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I recently came back from jogging. It’s shocking to write that statement. I think it could have been ten years since I last did so. Yet I found out recently that my levels show slightly high cholesterol, and doctors suggested to do sweaty exercise frequently.

It’s the initial instance in my existence that the reason to work out has been my health status. During earlier years, I jogged because I aimed to lose weight. I’ve also run to cure my anxiety – I was merely escaping from those feelings, instead of dealing with it. On other occasions, I ran because I sought to improve in running. It signified the meaning to me at that time to create a better life.

Exercising with new motivation currently prompted contemplation about the approaches I’ve interacted with my body throughout my life and how this is changing as I progress from early adulthood to being a middle-aged person. I believe not I’ve honored my own body, not deep down. I’ve appreciated it just for its functions and the aims it served me: trying to attract others; avoiding feelings; achieving a quicker 5km. Up to now, I failed to grasp that my body is me, it embodies my life, instead of a tool for outcomes.

A great deal has been written for ages about the separation involving physical and mental aspects – a topic you will be relieved to know, I won’t summarize here. What I’ve found most intriguing is Freud’s understanding that mind and body are innately connected right from the start, because physical development requires mental growth and vice versa. A baby’s physical sensations – for example the bodily feeling of hunger – propel consciousness to cultivate the capacity to perceive hunger as an emotion that can be sated by a feed; and the emotional comfort and satisfaction consistently provided by repeated nourishment supports the young mind just as the food nourishes them corporally. So too mental events – like the urge to stand up and grab an object, and the determination to attempt repeatedly – are why and how muscles grow stronger. Since infancy, our physical and mental selves are interlinked in mutual development as unified as a double helix.

Yet I’ve observed, during therapy with my therapist, that my consciousness and physique may exist in an alternate dynamic – one less integrated and more exploitative. My consciousness may employ my physique to store and manifest elements that my mind views undesirable or unacceptable. In analysis we’ve become aware that there are specific feelings that I worry I can’t handle; rather than sensing them in my mind, I unintentionally force them into bodily form, where they remain as corporeal issues.

I often had digestive discomfort – unrelated to my diet, but was a type of corporeal reaction of the more acidic feelings I couldn’t digest in my mind. This wasn’t a deliberate decision, but once it was raised into my consciousness in sessions, and my anxiety and sensitivity and anger and panic were experienced and expressed verbally instead of transformed into physical sensation, it resolved. I seldom experience from indigestion today.

The toughest period I experienced this terrible acid reflux, I was unable to sleep for several nights in a row. I felt I was losing my sanity. I visited to the GP, who scheduled various scans and tests, but there was nothing medically abnormal. It was another doctor who told me that the root might be psychological. My psychoanalyst did not disagree. I was surprised, but I also knew it was correct.

If an individual endures a physical symptom, they can be offended at the suggestion that it could have a psychological cause. It can seem this as being disrespected, being told that their symptom is imagined. And of course that does happen – some face their pain ignored or misdiagnosed. Yet occasionally it could be that the bodily signs exist – without doubt – and the source is emotional, the inner mind using the physique to manifest some pain or fury or whatever emotion the conscious self is unable to bear. Sometimes, it’s easy to think our feelings is only valid only through expression through the body. We continually disrespect our psychological well-being as individuals, collectively and within our culture; how else can we allow the appalling elimination of psychodynamic psychotherapy on the NHS?

Life lessons have shown me that an improved existence cannot be created if we remain trapped unconsciously in ways of relating, within ourselves and socially, that are rooted in disregard, manipulation and exchange. These interactions are frequently more straightforward to identify “out there” in the general public. It’s likely more challenging to consider where they come from, and to see these forms within ourselves and in intimate connections, in the dynamics of our psyches.

But it’s worth persevering. When I put my jogging shoes again post a long hiatus, going outside not for bodily change, or to eliminate an emotion, or to improve a running record, {it