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I recently came back from a run. It’s surprising to admit this fact. I think it might have been many years since the previous time. However I recently discovered that my tests indicate elevated cholesterol, and I’ve been advised to engage in vigorous activity on a consistent basis.

It’s the initial instance in living memory that my motivation to work out has been my physical health. In my youth, I exercised because I aimed to slim down. I’ve also run to manage feelings of anxiety – It was an avoidance tactic from the anxiety, not addressing it. At other times, I exercised because I sought to improve at running. This was the definition to me at that time to create an improved existence.

Jogging with altered intent currently prompted contemplation about the methods I’ve interacted with my physical self during my years and how this is changing as I transition from being a young person to middle age. I don’t think I’ve valued my body, not truly. I’ve appreciated it just for its roles and the aims it fulfilled for me: trying to attract others; dodging sentiments; achieving a quicker five kilometers. Previously, I failed to grasp that I am my body, it embodies my life, as opposed to an instrument for achievements.

A great deal has been written for ages about the split between body and mind – a topic it’s reassuring to know, I’m not going to precis here. What I’ve found most intriguing is the Freudian perspective that consciousness and physique are innately connected from birth, because bodily growth demands emotional evolution and vice versa. A baby’s physical sensations – such as the corporeal experience of hunger – propel the mind to build the skill to identify hunger as an emotion that is alleviated by a feed; and the mental reassurance and satisfaction consistently provided by feed after feed feeds the infant’s psyche in the same way the milk fuels them corporally. So too mental events – such as the desire to rise and grab an object, and the determination to attempt repeatedly – are why and how physical strength increases. Since infancy, mind and body are interconnected in reciprocal evolution as unified as a double helix.

However I’ve observed, during therapy with my psychoanalyst, that mental and physical aspects can be in a different kind of relationship – a more separated and somewhat abusive. My mind might utilize my physical self to hold and express elements that my psyche considers unwanted or intolerable. In analysis we’ve become aware that there are particular emotional states that I worry are too much for me; rather than sensing them mentally, I unintentionally force them into bodily form, becoming trapped as physical symptoms.

I previously experienced this as indigestion – unrelated to food intake, but represented a kind of bodily backlash of the sharper sentiments I couldn’t digest in my mind. This wasn’t a deliberate decision, but after it was introduced into my consciousness in sessions, and my fear and vulnerability and anger and terror were experienced and expressed verbally in place of transformed into physical sensation, it vanished. I seldom experience from indigestion today.

The most severe episode I had this terrible acid reflux, I was unable to sleep for many nights straight. I believed I was forfeiting my mental stability. I consulted to the GP, who arranged all sorts of diagnostic procedures, but everything was physically wrong. It turned out to be an alternate medic who suggested that the cause could be emotional. My psychoanalyst did not disagree. I was stunned, but I recognized it was correct.

When a patient experiences a corporeal problem, it can be upsetting upon hearing that there might be an emotional origin. They might feel like disrespect, the idea that their symptom is imagined. Naturally such cases occur – people can have their symptoms ignored or incorrectly identified. But in some cases it could be that the physical symptoms exist – certainly – and the origin is mental, the inner mind utilizing the body to manifest some pain or rage or whatever emotion awareness cannot tolerate. Occasionally, we might assume our experience matters solely if manifested through the body. We persistently neglect our mental states on a personal level, in social contexts and culturally; how else would we tolerate the appalling killing-off of psychodynamic psychotherapy through health services?

Life lessons have shown me that an improved existence is unattainable when we are stuck unconsciously in modes of connection, inside us and in relationships, that originate in devaluation, exploitation and exchange. These interactions tend to be simpler to identify “externally” in the general public. It may be less comfortable to consider where they come from, and to recognise these forms within ourselves and among loved ones, in the economy of our psyches.

But it’s worth persevering. After donning my jogging shoes back on following many years, heading out without aiming for a better body, or to get rid of a feeling, or to surpass a personal best, {it