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I just got back from a run. It’s surprising to write those words. I believe it was likely ten years since I last did so. Yet I recently discovered that I have elevated cholesterol, and doctors suggested to perform intense workouts frequently.

This is the first time in living memory that the driving force to work out has been my physical health. During earlier years, I ran because I wanted to be thinner. I’ve also run to cure nervousness – I was merely escaping from the worry, not addressing it. On other occasions, I ran because I wanted to enhance in running. This was the meaning to me at that time to build an improved existence.

Jogging with altered intent at present got me thinking about the approaches I’ve related with my physical self over my lifetime and its transformation as I move from youth to midlife. I don’t think I’ve respected my physical form, not truly. I’ve valued it only for its roles and the objectives it fulfilled for me: trying to attract others; avoiding feelings; completing a speedier 5km. Up to now, I’ve not understood that my body represents me, it embodies my life, instead of an instrument for achievements.

A great deal has been written for ages about the division of mind and body – which it’s reassuring to know, I’m not going to precis here. What I’ve found most compelling is Sigmund Freud’s view that mental and physical selves are innately connected from birth, because physical maturation demands mental growth and vice versa. A baby’s corporeal feelings – like the corporeal experience of hunger – motivate consciousness to build the capacity to recognise hunger as a feeling that is alleviated by nourishment; and the emotional comfort and satisfaction consistently provided by repeated nourishment nourishes the young mind similar to the milk fuels them corporally. Similarly mental events – for instance the desire to stand up and grab an object, and the determination to persist through effort – are the cause and means physical strength increases. From our earliest moments, mind and body are interconnected in reciprocal evolution as unified as DNA strands.

However It’s become clear, during therapy with my therapist, that my mind and body can be in an alternate dynamic – a more separated and more exploitative. My consciousness might utilize my body to hold and manifest aspects that my mind views unacceptable or intolerable. In my sessions we realized that exist certain emotions that I worry are too much for me; instead of sensing them psychologically, I unconsciously push them to my physical self, becoming trapped as bodily signs.

I previously experienced this as indigestion – not connected to food intake, but was a type of bodily backlash of the more acidic feelings I couldn’t digest mentally. This was not a deliberate decision, but after it was introduced to awareness through therapy, and my fear and sensitivity and rage and terror became palpable and expressed verbally instead of converted to physical sensation, it disappeared. I seldom experience from indigestion currently.

The worst time I had this severe heartburn, I didn’t sleep for many nights straight. It seemed I was slipping away from my mind. I consulted a general practitioner, who arranged various scans and tests, but there was nothing corporally problematic. It turned out to be a different physician who told me that the root might be mental. My psychoanalyst concurred. I was surprised, but I also knew it to be true.

Whenever someone experiences a bodily issue, they can be offended at the suggestion that there might be an emotional origin. They can experience like disrespect, the idea that their condition is fabricated. Certainly such cases occur – some face their suffering dismissed or misdiagnosed. But in some cases it’s possible that the bodily signs exist – no question – and the origin is emotional, the unconscious employing the body to convey certain suffering or rage or any feeling the mind is unable to bear. Sometimes, it’s easy to think our experience matters solely when it is expressed as bodily symptoms. We often undervalue our minds on a personal level, in social contexts and culturally; how else would we tolerate the shocking killing-off of psychological therapies through health services?

My experiences have taught me that an improved existence cannot be built when we are stuck unconsciously in ways of relating, internally and with others, that are rooted in devaluation, use and transaction. These dynamics are frequently more straightforward to spot “in the world” in the general public. It’s perhaps less comfortable to reflect on where they come from, and to recognise these shapes inside us and among loved ones, in the economy of our minds.

However it’s valuable to continue. When I put my jogging shoes once more post a long hiatus, venturing out not for physical improvement, or to escape an emotion, or to beat a 5km time, {it