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I recently came back from a run. It’s shocking to admit that statement. I think it might have been ten years since I last did so. But I found out recently that my levels show somewhat raised cholesterol, and I’ve been advised to do sweaty exercise frequently.

This is the first time in living memory 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 cure my anxiety – It was an avoidance tactic from those feelings, without confronting it. Sometimes, I jogged because I sought to improve with jogging. This was what it meant to me then to create a superior lifestyle.

Running for a different reason at present got me thinking about the ways I’ve related with my body over my lifetime and the way it’s evolving as I progress from youth to midlife. I believe not I’ve valued my physical form, not deep down. I’ve prized it just for its functions and the objectives it provided: aiming to appeal; escaping emotions; running a faster 5K run. Previously, I’ve not understood that my body is me, it is my life, rather than an instrument for achievements.

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 now. What I’ve found most fascinating is Freud’s understanding that mind and body are naturally unified from birth, because bodily growth demands psychological development and conversely. The newborn’s bodily experiences – for example the corporeal experience of hunger – motivate the mind to build the capacity to perceive hunger as a feeling that can be sated by eating; and the emotional comfort and contentment repeatedly brought by repeated nourishment feeds the child’s mind in the same way the food nourishes them bodily. Likewise emotional occurrences – like the wish to get up and grab an object, and the determination to attempt repeatedly – are the cause and means the body develops power. Since infancy, our body and mind are interconnected in shared growth as connected as a spiral.

However I’ve observed, during therapy with my therapist, that my consciousness and physique might experience a distinct connection – a less unified and more exploitative. My mind might utilize my body to retain and manifest elements that my consciousness views undesirable or intolerable. In analysis we’ve become aware how there are certain emotions that I worry I can’t handle; rather than feeling these in my mind, I subconsciously force them to my physical self, becoming trapped as bodily signs.

I used to get digestive discomfort – unrelated to what I’d eaten, but was a type of bodily backlash of the more acidic feelings I was unable to process in my mind. This wasn’t an intentional act, but when it was brought to awareness by my analyst, and my anxiety and insecurity and rage and panic became palpable and articulated instead of changed into corporeal symptoms, it resolved. I rarely suffer from indigestion now.

The worst time I endured this terrible acid reflux, I didn’t sleep for several nights in a row. I felt I was slipping away from my sanity. I visited my doctor, who organised all sorts of diagnostic procedures, but there was nothing medically abnormal. It turned out to be a different physician who told me that the cause may be emotional. My analyst concurred. I was surprised, but I recognized it was correct.

Whenever someone endures a physical symptom, they might feel insulted upon hearing that it may have an emotional origin. It can seem this as being disrespected, the idea that their condition isn’t real. And of course it’s a real phenomenon – people can have their suffering ignored or wrongly assessed. But in some cases it could be that the physical symptoms are genuine – certainly – and the cause is psychological, the unconscious using the body to express certain suffering or fury or any feeling the mind cannot tolerate. Occasionally, it’s easy to think our emotions is only valid when it is expressed as bodily symptoms. We persistently neglect our psychological well-being as individuals, as a society and within our culture; for what reason would we tolerate the shocking reduction of psychodynamic psychotherapy in public healthcare?

Personal insights have taught me that a better life cannot be built when we are stuck without realization in patterns of interaction, within ourselves and with others, that originate in disrespect, exploitation and dealings. These dynamics tend to be simpler to identify “externally” in broader culture. It’s perhaps harder to reflect on how they got out there, and to recognise these shapes inside us and within our closest relationships, in the economy of our mental lives.

Yet it’s valuable to continue. Upon wearing my jogging shoes once more after such a long decade, going outside without aiming for bodily change, or to get rid of a feeling, or to beat a personal best, {it