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I just got back from a run. It’s shocking to admit those words. I think it was likely many years since my last. Yet I recently discovered that my tests indicate slightly high cholesterol, and the recommendation was to engage in vigorous activity regularly.

This is the first time in my existence that my motivation to be active has been my health status. In my youth, I ran because I aimed to lose weight. I also jogged to manage feelings of anxiety – I was merely escaping from those feelings, without confronting it. At other times, I ran because I aimed to enhance with jogging. This was the meaning to me then to build a better life.

Exercising with new motivation now got me thinking about the methods I’ve related with my physique over my lifetime and its transformation as I transition from being a young person to being a middle-aged person. I don’t think I’ve honored my own body, not truly. I’ve valued it solely for its functions and the objectives it fulfilled for me: seeking approval; avoiding feelings; achieving a quicker 5K run. Up to now, I failed to grasp that my body represents me, it embodies my life, as opposed to a tool for outcomes.

A lot has been written for ages about the split involving physical and mental aspects – which it’s reassuring to know, I’m not going to precis in this piece. What has struck me most compelling is the Freudian perspective that consciousness and physique are developmentally integrated from the beginning, because bodily growth necessitates emotional evolution and conversely. The infant’s physical sensations – like the corporeal experience of hunger – propel the brain to cultivate the skill to perceive hunger as a feeling that can be sated by nourishment; and the emotional comfort and contentment consistently provided by repeated nourishment feeds the young mind just as the milk nourishes them bodily. Similarly mental events – like the urge to get up and reach for something, and the resolve to persist through effort – are the reason and method physical strength increases. Since infancy, mind and body are interlinked in shared growth as unified as a spiral.

However I have noticed, during therapy with my therapist, that my mind and body can be in an alternate dynamic – one less integrated and somewhat abusive. My psyche can use my body to hold and manifest things that my consciousness views undesirable or unacceptable. During therapy it emerged that there are particular emotional states that I fear I can’t handle; instead of feeling these psychologically, I unintentionally shift them into my body, where they remain as physical symptoms.

I often had this with indigestion – which had nothing to do with what I’d eaten, but was a form of physical reflux of the sharper sentiments I couldn’t digest in my mind. This wasn’t a deliberate decision, but when it was brought to awareness through therapy, and my anxiety and sensitivity and frustration and panic could be felt and articulated in place of changed into physical sensation, it disappeared. It’s uncommon for me from indigestion currently.

The worst time I had this severe heartburn, I was unable to sleep for multiple consecutive nights. It seemed I was losing my sanity. I went to the GP, who scheduled all sorts of examinations and assessments, but everything was medically abnormal. It turned out to be a different physician who suggested that the origin may be psychological. My psychoanalyst agreed. I was surprised, but I also felt it was accurate.

When a patient experiences a corporeal problem, it can be upsetting upon hearing that it could have a psychological cause. They can experience as invalidation, hearing that their illness is fabricated. Naturally it’s a real phenomenon – people can have their pain discounted or wrongly assessed. However, sometimes it might be that the physical symptoms exist – certainly – and the cause is psychological, the unconscious using the body to convey some pain or anger or whatever emotion the mind is unable to bear. Sometimes, we may believe our feelings only has value only through expression through the body. We continually disrespect our minds on a personal level, collectively and culturally; how else would we tolerate the shocking reduction of psychological therapies on the NHS?

My experiences have revealed that a better life is unattainable if we remain trapped without realization in patterns of interaction, internally and with others, that stem from disrespect, use and dealings. These interactions are frequently more straightforward to spot “out there” in wider society. It may be harder to think about their origins, and to recognise these forms inside us and in intimate connections, in the workings of our mental lives.

However persistence pays off. When I put my jogging shoes back on following many years, venturing out not to get physical improvement, or to escape a feeling, or to surpass a personal best, {it