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I have just returned from a jog. It’s shocking to admit that statement. It seems it might have been ten years since the previous time. However I recently discovered that my tests indicate slightly high cholesterol, and the recommendation was to do sweaty exercise regularly.

For the first time ever in my life that my motivation to be active has been my health status. In my youth, I exercised because I wanted to lose weight. I also jogged to alleviate nervousness – I was merely escaping from the worry, instead of dealing with it. At other times, I jogged because I sought to enhance with jogging. It signified the definition to me at that time to create an improved existence.

Jogging with altered intent at present prompted contemplation about the methods I’ve interacted with my body over my lifetime and the way it’s evolving as I transition from being a young person to middle age. It seems unlikely I’ve valued my own body, not truly. I’ve prized it only for its capabilities and the aims it served me: aiming to appeal; avoiding feelings; completing a speedier 5K run. Previously, I hadn’t realized that I am my body, it embodies my life, as opposed to a tool for outcomes.

A great deal has been written over the centuries about the split between body and mind – a topic it’s reassuring to know, I’m not going to precis now. What resonated most intriguing is Freud’s understanding that consciousness and physique are innately connected from the beginning, because physical maturation demands psychological development and conversely. The newborn’s corporeal feelings – such as the corporeal experience of hunger – propel the mind to build the capacity to perceive hunger as a feeling that can be sated by nourishment; and the emotional comfort and contentment consistently provided by meal after meal supports the child’s mind similar to the food sustains them bodily. Similarly psychological experiences – like the desire to rise and reach for something, and the determination to try again and again – are why and how muscles grow stronger. Starting at birth, mind and body are intertwined in reciprocal evolution as integrated as a spiral.

However I’ve observed, during therapy with my psychoanalyst, that my mind and body can be in a different kind of relationship – a more separated and increasingly manipulative. My psyche may employ my physique to store and express aspects that my consciousness deems undesirable or intolerable. In my sessions we’ve become aware that exist certain emotions that I fear I can’t handle; in place of experiencing them psychologically, I subconsciously shift them to my physical self, where they remain as physical symptoms.

I used to get this as indigestion – not connected to my diet, but was a kind of physical reflux of the sharper sentiments I was unable to process in my mind. This wasn’t a deliberate decision, but once it was raised to awareness in sessions, and my anxiety and insecurity and rage and terror were experienced and put into words rather than converted to corporeal symptoms, it resolved. It’s uncommon for me with digestive issues currently.

The toughest period I had this intense reflux, I failed to rest for many nights straight. I felt I was slipping away from my mental stability. I visited a general practitioner, who arranged all sorts of examinations and assessments, but everything was medically abnormal. It was a different physician who told me that the origin could be psychological. My therapist agreed. I was stunned, but I recognized it to be true.

When a patient is suffering a physical symptom, it can be upsetting if told that there might be an emotional origin. They can experience this as being disrespected, hearing that their symptom isn’t real. And of course it’s a real phenomenon – people can have their suffering discounted or wrongly assessed. However, sometimes it might be that the corporeal issues are real – certainly – and the cause is psychological, the inner mind employing the body to manifest certain suffering or rage or whatever emotion the conscious self is unable to bear. Occasionally, we may believe our experience only has value only through expression in physical form. We continually disrespect our psychological well-being on a personal level, as a society and as a culture; how else would we tolerate the appalling elimination of psychological therapies in public healthcare?

Personal insights have revealed that a superior lifestyle is unattainable if we remain trapped without realization in modes of connection, within ourselves and with others, that originate in disregard, manipulation and transaction. These interactions are frequently more straightforward to identify “externally” in the general public. It’s likely more challenging to reflect on their origins, and to identify these forms personally and in intimate connections, in the economy of our mental lives.

However persistence pays off. When I put my trainers back on following many years, going outside without aiming for physical improvement, or to escape an emotion, or to beat a 5km time, {it