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I recently came back from jogging. I’m amazed to write those words. I think it might have been ten years since my last. But I found out recently that my tests indicate slightly high cholesterol, and I’ve been advised to perform intense workouts regularly.

This is the first time in my existence that the driving force to exercise has been my health status. During earlier years, I exercised because I wanted to lose weight. I’ve also run to alleviate nervousness – I was just running away from those feelings, not addressing it. On other occasions, I ran because I wanted to get better in running. It signified the definition to me at that time to build a superior lifestyle.

Exercising with new motivation currently got me thinking about the approaches I’ve connected with my physical self throughout my life and the way it’s evolving as I transition from being a young person to midlife. I don’t think I’ve respected my body, not deep down. I’ve prized it only for its capabilities and the aims it served me: seeking approval; escaping emotions; achieving a quicker 5km. Previously, I hadn’t realized that my body is me, it is my existence, rather than something that produces results.

A great deal has been written through history about the separation involving physical and mental aspects – which it’s comforting to know, I won’t summarize in this piece. What resonated most fascinating is Freud’s understanding that mental and physical selves are naturally unified from birth, because bodily growth demands mental growth and vice versa. The newborn’s bodily experiences – like the physical sensation of hunger – motivate the mind to build the ability to identify hunger as a feeling that can be sated by eating; and the psychological solace and contentment repeatedly brought by repeated nourishment nourishes the child’s mind just as the food sustains them bodily. Similarly mental events – like the desire to rise and reach for something, and the determination to try again and again – are the cause and means physical strength increases. From our earliest moments, our body and mind are interlinked in reciprocal evolution as connected as a spiral.

But I’ve observed, during therapy with my analyst, that my mind and body may exist in a different kind of relationship – one less integrated and somewhat abusive. My consciousness might utilize my physique to store and display elements that my consciousness considers unacceptable or intolerable. In analysis we’ve become aware that exist specific feelings that I worry I can’t handle; in place of feeling these mentally, I unconsciously push them into my body, becoming trapped as physical symptoms.

I previously experienced this as indigestion – not connected to what I’d eaten, but represented a form of corporeal reaction of the more acidic feelings I couldn’t digest in my mind. This was not an intentional act, but once it was raised into my consciousness by my analyst, and my anxiety and insecurity and frustration and alarm could be felt and expressed verbally in place of changed into bodily feelings, it vanished. I seldom experience from indigestion today.

The toughest period I had this severe heartburn, I was unable to sleep for multiple consecutive nights. I felt I was losing my mental stability. I went my doctor, who scheduled all sorts of scans and tests, but no issues were found medically abnormal. The situation was another doctor who informed me that the origin could be mental. My analyst did not disagree. I was stunned, but I also felt it was accurate.

If an individual endures a corporeal problem, they might feel insulted at the suggestion that there might be a mental root. They can experience this as being disrespected, being told that their condition is imagined. And of course such cases occur – individuals may experience their symptoms ignored or misdiagnosed. Yet occasionally it’s possible that the corporeal issues are genuine – without doubt – and the cause is psychological, the inner mind utilizing the physical self to convey certain suffering or rage or whatever emotion the mind fails to handle. Occasionally, we may believe our emotions is only valid when it is expressed through the body. We continually disrespect our minds personally, in social contexts and as a culture; how else do we accept the terrible reduction of psychological therapies on the NHS?

Life lessons have shown me that a superior lifestyle is unattainable while caught without realization in patterns of interaction, inside us and with others, that are rooted in devaluation, exploitation and exchange. These dynamics tend to be simpler to spot “out there” in wider society. It’s likely harder to reflect on their origins, and to recognise these patterns personally and within our closest relationships, in the workings of our psyches.

But persistence pays off. When I put my jogging shoes once more after such a long decade, going outside not to get physical improvement, or to get rid of a sensation, or to surpass a 5km time, {it