Sensing Like Your Consciousness and Body Are Divided? Discover How Life Changes When We Achieve Wholeness.

I recently came back from a run. It’s shocking to admit those words. I think it could have been a decade since I last did so. However It came to my attention that I have slightly high cholesterol, and I’ve been advised to do sweaty exercise regularly.

This is the first time in my life that my motivation to exercise has been my bodily well-being. During earlier years, I exercised because I wanted to be thinner. I’ve also run to manage nervousness – I was merely escaping from those feelings, not addressing it. At other times, I ran because I aimed to get better at running. This was the definition to me back then to create a superior lifestyle.

Exercising with new motivation now prompted contemplation about the methods I’ve connected with my physical self during my years and the way it’s evolving as I transition from early adulthood to middle age. It seems unlikely I’ve honored my body, not fundamentally. I’ve appreciated it only for its functions and the purposes it provided: aiming to appeal; escaping emotions; achieving a quicker 5km. Up to now, I’ve not understood that my body represents me, it is my existence, instead of something that produces results.

A great deal has been discussed over the centuries about the split of mind and body – a topic you will be relieved to know, I’ll avoid detailing here. What has struck me most fascinating is Freud’s understanding that mental and physical selves are developmentally integrated from birth, because physical maturation requires emotional evolution and conversely. The infant’s physical sensations – for example the physical sensation of hunger – motivate the brain to cultivate the skill to recognise hunger as an emotion that can be sated by eating; and the emotional comfort and fulfillment consistently provided by repeated nourishment feeds the infant’s psyche similar to the food fuels them physically. Similarly mental events – like the wish to get up and reach for something, and the resolve to try again and again – are the reason and method the body develops power. Since infancy, our physical and mental selves are intertwined in shared growth as integrated as a spiral.

Yet I have noticed, during therapy with my analyst, that my consciousness and physique can be in a different kind of relationship – a less unified and somewhat abusive. My mind might utilize my physical self to retain and express things that my consciousness considers undesirable or unbearable. During therapy we realized that exist specific feelings that I fear I cannot bear; in place of feeling these psychologically, I unconsciously push them into my body, where they get stuck as physical symptoms.

I previously experienced this with indigestion – unrelated to my diet, but acted as a kind of bodily backlash of the more acidic feelings I was unable to process mentally. It wasn’t an intentional act, but when it was brought into my consciousness by my analyst, and my anxiety and sensitivity and rage and panic became palpable and articulated instead of transformed into bodily feelings, it disappeared. I rarely suffer with digestive issues today.

The worst time I experienced this severe heartburn, I failed to rest for many nights straight. I believed I was forfeiting my mental stability. I visited a general practitioner, who arranged various examinations and assessments, but everything was physically wrong. The situation was an alternate medic who informed me that the root might be psychological. My therapist concurred. I was stunned, but I recognized it to be true.

When a patient is suffering a corporeal problem, they might feel insulted upon hearing that there might be an emotional origin. They might feel like disrespect, hearing that their condition isn’t real. Certainly it’s a real phenomenon – individuals may experience their symptoms ignored or misdiagnosed. However, sometimes it might be that the physical symptoms are genuine – certainly – and the cause is mental, the inner mind employing the body to convey some pain or fury or whatever emotion the conscious self is unable to bear. Sometimes, we might assume our experience is only valid if manifested through the body. We often undervalue our mental states as individuals, as a society and culturally; why else would we tolerate the terrible elimination of psychodynamic psychotherapy on the NHS?

Life lessons have revealed that a better life cannot be built when we are stuck unawares in ways of relating, inside us and in relationships, that are rooted in devaluation, manipulation and transaction. These interactions tend to be simpler to recognize “in the world” in broader culture. It’s likely harder to consider how they got out there, and to recognise these patterns personally and in intimate connections, in the economy of our minds.

Yet it’s valuable to continue. When I put my jogging shoes back on post a long hiatus, venturing out without aiming for bodily change, or to eliminate a feeling, or to improve a running record, {it