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I just got back from a run. It’s surprising to write this fact. I think it might have been ten years since I last did so. But I recently discovered that my levels show elevated cholesterol, and doctors suggested to engage in vigorous activity regularly.

It’s the initial instance in my existence that the driving force to work out has been my physical health. When I was younger, I exercised because I desired to lose weight. I’ve also run to alleviate feelings of anxiety – It was an avoidance tactic from the worry, without confronting it. At other times, I ran because I wanted to improve at running. This was what it meant to me at that time to create a superior lifestyle.

Exercising with new motivation now sparked reflection about the ways I’ve interacted with my physical self over my lifetime and its transformation as I transition from youth to middle age. I don’t think I’ve respected my physical form, not truly. I’ve appreciated it only for its roles and the objectives it provided: trying to attract others; avoiding feelings; achieving a quicker 5km. Until today, I hadn’t realized that I am my body, it is my existence, rather than something that produces results.

A lot has been written for ages about the separation involving physical and mental aspects – a topic you will be relieved to know, I’ll avoid detailing here. What resonated most fascinating is Freud’s understanding that consciousness and physique are innately connected from birth, because physical development requires psychological development and the reverse is true. The newborn’s corporeal feelings – like the bodily feeling of hunger – propel the mind to develop the capacity to identify hunger as a feeling that is alleviated by eating; and the mental reassurance and satisfaction consistently provided by feed after feed nourishes the infant’s psyche in the same way the milk nourishes them corporally. Likewise mental events – for instance the wish to get up and grab an object, and the persistence to persist through effort – are the cause and means muscles grow stronger. Since infancy, mind and body are interlinked in mutual development as integrated as DNA strands.

But I’ve observed, in treatment with my psychoanalyst, that my mind and body may exist in an alternate dynamic – a more separated and somewhat abusive. My consciousness may employ my physique to hold and display elements that my consciousness views undesirable or intolerable. In analysis it emerged how exist particular emotional states that I fear are too much for me; rather than feeling these in my mind, I unconsciously shift them to my physical self, where they get stuck as corporeal issues.

I often had this as indigestion – which had nothing to do with food intake, but was a type of corporeal reaction of the harsher emotions I was unable to process psychologically. This wasn’t a deliberate decision, but once it was raised to awareness by my analyst, and my fear and vulnerability and anger and terror were experienced and articulated in place of changed into corporeal symptoms, it vanished. It’s uncommon for me with digestive issues currently.

The most severe episode I endured this terrible acid reflux, I didn’t sleep for multiple consecutive nights. I felt I was forfeiting my sanity. I visited a general practitioner, who scheduled various diagnostic procedures, but everything was medically abnormal. It turned out to be another doctor who informed me that the root might be emotional. My therapist concurred. I was surprised, but I also knew it was accurate.

Whenever someone is suffering a bodily issue, they might feel insulted upon hearing that there might be a mental root. They might feel as invalidation, the idea that their condition is fabricated. Certainly such cases occur – individuals may experience their pain ignored or misdiagnosed. But in some cases it’s possible that the corporeal issues are genuine – certainly – and the cause is emotional, the unconscious employing the physical self to express some pain or anger or whatever emotion awareness fails to handle. Sometimes, we may believe our feelings is only valid when it is expressed as bodily symptoms. We persistently neglect our mental states as individuals, as a society and as a culture; why else do we accept the terrible killing-off of psychological therapies on the NHS?

Life lessons have shown me that a superior lifestyle is unattainable if we remain trapped without realization in ways of relating, inside us and socially, that are rooted in disrespect, exploitation and transaction. These dynamics tend to be simpler to recognize “in the world” in the general public. It’s likely less comfortable to reflect on where they come from, and to recognise these forms inside us and within our closest relationships, in the economy of our psyches.

However persistence pays off. Upon wearing my jogging shoes again following many years, venturing out without aiming for bodily change, or to eliminate a feeling, or to beat a 5km time, {it