In perception the subject is wholly cut off from the object, while in thinking you might say that the subject is in the midst of its object and in feeling they are entirely fused. These are not all the possible modes in which a content arises in consciousness; in every case there is a characteristic implicit distance between subject and object and it is probably never greater than in perception and never less than in feeling.  Perception is taken to be the prototype of attention, or of intention in the phenomenological sense, and so it is easy to assume that the separation between subject and object is always evident to simple reflection. This is really a case of perceptual bias, wrongly labelled sometimes as the 'metaphysics of presence'. The sense of an objective self is concealed in those modes of consciousness where the subject and object are not and cannot be clearly delineated, in modes that do not show themselves in the light. The most obvious of these is feeling, but feeling is also never separate from will, in the sense of preparation for possible action on the basis of valuation, which is in turn never separate from thinking. If the question is then how to be attentive to feeling without treating it as an object of (inner) perception, then one obvious answer might be via music or dance. These however, are essentially mediated by social consciousness. You need not go so far. It is possible to be attentive to feeling and to incipient purposeful action without making them into objects of a quasi-perceptual kind. The trick might be to use the sense of 'I' not as an ontological pivot but as no more than a sort of organ of awareness, without distinction, affirmation or negation.