There are constantly arising points of reference in consciousness; a sense of looking from, at.
This from, at gives rise to "self", e.g. reflexive thought about you. "I am so and so," for example.
The sense of looking out at the world from your eyes is another.
Pretty gross.
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But there are far subtler manifestations of this where the point of reference thing is more implicit than explicit.
You only realize you're "selfing" because whatever experience arises implies this self somewhere in the system.
Emotional suffering (vs. just pain), for example.
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People usually mix emotional suffering with abusive self-talk, mental imagery or w/e, so that there is a more gross level of "WHY IS THIS HAPPENING TO ME?"
But you can have this sense of something happening to a "you" without these additional layers.
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There are also things like orientation in space, balance etc. that require a sort of constructed, instrumental sense of self in order to make sense.
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Point is you might not feel the need to name these things you, in the same way people do with their thoughts, feelings etc.
But experientially, there is the same component of reflexivity.
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So even if you suspend explicitly reflexive thought (i.e. talking about yourself inside your mind) and imagery, there are still these constant exercises of perspective-taking that you carry out in order to function (quite literally) in the world.
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But when mind is quiet and this is the main, sometimes only way in which such feelings arise, they have a very flexible, flighty quality to them.
You may just as easily experience self *inside your perception of someone else's feelings* as in your thoughts, for example.
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But a lot of the time there are these extremely localized feelings of consciousness rippling out from some point in space or abstract mind-geometry.
You step on a nail, and there's a whole lot of self going on in your foot. You adjust your balance, it moves around... etc.
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For a while I was regularly experiencing this sense of self as arising from a point in space somewhere up and to the left of my head.
From this vantage, I was pretty close to totally insensate to body-internal feelings, but still sensitive to the wider environment.
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In practical terms this amounts to somatic dissociation, sort of like something you may experience spontaneously during trauma.
In fact, a very traumatic event precipitated me learning this skill, just that I was aware of it forming and of how to trigger it deliberately.
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But given the extremely low bandwidth of consciousness, something is always going to have less than optimal levels of attention.
The benefit of this form of somatic meditation is that it allows you to see Self as a sort of operational skill, rather than something innate, fixed.