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I have just returned from a jog. I’m amazed to admit this fact. I think it was likely many years since my last. But I found out recently that my levels show elevated cholesterol, and I’ve been advised to perform intense workouts frequently.

It’s the initial instance in my life that the reason to exercise has been my physical health. In my youth, I jogged because I desired to lose weight. I’ve also run to manage my anxiety – It was an avoidance tactic from the anxiety, without confronting it. At other times, I jogged because I sought to improve with jogging. That represented the definition to me back then to develop an improved existence.

Exercising with new motivation now prompted contemplation about the approaches I’ve connected with my physical self during my years and the way it’s evolving as I transition from early adulthood to being a middle-aged person. I believe not I’ve valued my own body, not truly. I’ve prized it only for its roles and the aims it provided: seeking approval; escaping emotions; achieving a quicker 5K run. Previously, I hadn’t realized that my body is me, it is my life, as opposed to a tool for outcomes.

Much has been discussed for ages about the separation involving physical and mental aspects – which it’s reassuring to know, I won’t summarize here. What resonated most compelling is Freud’s understanding that mental and physical selves are developmentally integrated from the beginning, because physical maturation demands emotional evolution and conversely. The newborn’s bodily experiences – for example the bodily feeling of hunger – drive the mind to develop the ability to identify hunger as a feeling that can be sated by nourishment; and the mental reassurance and satisfaction repeatedly brought by meal after meal supports the child’s mind similar to the nutrition nourishes them physically. Similarly emotional occurrences – like the desire to get up and reach for something, and the determination to persist through effort – are why and how physical strength increases. Since infancy, our physical and mental selves are interlinked in reciprocal evolution as unified as a spiral.

However It’s become clear, in sessions with my analyst, that mental and physical aspects can be in a different kind of relationship – a less unified and increasingly manipulative. My consciousness might utilize my body to retain and manifest aspects that my consciousness views unacceptable or intolerable. In my sessions it emerged that there are specific feelings that I am afraid I can’t handle; in place of feeling these psychologically, I subconsciously push them into my body, where they get stuck as corporeal issues.

I used to get this as indigestion – which had nothing to do with my diet, but acted as a form of corporeal reaction of the more acidic feelings I was unable to process psychologically. This wasn’t a deliberate decision, but when it was brought to my attention in sessions, and my fear and insecurity and rage and panic could be felt and put into words in place of converted to bodily feelings, it disappeared. I seldom experience from stomach problems currently.

The toughest period I experienced this terrible acid reflux, I didn’t sleep for many nights straight. I believed I was losing my sanity. I visited a general practitioner, who scheduled all sorts of examinations and assessments, but no issues were found physically wrong. It turned out to be another doctor who informed me that the root might be mental. My psychoanalyst agreed. I was surprised, but I also felt it was correct.

Whenever someone is suffering a bodily issue, it can be upsetting if told that there might be an emotional origin. They might feel as invalidation, hearing that their condition isn’t real. And of course such cases occur – people can have their pain dismissed or wrongly assessed. Yet occasionally it could be that the physical symptoms are real – certainly – and the cause is mental, the subconscious employing the body to express emotional hurt or rage or whatever emotion awareness fails to handle. Sometimes, it’s easy to think our experience only has value only through expression through the body. We often undervalue our mental states as individuals, as a society and culturally; for what reason would we tolerate the shocking reduction of mental health treatments through health services?

Personal insights have revealed that a superior lifestyle is unattainable if we remain trapped without realization in ways of relating, inside us and with others, that stem from disrespect, manipulation and exchange. These dynamics are frequently more straightforward to spot “externally” in wider society. It’s likely less comfortable to think about how they got out there, and to identify these forms inside us and within our closest relationships, in the economy of our minds.

However it’s worth persevering. Upon wearing my jogging shoes back on after such a long decade, heading out not for a better body, or to get rid of a sensation, or to surpass a personal best, {it