On The Philosopher's Zone on ABC (presented by Alan Saunders) Taylor Carman says:

what's really original about Merleau-Ponty is his idea that we have to understand perception as an embodied phenomenon. And what that means is that the thing doing the perceiving is a body, a bodily being. It's hard to say that without it sounding obvious and trivial, because we all know that we have bodies, and we all know that you have to have a body to perceive the world. The tradition had wanted to make a distinction between the mind, which is somehow what we really are, and the body, which is a kind of vehicle or instrument between us and the world. Merleau-Ponty wanted to get rid of that, what's called dualism, that distinction between mind and body, and he wanted to say we're one thing, we're an embodied, perceptual being. So all of our perceptual experience is a bodily experience, it's experience of being oriented in a world, a material world, that surrounds us and that we're part of. And there's really no room in our experience itself, for a conception of a disembodied mind that's somehow really the real site of the experience. The site, the location, the locale of the experience, is the body.

One of the arguments Merleau-Ponty makes goes a little like this. When we see objects in the world around us, one of the conditions of their appearing to us as objects is that we see them as being able to be obscured, being able to be hidden, being able to recede into the distance and disappear from view. The possibility of an object is the kind of thing that can be absent as well as present. Now, interestingly, the body, when you start thinking about your experience of your own body, it doesn't have that character, the same character as an object has. A body is always present: not necessarily in front of us the way an object is, in the sense that I can be, when I touch an object, when I touch this table, for example, I'm not focused on my hand as an object, I'm focused on the table, but the hand remains present to me in a certain way. It's that perennial presence that differentiates my body from other objects in the world.