You've struck at the essential problem of dualism. If thoughts are nonphysical, how can thoughts influence our physical bodies? If consciousness does not interact with the physical world, but merely arises from it, then how can we possibly discuss it, since anything we describe is causally linked to our description of it?

Descartes thought the soul was linked to the body through the pineal gland, inspiring a long tradition of mystic woo associated with what is, in fact, a fairly pedestrian endocrine gland.

Further reading, if you're interested:

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/dualism/

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consciousness/

Personally, my take is that we can't really trust our own accounts of consciousness. Humans describe feeling that their senses form a cohesive sensorium that passes smoothly through time as a unique, distinct entity, but that feeling is just a property of how our brains process sensory information into thoughts. The way we're built strongly disposes us to think that "conscious experience" is a real distinct thing, even if it's not even clear what we mean by that, and even if the implications of its existence don't make sense. So the simple answer to the hard problem, IMO, is that consciousness doesn't exist (not even conceptually), and we just use the word "consciousness" to describe a particular set of feelings and intuitions that don't really tell us much about the underlying reality of the mind.