Sensing Like Your Mind and Body Are Separate? Here’s How Life Changes When We Become Whole.

I have just returned from a run. It’s surprising to state that statement. I think it was likely many years since I last did so. Yet I found out recently that my tests indicate somewhat raised cholesterol, and I’ve been advised to perform intense workouts on a consistent basis.

For the first time ever in my life that my motivation to exercise has been my physical health. When I was younger, I ran because I wanted to lose weight. I’ve also run to cure my anxiety – It was an avoidance tactic from the anxiety, without confronting it. Sometimes, I ran because I wanted to improve at running. This was what it meant to me at that time to create a better life.

Exercising with new motivation now prompted contemplation about the approaches I’ve connected with my physique throughout my life and how this is changing as I move from youth to midlife. I don’t think I’ve valued my physical form, not fundamentally. I’ve appreciated it solely for its functions and the aims it fulfilled for me: seeking approval; avoiding feelings; running a faster five kilometers. Up to now, I failed to grasp that my body represents me, it is my life, instead of an instrument for achievements.

Much has been discussed through history about the division involving physical and mental aspects – which you will be relieved to know, I won’t summarize here. What resonated most compelling is Freud’s understanding that consciousness and physique are innately connected from birth, because bodily growth necessitates emotional evolution and vice versa. The infant’s corporeal feelings – for example the physical sensation of hunger – drive the mind to cultivate the ability to perceive hunger as a sensation that can be sated by eating; and the psychological solace and contentment repeatedly brought by feed after feed nourishes the young mind similar to the nutrition fuels them physically. Similarly mental events – such as the desire to get up and reach for something, and the determination to attempt repeatedly – are the cause and means muscles grow stronger. Starting at birth, mind and body are interconnected in shared growth as integrated as a double helix.

Yet It’s become clear, in treatment with my psychoanalyst, that mental and physical aspects may exist in a different kind of relationship – a less unified and more exploitative. My consciousness may employ my physical self to hold and express elements that my psyche views undesirable or intolerable. In analysis it emerged how exist specific feelings that I fear I can’t handle; rather than feeling these mentally, I unconsciously shift them to my physical self, becoming trapped as physical symptoms.

I often had this as indigestion – which had nothing to do with food intake, but represented a type of corporeal reaction of the sharper sentiments I failed to handle mentally. It wasn’t an intentional act, but once it was raised into my consciousness in sessions, and my dread and sensitivity and frustration and terror could be felt and put into words instead of converted to bodily feelings, it resolved. It’s uncommon for me with digestive issues today.

The worst time I had this intense reflux, I didn’t sleep for multiple consecutive nights. I believed I was forfeiting my mental stability. I consulted to the GP, who arranged multiple examinations and assessments, but no issues were found physically wrong. It was another doctor who informed me that the cause could be emotional. My therapist did not disagree. I was shocked, but I also felt it to be true.

When a patient is suffering a corporeal problem, it can be upsetting if told that it could have an emotional origin. They can experience like disrespect, being told that their symptom is fabricated. And of course such cases occur – people can have their symptoms dismissed or incorrectly identified. Yet occasionally it could be that the corporeal issues are real – no question – and the origin is mental, the subconscious utilizing the physical self to express emotional hurt or fury or whichever sentiment awareness is unable to bear. At times, we may believe our feelings is only valid if manifested as bodily symptoms. We continually disrespect our mental states as individuals, in social contexts and culturally; how else do we accept the shocking reduction of psychological therapies in public healthcare?

Life lessons have revealed that a superior lifestyle cannot be built when we are stuck unconsciously in ways of relating, within ourselves and with others, that are rooted in devaluation, exploitation and transaction. These interactions are often easier to recognize “externally” in wider society. It’s perhaps harder to consider how they got out there, and to recognise these shapes within ourselves and in intimate connections, in the workings of our minds.

Yet persistence pays off. After donning my jogging shoes once more post a long hiatus, heading out without aiming for a better body, or to get rid of an emotion, or to beat a running record, {it