My best understanding is the soul is your sort of inner essence, who you are inside, what you experience life with, and it can be what chooses what you do. But it’s not a simple and clearly understood or agreed-upon relationship to your physical body. A priest, a lama, a dervish and a materialist will give you different answers, and perhaps others with the same titles would give you another set of answers.
What I have experienced for myself is:
* When I’m not depressed, distracted, behaving habitually, fatigued or otherwise dissociated, I have a clear sense of my consciousness and inner self as distinct from my identity in the physical body I live in. I dream from this consciousness, and often forget some or all of my physical identity. Meditation and other techniques have made the layers of my experiences and thoughts more distinct. I think it is (or is closely related to) what’s called “being present” in a meditation or psychology context. I think of this consciousness as my experience of my soul.
* I can spend hours at a time running more or less on auto-pilot, making decisions and using skills, not being very present at all. Sometimes it’s a bit like my soul took a nap for a while while I drove to work or something. Being present isn’t an all-or-nothing thing.
* A soul seems to also have “soul parts” (a shamanic term), and sometimes different ones may be present or not. People, particularly those who’ve had a lot of trauma, often have some soul parts that hide some or all of the time. I have seen shamanic work have a massive effect on people’s experience of life by working on healing this.
* I have experienced mediumistic events where I have allowed other spirits to use my voice, with no training or coaching and with no conscious knowledge of how to do that or what I might say or who might be saying it until the words came out of my mouth. Not like free association. Not like improv.
* I have had full anesthesia and experienced an hour or more as a few moments in a fluffy warm cloud. I’ve also been very tired and slept for quite a while that seemed like just a moment. These things seem to show me that the physical/chemical condition of my brain & body can cause me to be entirely disconnected from my usual experience of consciousness.
* I have also been really tired and had parts of my brain essentially pass out, showing that how I think can be affected by the physical state of my brain and body.
* I have studied and practiced recording my dreams, and found that I can dream elaborate physical scenes that would take hours to diagram when awake, and experience elaborate stories, and have very little time elapse on the physical clock. This mainly shows me that my brain is very capable at something, but also that there’s a time perception disconnect possible in the other direction too, between my consciousness and my physical body – I can’t do those things while awake (or when not in a hypnogogic state).
* I’ve also read many accounts of (and talked to and know people who’ve had and who’ve induced) past-life hypnotic regressions, which for the most part seem quite credible and interesting, and suggest that our consciousness (or soul, I assume) can tune into sources in this way that are not from our physical body. They seem to very strongly suggest that the soul exists independently of the physical body. These regressions often have great therapeutic effects on people, too.