What Is Somatic Meaning Guidance?
Exploring Between the Layers That Obscure Meaning
Somatic Meaning Guidance did not emerge solely from the search for an academic theory. For its founder, Ejder Atlas Akmaner, psychology, the body, death, belonging, and meaning became direct questions of life early on. At nine, Akmaner witnessed the severe collapse of the parent through whom life had first been learned; at twelve, that parent was lost. Hospitals, morgues, funerals, accompanying the deaths of living beings of different species, and adolescent encounters with street life, severe addiction, and death made it impossible to regard life and the body as abstract concepts.
Yet SMG does not turn lived experience into a method. Experience is not evidence of correctness; it is the source of its questions. Philosophy, archaeology, evolutionary and fossil studies, a Master’s thesis in Comparative Literature, art, Logotherapy and Existential Analysis, embodied-mind research, and somatic practices subsequently opened layers of the same question: Are we investigating what we actually encounter, or placing what we think we already know onto it?
Somatic Meaning Guidance is the name this inquiry takes today.
1. Critical Psychology, Philosophy, and Literature
Psychological inquiry moved beyond asking, “What is happening within the person?” to questioning the concepts, norms, and classifications through which psychology perceives a person. Does using a category in scientific language make it independent of history and power relations?
Philosophy transformed questioning into a method: examining assumptions and one’s own thinking. The centrality of European intellectual history revealed how canons emerge within historical, institutional, and political conditions, while therapeutic philosophy asked whether philosophy only constructs arguments or also works upon how we think and live.
Graduate study in Comparative Literature extended this inquiry into narratives across cultures, periods, and traditions. Literature makes visible traces of individual and collective unconscious processes alongside voices, conflicts, and desires suppressed by dominant narratives—framing which lives are considered possible, normal, valuable, or thinkable. Psychoanalytic approaches further deepened this lens.
A central question emerged: Does intellectually defending something mean actually living it? The gap between discourse and action revealed the limits of philosophy detached from psychology and the body.
2. Archaeology, Fossils, and Evolution
Archaeology contributed field methodology and epistemological attentiveness. An excavation site is not opened at once; layers are removed gradually while preserving context. In SMG, a bodily response, behavior, or life question is never reduced to a single cause; psychology, history, the body, material conditions, relationships, and narratives are investigated layer by layer.
Archaeology and evolution also question how the past is narrated. The rigid “Man the Hunter” narrative—producing fixed active and passive gender roles—is not a universal law. Archaeological and ethnographic evidence, alongside flexible divisions of labor in contemporary hunter-gatherer communities, exposes the limits of a single gendered evolutionary story. The problem lies in reducing a complex past to one schema to justify the supposed “biological naturalness” of present-day power relations.
SMG draws on post-processual and interpretive archaeology, evolutionary pluralism, the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis, niche construction, gene–culture coevolution, developmental systems, biocultural evolution, and processual-relational perspectives. Fossils, bodies, and behavior are read through genetics, development, environment, culture, materiality, other sentient beings, and historical contingency. “Human” is not treated as natural, fixed, or evolution’s endpoint. What exists today is not the outcome the past was trying to reach.
3. Logotherapy and Existential Analysis
Logotherapy and Existential Analysis clarified a vital distinction: Meaning is not constructed. Meaning is discovered.
Political, historical, and cultural narratives, however, are constructed around “success,” “normality,” the “acceptable body,” the “right way to live,” belonging, and identity—with gender operating as a political classification distributing roles, rights, desires, duties, and futures across bodies.
SMG does not equate meaning with narrative. While Logotherapy and Existential Analysis approach meaning as an orientation discovered within concrete life rather than an invented story, SMG extends this trajectory through embodied, historical, relational, and non-power-centered inquiry.
What is deconstructed is not meaning itself, but the construction taking its place.
4. The Neutral Space: Nominalism
Nominalism asks: Is the name we give something identical to the thing itself?
Categories like “woman–man,” “nature–human,” “human–animal,” and “mind–body” organize reality, yet when a concept replaces the living being, it begins dictating boundaries and relationships. Dominant narratives sharpen distinctions into opposing poles, producing an “other” to organize hierarchy and conflict. SMG does not erase difference; it questions fixing differences into necessary, opposing essences. The aim is not switching poles, but investigating encounter within the neutral space that opens when compulsory oppositions between name and being loosen.
5. Emptiness and Bracketing
Replacing a dismantled construction immediately with a new answer perpetuates the same mechanism. SMG views the neutral space not as indifference or nihilism, but as openness to inquiry before judgment.
In Buddhist thought, śūnyatā means not nothingness, but the emptiness of claims to independent, unchanging essences—questioning phenomena as fixed entities detached from conditions. Though often viewed as distant today, 10th-century Old Uyghur texts document Turkish equivalents like quruġ and yoq quruġ. In 19th-century Europe, Buddhist thought was frequently forced into Eurocentric categories of “nothingness,” pessimism, and nihilism—prominently by Hegel—intersecting with Orientalist and colonial knowledge regimes without reducing to a single plot.
“No fixed essence” does not mean “no meaning.” Emptiness is the loosening of compulsory judgments obstructing discovery. Husserl’s epoché (bracketing) brings a comparable discipline: the world is not denied, but automatic judgments about it are temporarily suspended.
6. Attention, Neuroplasticity, and the Body
While psychology and neuroscience study mindfulness via EEG and fMRI—reporting changes in attention, self-monitoring, and brain networks alongside methodological limitations—SMG does not use neuroplasticity as “medical proof.” Its claim is cautious: the nervous system changes through learning and experience, meaning automatic patterns are not absolute.
Practically, this means noticing an automatic response, bracketing it, and creating space to try another—not teaching a new “correct” way of being, but expanding flexibility across attention, behavior, and relationship.
7. The Meaning the Body Knows
SMG’s somatic dimension includes the soma—the living, experiencing body—within meaning inquiry. Sensation, breath, movement, contact, tension, support, and environmental relationship provide data about present experience.
Drawing on fascia-sensitive yoga, Dynamic VingTshun, breathwork, and contemporary nervous-system and movement research, SMG prioritizes interoception: noticing internal bodily sensations. Whereas performance-centered living turns the body into an object to control or measure, movement in SMG aims to notice oneself and the environment, recognize boundaries, and widen choices between movement and stillness. Breathing functionality, nervous-system state, movement speed and intensity, contact, and orientation are tools supporting contact rather than measures of success.
The body is not a new authority replacing thought. The body provides data; it does not deliver the verdict. “The Meaning the Body Knows” is also the bilingual podcast series carrying SMG’s inquiries across media.
8. Guidance Beyond Power-Centered Narratives
Categories exert political force in interpersonal relationships too, as individuals, families, schools, institutions, or states pronounce, “This is what you are.” Repetition or authority does not make a claim true, though observable facts, interpretations, criticism, and unfounded totalizing judgments must be distinguished.
The past comprises not just events, but carried relationships and representations. Earlier images of us may live on in others’ minds, addressing us through old names or roles. Those images have no automatic right to govern our present, nor do formerly central figures necessarily represent living relationships today. Working with the past means choosing anew which relationships, images, and judgments continue living now. We need not carry for life the verdict of an environment that misunderstood us.
Something may have happened, yet it need not continue living in the present. Will becomes having a greater say in what continues living now. In SMG, the guide writes no new narrative for another, nor declares, “This is who you really are,” but holds space to differentiate and investigate observable reality, narrative, bodily experience, and orientation together. Rejecting “human” as life’s natural center, this map expands to include other sentient beings and interspecies relationships.
9. Art, Literature, and Worldbuilding
Art was never mere decoration. Initially, it translated anger, pain, fear, tension, and internal “poison” into form, sound, language, or image. Externalizing indistinct experiences allowed mind and body to be encountered and investigated—moving art from expression to externalization, encounter, inquiry, and discovery.
Literature and worldbuilding expand this. Fiction is not meaning, but reveals how much of apparent reality is non-inevitable: Why must gender produce power distributions, power become hierarchy, belonging depend on ancestry or borders, “human” rank above other sentient life, or “East” and “West” exist as mutually exclusive essences?
Through lore, character, and world design, worldbuilding experimentally asks, “Could life be otherwise?” Rethinking a character’s past, body, values, and future exposes patterns assumed inevitable in one’s own life. Without denying material conditions or interspecies relationships, we become active agents in our lives. Worldbuilding does not provide the answer; it experimentally removes necessity from the seemingly inevitable, turning art, music, poetry, and worldbuilding into inquiries carrying experiences theory cannot yet name.
Somatic Meaning Guidance draws from critical psychology the limits of categories; from philosophy, inquiry; from literature, narrative and the suppressed; from archaeology, layers and context; from evolutionary pluralism, skepticism toward single causes and a fixed “human”; from Logotherapy and Existential Analysis, meaning discovery; from nominalism, the distance between name and being; from śūnyatā, loosening fixed essence; from phenomenology, bracketing; from mindfulness, attention; from somatic inquiry, the body; and from art, contact beyond words. It draws no compulsory conclusions about a species from the singular, nor accepts “human” as the measure of life. It is an interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary approach.
Its movement converges as: Notice → bracket → investigate the layers → listen to the body and relationships → distinguish judgment from evidence → do not manufacture meaning → remain open to discovery. We may be taught that others have decided how life should be lived. Perhaps the greatest obstacle to discovering meaning is not yet recognizing our own will.
As people discover themselves and one another, they participate more actively in the world, opening new possibilities and bringing beauty wherever they touch. As meaning is discovered, life ceases to merely happen to us—and at the end of this inquiry, what we encounter again is our will.
Kaynakça
- Akmaner, E. A. (n.d.). Ejderhane. https://www.ejderhane.com