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I just got back from jogging. It’s surprising to write that statement. It seems it might have been many years since I last did so. Yet It came to my attention that I have elevated cholesterol, and I’ve been advised to perform intense workouts regularly.

This is the first time in my existence that my motivation to work out has been my health status. In my youth, I exercised because I desired to be thinner. At times I ran to alleviate feelings of anxiety – It was an avoidance tactic from those feelings, instead of dealing with it. Sometimes, I jogged because I sought to enhance in running. This was what it meant to me at that time to create a better life.

Exercising with new motivation currently sparked reflection about the methods I’ve interacted with my physical self over my lifetime and its transformation as I progress from early adulthood to middle age. It seems unlikely I’ve valued my own body, not deep down. I’ve prized it only for its roles and the objectives it provided: trying to attract others; avoiding feelings; running a faster five kilometers. Previously, I hadn’t realized that I am my body, it is my life, as opposed to a tool for outcomes.

A great deal has been explored through history about the division between body and mind – which it’s reassuring to know, I’ll avoid detailing now. What I’ve found most intriguing is the Freudian perspective that consciousness and physique are developmentally integrated from the beginning, because physical maturation requires psychological development and conversely. The infant’s physical sensations – for example the corporeal experience of hunger – motivate the mind to build the capacity to perceive hunger as a feeling that can be sated by a feed; and the psychological solace and contentment repeatedly brought by meal after meal nourishes the child’s mind in the same way the milk nourishes them corporally. Similarly mental events – for instance the desire to get up and attain a goal, and the resolve to persist through effort – are why and how muscles grow stronger. From our earliest moments, our physical and mental selves are interlinked in reciprocal evolution as unified as DNA strands.

But I’ve observed, during therapy with my analyst, that my mind and body may exist in a distinct connection – a less unified and increasingly manipulative. My consciousness might utilize my body to store and manifest aspects that my consciousness considers undesirable or intolerable. During therapy we realized how there are specific feelings that I fear I can’t handle; in place of feeling these psychologically, I unintentionally force them into bodily form, becoming trapped as physical symptoms.

I used to get this with indigestion – not connected to food intake, but represented a kind of corporeal reaction of the harsher emotions I was unable to process mentally. This was not a conscious choice, but when it was brought to my attention in sessions, and my dread and vulnerability and rage and panic were experienced and expressed verbally instead of transformed into corporeal symptoms, it resolved. I seldom experience with digestive issues today.

The toughest period I endured this severe heartburn, I was unable to sleep for many nights straight. I felt I was forfeiting my sanity. I went to the GP, who organised multiple examinations and assessments, but everything was medically abnormal. It was an alternate medic who informed me that the root might be emotional. My analyst did not disagree. I was surprised, but I also knew it was correct.

Whenever someone is suffering a physical symptom, they might feel insulted at the suggestion that there might be an emotional origin. They can experience like disrespect, hearing that their symptom isn’t real. And of course such cases occur – people can have their symptoms ignored or misdiagnosed. But in some cases it could be that the bodily signs are genuine – no question – and the cause is mental, the inner mind using the physical self to convey certain suffering or anger or any feeling the mind is unable to bear. At times, we may believe our emotions only has value when it is expressed in physical form. We persistently neglect our psychological well-being on a personal level, as a society and as a culture; why else do we accept the appalling elimination of mental health treatments on the NHS?

Personal insights have taught me that a better life is unattainable if we remain trapped without realization in modes of connection, within ourselves and in relationships, that stem from devaluation, manipulation and transaction. These dynamics are frequently more straightforward to recognize “externally” in broader culture. It’s perhaps more challenging to think about how they got out there, and to see these forms personally and in intimate connections, in the workings of our psyches.

Yet persistence pays off. When I put my jogging shoes again after such a long decade, venturing out not to get physical improvement, or to get rid of an emotion, or to improve a 5km time, {it