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I recently came back from jogging. I’m amazed to write this fact. I think it was likely many years since my last. Yet I found out recently that I have slightly high cholesterol, and the recommendation was to perform intense workouts regularly.

For the first time ever in living memory that my motivation to be active has been my physical health. In my youth, I exercised because I desired to lose weight. I’ve also run to cure nervousness – It was an avoidance tactic from the anxiety, instead of dealing with it. Sometimes, I exercised because I sought to get better with jogging. It signified what it meant to me then to build a superior lifestyle.

Jogging with altered intent currently prompted contemplation about the methods I’ve connected with my body during my years and its transformation as I progress from youth to middle age. I don’t think I’ve honored my body, not fundamentally. I’ve valued it solely for its roles and the objectives it fulfilled for me: aiming to appeal; dodging sentiments; running a faster 5K run. Until today, I failed to grasp that I am my body, it embodies my life, as opposed to something that produces results.

A lot has been discussed over the centuries about the separation between body and mind – a topic it’s comforting to know, I won’t summarize here. What resonated most fascinating is the Freudian perspective that mind and body are naturally unified right from the start, because physical maturation demands emotional evolution and the reverse is true. A baby’s bodily experiences – such as the bodily feeling of hunger – motivate the brain to build the ability to recognise hunger as a feeling that is alleviated by a feed; and the emotional comfort and satisfaction regularly delivered by feed after feed feeds the child’s mind similar to the nutrition sustains them bodily. So too mental events – like the urge to rise and reach for something, and the persistence to try again and again – are the reason and method muscles grow stronger. From our earliest moments, mind and body are intertwined in reciprocal evolution as connected as a double helix.

Yet I’ve observed, during therapy with my psychoanalyst, that my consciousness and physique might experience a distinct connection – a more separated and more exploitative. My consciousness can use my body to hold and express aspects that my consciousness views undesirable or unbearable. In analysis we’ve become aware that exist specific feelings that I fear I can’t handle; in place of experiencing them psychologically, I unconsciously push them into bodily form, where they remain as bodily signs.

I often had digestive discomfort – unrelated to food intake, but acted as a kind of corporeal reaction of the more acidic feelings I couldn’t digest mentally. This was not a deliberate decision, but after it was introduced to my attention through therapy, and my fear and vulnerability and anger and terror were experienced and put into words rather than changed into corporeal symptoms, it vanished. I seldom experience from indigestion currently.

The toughest period I had this terrible acid reflux, I failed to rest for many nights straight. I believed I was slipping away from my mind. I went my doctor, who arranged various scans and tests, but everything was corporally problematic. It turned out to be another doctor who informed me that the root may be mental. My analyst agreed. I was surprised, but I recognized it to be true.

If an individual experiences a physical symptom, they might feel insulted upon hearing that it could have a psychological cause. They might feel like disrespect, hearing that their symptom is imagined. And of course that does happen – some face their symptoms dismissed or wrongly assessed. However, sometimes it might be that the physical symptoms exist – certainly – and the origin is emotional, the unconscious utilizing the body to express certain suffering or rage or any feeling awareness fails to handle. At times, we may believe our experience is only valid when it is expressed in physical form. We persistently neglect our psychological well-being on a personal level, as a society and as a culture; why else do we accept the appalling killing-off of psychological therapies on the NHS?

My experiences have taught me that a superior lifestyle is unattainable when we are stuck without realization in modes of connection, within ourselves and socially, that are rooted in disrespect, exploitation and exchange. Such patterns tend to be simpler to identify “in the world” in broader culture. It may be less comfortable to think about where they come from, and to see these shapes inside us and in intimate connections, in the economy of our psyches.

However it’s valuable to continue. Upon wearing my trainers again following many years, going outside not to get a better body, or to get rid of a feeling, or to beat a personal best, {it