Feeling As If Your Consciousness and Body Are Divided? Discover The Transformation When We Achieve Wholeness.

I recently came back from a run. It’s shocking to write this fact. I believe it might have been ten years since my last. However I recently discovered that I have elevated cholesterol, and I’ve been advised to perform intense workouts regularly.

It’s the initial instance in my existence that the driving force to work out has been my bodily well-being. During earlier years, I jogged because I desired to lose weight. I’ve also run to manage nervousness – I was merely escaping from the worry, instead of dealing with it. At other times, I ran because I sought to get better at running. It signified the definition to me back then to create a superior lifestyle.

Exercising with new motivation now prompted contemplation about the approaches I’ve connected with my physical self during my years and its transformation as I move from youth to midlife. I believe not I’ve valued my body, not fundamentally. I’ve prized it only for its functions and the purposes it fulfilled for me: trying to attract others; avoiding feelings; achieving a quicker five kilometers. Previously, I failed to grasp that I am my body, it is my existence, rather than a tool for outcomes.

A great deal has been discussed over the centuries about the division of mind and body – a topic it’s reassuring to know, I’m not going to precis now. What resonated most compelling is Sigmund Freud’s view that mental and physical selves are innately connected from birth, because physical development necessitates mental growth and vice versa. A baby’s physical sensations – for example the corporeal experience of hunger – drive consciousness to build the skill to identify hunger as a feeling that can be sated by a feed; and the mental reassurance and contentment consistently provided by meal after meal feeds the infant’s psyche in the same way the food sustains them corporally. So too mental events – like the urge to get up and grab an object, and the persistence to attempt repeatedly – are why and how physical strength increases. Starting at birth, our body and mind are intertwined in shared growth as integrated as DNA strands.

Yet I have noticed, in treatment with my analyst, that my consciousness and physique can be in an alternate dynamic – a more separated and increasingly manipulative. My psyche can use my physical self to retain and express elements that my consciousness deems unacceptable or unbearable. In analysis we’ve become aware how there are particular emotional states that I fear I cannot bear; instead of experiencing them psychologically, I unconsciously shift them to my physical self, becoming trapped as corporeal issues.

I previously experienced digestive discomfort – not connected to my diet, but was a form of physical reflux of the more acidic feelings I was unable to process psychologically. This was not a deliberate decision, but when it was brought to awareness through therapy, and my fear and vulnerability and rage and alarm became palpable and put into words rather than changed into bodily feelings, it vanished. I rarely suffer with digestive issues today.

The most severe episode I had this severe heartburn, I was unable to sleep for multiple consecutive nights. I felt I was forfeiting my sanity. I went my doctor, who organised various examinations and assessments, but there was nothing physically wrong. It was a different physician who told me that the origin could be psychological. My psychoanalyst concurred. I was shocked, but I recognized it to be true.

If an individual experiences a physical symptom, it can be upsetting at the suggestion that it may have an emotional origin. They might feel this as being disrespected, being told that their condition is imagined. Naturally such cases occur – some face their suffering dismissed or misdiagnosed. However, sometimes it could be that the corporeal issues are genuine – without doubt – and the origin is emotional, the inner mind using the physique to manifest some pain or anger or whatever emotion awareness cannot tolerate. Sometimes, we might assume our emotions is only valid when it is expressed as bodily symptoms. We continually disrespect our psychological well-being personally, in social contexts and within our culture; how else would we tolerate the shocking killing-off of psychodynamic psychotherapy on the NHS?

Life lessons have revealed that a better life cannot be built when we are stuck unawares in modes of connection, inside us and socially, that stem from disrespect, manipulation and transaction. These dynamics tend to be simpler to spot “externally” in the general public. It may be more challenging to think about how they got out there, and to see these shapes inside us and within our closest relationships, in the dynamics of our mental lives.

Yet persistence pays off. When I put my jogging shoes back on following many years, going outside without aiming for physical improvement, or to escape an emotion, or to improve a personal best, {it