ABSTRACT
The body, relationship, experience, and disease are all entangled. But it is one thing to show these entangled relationships from a phenomenological perspective, and it is quite another to explain them in a more fundamental way. It is important to emphasise that experience, flowing out of a capacity for living awareness and responsiveness, is not a category separate from the organism's bodily nature, nor from the organism's environmental context. Experience is intimately tied up with the fact that we are somatic and physical. Experience, and the capacity for it, is not something added to a 'dead matter' organism. We have 'experience' which emerges from an embodied capacity for living awareness and responsiveness within, and in interaction with, a rich multifaceted environment. While psychotherapists tend to relate human experience to feelings, it is likely that there is a capacity in nature for experience that is more fundamental than the sophisticated human capacity for feelings.
