ABSTRACT
When it comes to illness most Western patients do assume a separation of mind and body, a stance that frequently blocks opportunities for healing. Many patients are much more flexible in their thinking than either this patient or many clinicians. With relatively little encouragement they allow an expansion of their awareness. In the Asian religious, cultural, and philosophical traditions there are some very interesting and radically different views of the ways a person exists as both subject and object. To establish the awareness needed in meaning-full disease we battle with many factors. Difficult dynamics between the clinician and the patient can prevent safe progress to the awareness needed. Underneath the experiences of subject-body and object-body is a lived body scheme that synthesizes and unifies the two, a lived unity or oneness between the subject and object, between the interior and the exterior.
