Saint John of the Cross reminds us that the flesh is the most persistent enemy of the soul, because its attacks last a lifetime. It is not just the body, but all the disordered inclinations that distance us from God: laziness, gluttony, lust, the search for selfish pleasure. To overcome these passions, the saint offers us three essential precautions.

1. Allow yourself to be molded by others. Instead of seeking comfort and pride in your own opinion, Saint John of the Cross exhorts us to accept the corrections and difficulties that come from others as a means of our purification. Just as a statue is carved by the sculptor, we must allow God to mold us through the relationships and experiences of life.
2. Never stop doing good, even if we do not feel like it. The flesh always seeks the easy way, avoiding effort and discipline. For this reason, the saint warns us that we must never abandon good works just because they are not pleasurable. Constancy in prayer, service to others, and renunciation of sin strengthen us against temptations.
3. Take care of prayer as food for the soul. The flesh tends to be distracted by sensory pleasures and forget the spiritual dimension. Saint John of the Cross reminds us that prayer is the means par excellence to elevate ourselves above our disordered desires and find true peace in God.

Dominating the flesh is not an easy task, but with the grace of God and the practice of these precautions, we can live with greater inner freedom, abandoning the ephemeral to embrace the eternal. True happiness is not in passing pleasures, but in the life of the Spirit, where the soul finds its true rest in God.

St. John of the Cross speaks of nine precautions, divided into three groups according to the enemies of the soul:

• Three precautions against the world
• Three precautions against the devil
• Three precautions against the flesh