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I have just returned from a run. It’s shocking to state that statement. I think it could have been a decade since my last. However I found out recently that I have somewhat raised cholesterol, and the recommendation was to engage in vigorous activity frequently.

It’s the initial instance in my life that the reason to work out has been my health status. In my youth, I jogged because I wanted to slim down. At times I ran to alleviate nervousness – I was just running away from those feelings, not addressing it. At other times, I ran because I wanted to improve in running. That represented the meaning to me then to create a superior lifestyle.

Running for a different reason now got me thinking about the approaches I’ve interacted with my physical self over my lifetime and its transformation as I transition from early adulthood to midlife. I believe not I’ve respected my physical form, not deep down. I’ve valued it only for its functions and the objectives it fulfilled for me: trying to attract others; dodging sentiments; running a faster five kilometers. Up to now, I hadn’t realized that I am my body, it is my existence, instead of something that produces results.

A great deal has been discussed over the centuries about the split between body and mind – a topic it’s reassuring to know, I won’t summarize here. What I’ve found most compelling is the Freudian perspective that mental and physical selves are naturally unified from birth, because physical maturation demands emotional evolution and vice versa. A baby’s bodily experiences – for example the bodily feeling of hunger – drive the mind to develop the skill to identify hunger as a feeling that may be satisfied by eating; and the emotional comfort and contentment repeatedly brought by meal after meal nourishes the young mind in the same way the food fuels them physically. So too 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 muscles grow stronger. Since infancy, our physical and mental selves are interlinked in shared growth as integrated as a spiral.

Yet I have noticed, in sessions with my psychoanalyst, that my consciousness and physique can be in a distinct connection – a less unified and more exploitative. My psyche may employ my body to store and express elements that my psyche views unwanted or unacceptable. In analysis it emerged that exist certain emotions that I am afraid are too much for me; instead of experiencing them mentally, I subconsciously force them into bodily form, where they remain as corporeal issues.

I previously experienced digestive discomfort – unrelated to what I’d eaten, but represented a type of corporeal reaction of the sharper sentiments I failed to handle mentally. This wasn’t a deliberate decision, but once it was raised to awareness in sessions, and my anxiety and sensitivity and frustration and terror became palpable and put into words instead of transformed into physical sensation, it vanished. I seldom experience with digestive issues currently.

The worst time I endured this intense reflux, I didn’t sleep for many nights straight. It seemed I was forfeiting my mind. I consulted my doctor, who scheduled various examinations and assessments, but everything was corporally problematic. It was another doctor who suggested that the origin may be mental. My analyst concurred. I was surprised, but I recognized it was correct.

When a patient experiences a corporeal problem, they can be offended upon hearing that there might be a psychological cause. It can seem as invalidation, the idea that their symptom isn’t real. Certainly that does happen – some face their symptoms discounted or incorrectly identified. However, sometimes it’s possible that the corporeal issues are real – no question – and the source is mental, the unconscious using the physical self to convey certain suffering or fury or whichever sentiment the mind cannot tolerate. At times, it’s easy to think our experience is only valid when it is expressed in physical form. We persistently neglect our mental states personally, as a society and culturally; for what reason would we tolerate the appalling reduction of psychodynamic psychotherapy through health services?

Personal insights have shown me that a superior lifestyle is unattainable when we are stuck unawares in ways of relating, inside us and with others, that originate in disregard, use and exchange. Such patterns are often easier to spot “externally” in broader culture. It may be less comfortable to consider how they got out there, and to see these shapes inside us and in intimate connections, in the economy of our minds.

However it’s worth persevering. When I put my running shoes again post a long hiatus, heading out not for bodily change, or to escape a sensation, or to improve a 5km time, {it