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I have just returned from jogging. I’m amazed to state those words. It seems it was likely ten years since I last did so. However I recently discovered that my levels show somewhat raised cholesterol, and doctors suggested to do sweaty exercise on a consistent basis.

For the first time ever in my life that the driving force to be active has been my health status. When I was younger, I ran because I aimed to lose weight. At times I ran to manage nervousness – It was an avoidance tactic from the worry, instead of dealing with it. Sometimes, I ran because I aimed to enhance at running. That represented the meaning to me then to develop a superior lifestyle.

Jogging with altered intent at present got me thinking about the approaches I’ve interacted with my physique during my years and the way it’s evolving as I progress from youth to middle age. It seems unlikely I’ve honored my physical form, not truly. I’ve prized it solely for its functions and the purposes it served me: trying to attract others; avoiding feelings; running a faster five kilometers. Until today, I’ve not understood that my body represents me, it embodies my life, as opposed to something that produces results.

A lot has been explored through history about the division of mind and body – a topic it’s comforting to know, I won’t summarize here. What has struck me most intriguing is Sigmund Freud’s view that consciousness and physique are developmentally integrated right from the start, because bodily growth demands psychological development and conversely. The infant’s physical sensations – like the bodily feeling of hunger – propel the brain to build the ability to identify hunger as an emotion that may be satisfied by eating; and the psychological solace and contentment regularly delivered by meal after meal feeds the infant’s psyche similar to the nutrition sustains them bodily. Similarly psychological experiences – like the urge to get up and grab an object, and the resolve 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 a spiral.

However I have noticed, in sessions with my therapist, that my mind and body may exist in a distinct connection – a more separated and more exploitative. My psyche might utilize my physique to store and express elements that my consciousness considers unwanted or intolerable. During therapy it emerged that exist specific feelings that I worry I cannot bear; in place of feeling these in my mind, I subconsciously force them to my physical self, where they get stuck as physical symptoms.

I often had this with indigestion – unrelated to food intake, but represented a kind of bodily backlash of the sharper sentiments I couldn’t digest in my mind. This wasn’t an intentional act, but once it was raised into my consciousness by my analyst, and my fear and sensitivity and anger and terror could be felt and put into words instead of changed into physical sensation, it resolved. I rarely suffer with digestive issues today.

The worst time I endured this intense reflux, I was unable to sleep for multiple consecutive nights. I believed I was slipping away from my sanity. I visited to the GP, who organised various examinations and assessments, but there was nothing corporally problematic. It turned out to be a different physician who suggested that the root could be psychological. My psychoanalyst did not disagree. I was shocked, but I recognized it was correct.

Whenever someone endures a bodily issue, it can be upsetting upon hearing that it could have an emotional origin. They might feel this as being disrespected, the idea that their condition is imagined. Certainly that does happen – individuals may experience their symptoms dismissed or wrongly assessed. Yet occasionally it’s possible that the bodily signs are real – without doubt – and the source is mental, the subconscious utilizing the physical self to express some pain or fury or whichever sentiment awareness cannot tolerate. At times, we may believe our experience is only valid only through expression through the body. We continually disrespect our mental states personally, collectively and within our culture; why else can we allow the appalling reduction of mental health treatments through health services?

Life lessons have shown me that a superior lifestyle is unattainable while caught unawares in modes of connection, within ourselves and in relationships, that originate in devaluation, use and transaction. Such patterns are often easier to spot “out there” in wider society. It’s perhaps harder to think about where they come from, and to recognise these patterns inside us and within our closest relationships, in the dynamics of our minds.

However it’s valuable to continue. When I put my running shoes again following many years, venturing out not to get physical improvement, or to escape a sensation, or to beat a personal best, {it