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I have just returned from a jog. I’m amazed to state that statement. I think it was likely a decade since the previous time. Yet I found out recently that my levels show slightly high cholesterol, and doctors suggested to do sweaty exercise frequently.

It’s the initial instance in my existence that the driving force to exercise has been my health status. When I was younger, I exercised because I wanted to slim down. I also jogged to manage feelings of anxiety – I was merely escaping from the anxiety, without confronting it. On other occasions, I exercised because I sought to enhance in running. This was what it meant to me at that time to build a better life.

Jogging with altered intent now prompted contemplation about the ways I’ve interacted with my body during my years and its transformation as I move from youth to middle age. It seems unlikely I’ve honored my body, not deep down. I’ve valued it only for its roles and the aims it served me: trying to attract others; avoiding feelings; achieving a quicker 5km. Until today, I hadn’t realized that I am my body, it embodies my life, instead of an instrument for achievements.

A great deal has been explored through history about the separation of mind and body – which it’s reassuring to know, I’m not going to precis here. What I’ve found most compelling is Freud’s understanding that mental and physical selves are naturally unified from birth, because physical development necessitates psychological development and vice versa. The newborn’s corporeal feelings – like the physical sensation of hunger – propel the brain to cultivate the skill to identify hunger as an emotion that is alleviated by eating; and the emotional comfort and satisfaction consistently provided by meal after meal supports the young mind just as the milk fuels them corporally. Likewise mental events – such as the desire to stand up and grab an object, and the resolve to try again and again – are the cause and means the body develops power. From our earliest moments, mind and body are interlinked in shared growth as unified as DNA strands.

But I have noticed, in treatment with my psychoanalyst, that my consciousness and physique can be in an alternate dynamic – a less unified and increasingly manipulative. My psyche can use my physical self to store and express elements that my mind considers unacceptable or unacceptable. During therapy we realized that there are particular emotional states that I fear I can’t handle; in place of experiencing them in my mind, I unintentionally force them into bodily form, where they get stuck as corporeal issues.

I used to get this with indigestion – not connected to what I’d eaten, but acted as a type of bodily backlash of the harsher emotions I couldn’t digest psychologically. It wasn’t a deliberate decision, but when it was brought to awareness by my analyst, and my dread and vulnerability and frustration and terror were experienced and articulated instead of converted to bodily feelings, it disappeared. It’s uncommon for me from indigestion today.

The most severe episode I endured this severe heartburn, I didn’t sleep for multiple consecutive nights. I believed I was slipping away from my mind. I consulted to the GP, who arranged multiple diagnostic procedures, but there was nothing corporally problematic. The situation was a different physician who suggested that the root might be emotional. My therapist agreed. I was shocked, but I recognized it was correct.

When a patient is suffering a corporeal problem, they might feel insulted at the suggestion that there might be an emotional origin. They might feel as invalidation, being told that their symptom isn’t real. Certainly such cases occur – some face their pain discounted or misdiagnosed. Yet occasionally it could be that the bodily signs are real – without doubt – and the origin is mental, the inner mind using the physical self to manifest emotional hurt or fury or any feeling awareness cannot tolerate. Occasionally, we may believe our feelings is only valid if manifested as bodily symptoms. We persistently neglect our minds as individuals, collectively and culturally; why else can we allow the terrible elimination of psychodynamic psychotherapy on the NHS?

Personal insights have shown me that an improved existence cannot be created while caught unawares in modes of connection, internally and socially, that are rooted in devaluation, use and dealings. These interactions are often easier to recognize “in the world” in the general public. It’s perhaps more challenging to consider their origins, and to identify these shapes personally and within our closest relationships, in the economy of our psyches.

But it’s valuable to continue. Upon wearing my running shoes back on post a long hiatus, heading out not for a better body, or to escape a feeling, or to improve a personal best, {it