Experiencing As If Your Consciousness and Physical Self Are Divided? Here’s The Transformation When We Become Whole.

I just got back from a run. I’m amazed to admit that statement. It seems it could have been many years since my last. But I found out recently that my levels show elevated cholesterol, and I’ve been advised to perform intense workouts frequently.

For the first time ever in my existence that my motivation to work out has been my physical health. In my youth, I ran because I wanted to slim down. I also jogged to cure feelings of anxiety – It was an avoidance tactic from the anxiety, instead of dealing with it. Sometimes, I ran because I wanted to get better at running. That represented the meaning to me at that time to build a better life.

Jogging with altered intent now prompted contemplation about the approaches I’ve connected with my physical self throughout my life and the way it’s evolving as I progress from youth to being a middle-aged person. I believe not I’ve respected my physical form, not truly. I’ve appreciated it only for its capabilities and the objectives it fulfilled for me: seeking approval; avoiding feelings; completing a speedier five kilometers. Up to now, I’ve not understood that my body represents me, it embodies my life, rather than something that produces results.

Much has been written over the centuries about the separation involving physical and mental aspects – a topic you will be relieved to know, I’ll avoid detailing now. What I’ve found most fascinating is the Freudian perspective that mind and body are developmentally integrated from the beginning, because bodily growth necessitates emotional evolution and vice versa. The newborn’s corporeal feelings – like the bodily feeling of hunger – drive the brain to cultivate the ability to identify hunger as a sensation that is alleviated by nourishment; and the mental reassurance and contentment regularly delivered by repeated nourishment feeds the young mind just as the food fuels them physically. Similarly psychological experiences – such as the urge to stand up and reach for something, and the resolve to try again and again – are the reason and method physical strength increases. Starting at birth, mind and body are interconnected in shared growth as unified as a spiral.

Yet I have noticed, in treatment with my analyst, that my mind and body might experience an alternate dynamic – a less unified and increasingly manipulative. My consciousness can use my body to retain and express things that my consciousness considers undesirable or unbearable. In analysis it emerged that exist particular emotional states that I worry I cannot bear; instead of sensing them psychologically, I unconsciously push them into bodily form, where they get stuck as bodily signs.

I previously experienced this with indigestion – not connected to my diet, but was a kind of bodily backlash of the sharper sentiments I failed to handle psychologically. It wasn’t a deliberate decision, but after it was introduced to awareness through therapy, and my anxiety and vulnerability and rage and terror became palpable and put into words instead of transformed into bodily feelings, it resolved. I seldom experience from stomach problems today.

The most severe episode I endured this terrible acid reflux, I failed to rest for several nights in a row. I believed I was losing my mental stability. I visited a general practitioner, who scheduled various diagnostic procedures, but everything was medically abnormal. It was an alternate medic who suggested that the cause might be psychological. My therapist did not disagree. I was surprised, but I also felt it to be true.

When a patient experiences a physical symptom, they might feel insulted upon hearing that it may have a psychological cause. It can seem like disrespect, the idea that their illness is imagined. Naturally such cases occur – some face their suffering discounted or wrongly assessed. However, sometimes it could be that the corporeal issues are real – no question – and the origin is mental, the unconscious using the physical self to manifest certain suffering or fury or whichever sentiment awareness is unable to bear. Occasionally, we might assume our feelings only has value only through expression as bodily symptoms. We often undervalue our mental states on a personal level, collectively and as a culture; how else can we allow the appalling reduction of psychological therapies on the NHS?

My experiences have shown me that a better life cannot be built if we remain trapped unconsciously in ways of relating, inside us and in relationships, that originate in disrespect, use and dealings. Such patterns are often easier to spot “in the world” in wider society. It may be more challenging to think about where they come from, and to see these patterns within ourselves and in intimate connections, in the dynamics of our minds.

But it’s worth persevering. When I put my running shoes again after such a long decade, going outside not to get a better body, or to eliminate a feeling, or to improve a 5km time, {it