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I recently came back from jogging. It’s shocking to state that statement. I believe it was likely a decade since I last did so. Yet I recently discovered that my levels show somewhat raised cholesterol, and I’ve been advised to do sweaty exercise on a consistent basis.

For the first time ever in my existence that my motivation to be active has been my bodily well-being. During earlier years, I jogged because I desired to slim down. I also jogged to alleviate my anxiety – It was an avoidance tactic from those feelings, not addressing it. Sometimes, I exercised because I wanted to get better at running. It signified what it meant to me back then to develop a superior lifestyle.

Running for a different reason at present got me thinking about the approaches I’ve connected with my body during my years and its transformation as I move from youth to midlife. I believe not I’ve honored my own body, not deep down. I’ve appreciated it just for its functions and the purposes it provided: seeking approval; escaping emotions; achieving a quicker five kilometers. Until today, I hadn’t realized that I am my body, it is my life, instead of a tool for outcomes.

A great deal has been written through history about the division involving physical and mental aspects – a topic it’s comforting to know, I’ll avoid detailing here. What resonated most intriguing is Freud’s understanding that mental and physical selves are developmentally integrated from birth, because physical development demands emotional evolution and vice versa. A baby’s bodily experiences – like the physical sensation of hunger – drive consciousness to develop the ability to identify hunger as a sensation that can be sated by eating; and the psychological solace and satisfaction repeatedly brought by meal after meal feeds the infant’s psyche just as the milk sustains them corporally. Similarly psychological experiences – such as the desire to rise and grab an object, and the resolve to persist through effort – are why and how muscles grow stronger. Since infancy, our physical and mental selves are interlinked in mutual development as connected as a double helix.

However It’s become clear, in sessions with my analyst, that my consciousness and physique may exist in an alternate dynamic – a more separated and more exploitative. My consciousness can use my physique to store and manifest things that my consciousness deems undesirable or intolerable. During therapy we’ve become aware that exist certain emotions that I am afraid I can’t handle; instead of feeling these in my mind, I subconsciously push them into my body, where they get stuck as bodily signs.

I previously experienced this with indigestion – not connected to what I’d eaten, but was a kind of bodily backlash of the harsher emotions I couldn’t digest psychologically. This wasn’t a deliberate decision, but after it was introduced to my attention by my analyst, and my fear and sensitivity and anger and alarm became palpable and put into words rather than transformed into corporeal symptoms, it vanished. I rarely suffer from indigestion now.

The most severe episode I experienced this terrible acid reflux, I didn’t sleep for several nights in a row. I felt I was forfeiting my mental stability. I consulted to the GP, who arranged all sorts of diagnostic procedures, but there was nothing medically abnormal. It was a different physician who told me that the cause might be emotional. My therapist concurred. I was stunned, but I also knew it was accurate.

If an individual experiences a bodily issue, they can be offended upon hearing that there might be an emotional origin. They might feel as invalidation, the idea that their symptom isn’t real. Naturally such cases occur – people can have their suffering dismissed or wrongly assessed. Yet occasionally it’s possible that the bodily signs are real – no question – and the origin is psychological, the inner mind using the body to convey emotional hurt or anger or any feeling awareness fails to handle. Sometimes, we might assume our emotions only has value when it is expressed in physical form. We often undervalue our psychological well-being as individuals, collectively and culturally; why else do we accept the appalling killing-off of mental health treatments in public healthcare?

Life lessons have shown me that a superior lifestyle is unattainable while caught without realization in modes of connection, internally and in relationships, that originate in disregard, exploitation and exchange. These dynamics are often easier to identify “out there” in the general public. It may be less comfortable to think about how they got out there, and to recognise these shapes inside us and in intimate connections, in the workings of our psyches.

But persistence pays off. When I put my jogging shoes again post a long hiatus, venturing out without aiming for bodily change, or to escape an emotion, or to beat a personal best, {it