in which self-discipline and spiritual insight reduce the tyranny of the body over the mind.