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I have just returned from jogging. It’s surprising to write this fact. I believe it might have been ten years since my last. Yet I recently discovered that my tests indicate elevated cholesterol, and doctors suggested to do sweaty exercise regularly.

For the first time ever in living memory that my motivation to exercise has been my physical health. During earlier years, I ran because I desired to lose weight. I’ve also run to cure feelings of anxiety – I was just running away from the anxiety, instead of dealing with it. Sometimes, I jogged because I wanted to improve with jogging. It signified what it meant to me at that time to build an improved existence.

Exercising with new motivation at present sparked reflection about the ways I’ve related with my physique over my lifetime and the way it’s evolving as I transition from youth to midlife. It seems unlikely I’ve valued my own body, not truly. I’ve appreciated it only for its capabilities and the aims it fulfilled for me: aiming to appeal; avoiding feelings; running a faster 5K run. Until today, I hadn’t realized that I am my body, it embodies my life, rather than something that produces results.

A great deal has been written through history about the separation involving physical and mental aspects – a topic it’s comforting to know, I’ll avoid detailing here. What I’ve found most compelling is Freud’s understanding that consciousness and physique are innately connected right from the start, because physical development demands psychological development and the reverse is true. The newborn’s corporeal feelings – like the bodily feeling of hunger – motivate the mind to develop the skill to recognise hunger as an emotion that may be satisfied by a feed; and the mental reassurance and contentment repeatedly brought by feed after feed feeds the infant’s psyche similar to the milk nourishes them physically. So too emotional occurrences – such as the urge to rise and attain a goal, and the resolve to attempt repeatedly – are the reason and method the body develops power. Since infancy, mind and body are interconnected in shared growth as integrated as DNA strands.

Yet I’ve observed, during therapy with my psychoanalyst, that mental and physical aspects may exist in a distinct connection – a less unified and more exploitative. My psyche might utilize my physique to hold and manifest elements that my consciousness views unacceptable or unacceptable. During therapy we realized that there are certain emotions that I fear I cannot bear; in place of sensing them in my mind, I unintentionally force them to my physical self, becoming trapped as bodily signs.

I previously experienced digestive discomfort – which had nothing to do with what I’d eaten, but represented a kind of corporeal reaction of the harsher emotions I couldn’t digest psychologically. This wasn’t a deliberate decision, but after it was introduced into my consciousness in sessions, and my dread and insecurity and rage and alarm were experienced and put into words rather than transformed into bodily feelings, it disappeared. I seldom experience from stomach problems currently.

The most severe episode I endured this severe heartburn, I didn’t sleep for many nights straight. It seemed I was losing my mental stability. I visited a general practitioner, who arranged multiple diagnostic procedures, but everything was physically wrong. The situation was another doctor who told me that the origin might be mental. My analyst agreed. I was stunned, but I recognized it was accurate.

When a patient is suffering a bodily issue, they can be offended if told that it could have an emotional origin. They might feel like disrespect, hearing that their symptom is imagined. Certainly such cases occur – individuals may experience their pain discounted or misdiagnosed. Yet occasionally it could be that the bodily signs are genuine – no question – and the source is psychological, the unconscious utilizing the physical self to convey some pain or rage or any feeling the conscious self fails to handle. Sometimes, we might assume our experience only has value when it is expressed in physical form. We persistently neglect our mental states as individuals, collectively and culturally; why else can we allow the appalling killing-off of psychological therapies on the NHS?

Life lessons have shown me that a superior lifestyle cannot be built if we remain trapped unconsciously in patterns of interaction, within ourselves and in relationships, that stem from devaluation, manipulation and dealings. These dynamics are often easier to identify “in the world” in wider society. It’s likely harder to reflect on their origins, and to see these forms inside us and in intimate connections, in the dynamics of our psyches.

However it’s valuable to continue. When I put my running shoes again following many years, going outside not to get a better body, or to escape a sensation, or to surpass a 5km time, {it