Quote

The practice itself seems to be derived from the Eastern spiritual lineage of tantra (ever heard of tantric sex?), but a woman named Nicole Daedone formalized the practice and dubbed it “Orgasmic Meditation”, or OM for short.

Her organization, OneTaste, has popularized OM and has even built a spiritual path and community all centered around this practice. There are now OneTaste centers all over the world where people come for morning and evening OM practices, just like yoga, and can take workshops and programs.

The organization itself is pretty controversial. There are those who call it a weird cult. Say it brainwashes people and takes all their money. And yet, others swear that it’s the most powerful, transformative thing to ever happen to them. That OMing and OneTaste’s programs are the most powerful tools for self-expansion they’ve ever come across. That their lives have a clear “before OM” and “after OM” demarcation.

So, how did I get involved in all of this?

The first I ever heard about OM was a few years ago, when I read the book Slow Sex by Nicole Daedone, OneTaste’s founder (and guru – she’s pretty much worshipped). The book was amazingly insightful and the benefits of the practice sounded too good to ignore.

But every time I went to learn more (at their social mixer TurnOn events), I got turned off. There was something about the OneTaste vibe that felt unsettling to me.

After a few years of this, my curiosity finally grew strong enough that I decided it’d be worth exploring – weird vibes be damned!

Quote

A few months later, I felt a strong pull towards San Francisco to explore community living. But I had no idea where I’d live. No idea where I’d find this “community”.

And so, you can imagine my surprise when an OM friend casually mentioned to me, “You should come live in my Orgasmic Meditation house in SF!”

Wait, what? For real?

I soon learned that there were OM houses all over the world, where practitioners lived together in community. Most OM houses are structured so there are two people (usually a male and female) sharing not just a room, but the same bed!

Quote

One thing I always found off-putting about the OM community was their hyper-aggressiveness. The community really loves riling up harsh emotions and dropping uncomfortable “truths” on one another (which they call verbal “stroking”).

Quote

n the same way you don’t have to be a Buddhist to meditate, you also don’t have to join OneTaste to practice Orgasmic Meditation.

The practice, I find to be a beautiful one. I would recommend it to anyone and can only see benefits.

But not so with OneTaste, the parent organization.

OneTaste is an organization I have very mixed feelings about.

On the one hand, I think it’s wonderful that an organization like OneTaste is growing so fast and spreading a more open, conscious approach to sexuality throughout the world.

But on the other hand, I find them to be pretty weird. And off-putting. And even dangerous, in some ways.

First of all, OneTaste is one of the most aggressively money-hungry organizations I’ve ever come across.

From the moment you go to one of their events, the sales machines swings into full gear! They call and text you incessantly. Constantly push you (hyper-aggressively) to sign up for their latest programs. Use every sales tactic in the book to get you to take out your credit card (including using your specific issues and wounds as leverage).

And these classes and workshops range from several hundred to TENS OF THOUSANDS of dollars. Seriously, their highest tier programs run well over $10,000 or $20,000!

I even had a housemate who spent close to $100,000 for the all-inclusive Membership package! (Luckily, she got most of her money back when she decided to leave.)

Now to be fair, charging a lot is not necessarily a problem in and of itself.

But when an organization constantly encourages people to go into debt (and many do) to take their programs, it feels like they’re walking a dangerous line.

Quote

I’ve known many OMers who felt like OneTaste pressured them to prioritize the needs of the organization over their own, much like a classic cult.

They were pushed to constantly help with events, to volunteer, and especially to RECRUIT for OneTaste. If you didn’t spend all your free time giving back to the organization, you were seen as “not a team player” and they’d turn their back on you.

They’d get sneaky too.

Once they tried to get my house to take in a “team player”. When we decided she wasn’t a good fit for the house, they began pressuring us constantly. Then they manipulated an easily impressionable housemate to report on our house meetings and throw in specifically seeded talking points. Like a spy!

For all of the above reasons and more, a lot of former OM’ers really do feel used and taken advantage of by OneTaste.

Quote

Over the years, I’ve built a very strong sense of who I am. My strengths. My weaknesses. What I have to offer the world. What’s true for me. And what isn’t.

But living amongst a group of people who didn’t fully see me – even as loving, authentic, and deep as they were – began to erode all of that.

I began to feel depressed and lonely in a deep way. Began to doubt myself. Began to tamp down my unique perspective. Began to believe I had no value to give to the world.

Their way of seeing me, as much as I knew it was untrue, began to seep it’s way into my consciousness.

nd the more it did, the more I slowly shut down.

It felt like part of me was dying. And in a way, it was.

Just as the human body needs the nourishment of food and water, the human soul needs the nourishment of being seen. Recognized. Appreciated.

I didn’t fully realize how starved I was until I finally moved out of the OM house and into a possibly crazier situation: a diverse, free-spirited 40-person mansion (yup, that’s not a typo).

Here, there was no group think. No singular culture. The mansion was incredibly diverse, with people from all different backgrounds, cultures, sexual orientations, and mindsets.

Here, my unique perspective was welcomed and celebrated, not dismissed

Quote

Nicole Daedone, the founder of OneTaste, is definitely revered in an almost idol-istic way. She’s worshipped as a guru who can do or say no wrong. Her wisdom is elevated to an almost mystical level.

During one of her programs, she actually told my friend, “You are going to fall in love with a man here.”

Now, there was only one eligible bachelor in the group and my friend had absolutely NO attraction to this guy. But as the days passed, she found herself drawn to him, and then determinedly pursued him for weeks!

Maybe Nicole Daedone’s intuition was just right on, but what I fear is that her word is so highly revered, people will subconsciously bend their actual desires and wishes around it.

Quote

In the June, 2011 speech for TEDx SF that has since been viewed more than half a million times, Daedone lamented what she calls the Western woman’s mantra: “I work too hard, I eat too much, I diet too much, I drink too much, I shop too much, I give too much. And still there's this sense of hunger I can't touch.” In that old YouTube video, Daedone wore an ill-fitting black blazer and frumpy purple blouse, her hair in brown waves. Now she stood transformed, slender, triumphant. Her cheeks were supple and glowing. Her lipstick was chocolate-box red.

The cure for that untouched female hunger, Daedone teaches, is a brief ritual, performed with a partner. The woman removes the clothing from her lower half, and only from that half. The partner—the stroker, typically a man—remains fully dressed. The lights stay on. Over the course of 15 minutes, timed, the partner rubs the upper left quadrant of the woman's clitoris, and she surrenders to involuntary sensation.

The desired outcome is therapeutic, rather than sexual—not a spikey, sneeze-like commonplace climax, but something more sensuous, purportedly activating the limbic depths of the brain and releasing a flood of oxytocin, stimulating bonding between participants. OneTaste originally presented it as a spiritual practice like yoga or meditation, but lately, as Daedone's fame has grown, it's taught as a technological innovation—a body-hack to happiness. At the end of The 4 Hour Body’s orgasm chapter, the efficiency impresario Ferriss declares: "This should be required education for every man on the planet.”

To Daedone, the applications go even further. OneTaste's orgasm-industry vision extends to certifying businesses as OM-based: a Bikram yoga studio, even a coffee shop, sure, but also banks and legal offices. “And potentially OM on the airplane!” The audience, in its blissful optimism, rushed the stage afterward to sign up.

Everyone is interested in doing fun things with their bodies. But the impulse to systematize, replicate, package, sell, and build an ideology around it is uniquely Silicon Valley. Part of what drives app makers and investors is the urge to bend the world to their desires—turn a thing on its side to see if it works better that way. In the personal realm, that translates to a libertine sense of entitlement and the pursuit of total optimization. OM seems ideally designed to meet those goals.

Many of OneTaste’s employees and devotees work in the startup sector. Reese Jones, Daedone’s sometime boyfriend, is also a venture capitalist and serial inventor credited with the first sound-recording software. During a presentation at the conference, Jones would compare the "OM container"—which refers both to the pillow-and-blanket covered "nest" one is supposed to construct and to the time limits and emotional boundaries of the practice—to the Internet communications protocol TCP/IP.

This past April, during the interactive portion of South by Southwest, Daedone delivered a talk titled "Female Orgasm: The Regenerative Human Technology" to a packed room. She relayed an endorsement from foundational futurist Ray Kurzweil, whose Singularity University counts Reese Jones as a board member. “The next thing we knew we were invited into all of these tech circles and, whoa, man, the testing there was rigorous and crazy," she said. "But finally we got the blessing of Ray Kurzweil that we are officially a technology, and they said it's based on scientific knowledge about physiology and psychology and it goes far beyond insight or a piece of advice.”

“In fact," she said, "I would go even further to say orgasm can do for physical connection what the internet has done for us in terms of virtual connection.”

Quote

I first heard about OneTaste in March, at a breakfast meeting with a venture capitalist who had newly moved to New York from San Francisco. She hadn't felt compelled to try it herself, but she had a friend who worked at OneTaste, who would OM if she was nervous before a big meeting. They had lingo for the men who'd perfected the craft: "Master stroker—that's what it's called!"

Genital stimulation in a professional context seemed transgressive, even for hippie-hedonist San Francisco. Her friend, Joanna Van Vleck—who is now OneTaste's president—met me in June when she was in New York. "We don't OM, like, right in the office," Van Vleck explained. But she said, "If we have employee problems, we're like, let's OM together. Yeah, if two people have a discrepancy, we say: OM together!"

OneTaste’s headquarters is located in an airy, two-story building at 47 Moss Street with polished concrete floors and rays of sunlight refracted through a garage-door like facade. This is where the company hosts therapy sessions and OMing classes. But its spiritual center is a nearby clay-colored, three-story residence at 1080 Folsom Street, down the street from Sightglass Coffee, the epitome of retro-futurist craftsmanship and a mandatory scene for magazine profiles of Twitter cofounder Jack Dorsey, whose mobile payments company, Square, is headquartered nearby.

Not all of the 55 people who live at 1080 work for OneTaste. Some would-be residents sign up for the waiting list in search of a plum location and affordable rent. But at 7:30 every weekday, the building hosts a group session, closed to the general public. Many employees maintain multiple "research partners" simultaneously. "You come in with certain boundaries," OneTaste's business development manager, Marcus Ratnathicam, told me during the conference. Ratnathicam, a half-Swedish, half-Sri Lankan former software-company business development manager, has been a resident of 1080 for three and a half years. "And because it gets so multi-dimensional, it starts to crack open," he said. "Friends are lovers are friends."

In 2012, OneTaste opened centers in London, Los Angeles, Austin, Las Vegas, San Diego, Boulder, and Philadelphia, and re-established its New York City presence with a residence in Harlem. The company’s goal is to open in 20 cities by the end of 2014. Daedone, meanwhile, has been accruing the trappings of a daytime personality, building a lifestyle brand along the way. Her 2011 book, Slow Sex, was put out by the Hachette imprint that publishes Gwyneth Paltrow and Gordon Ramsay. OneTaste offers sessions ranging from Coaching certification ($15,000) to six-month Mastery Programs ($7,500) to a one-day Play Class ($195) and evening TurnOn events ($10), as well as t-shirts, organic lube, and OM warmers for your legs in the winter. After the conference, a newsletter went out welcoming acolytes to a private social network called the OM Hub, a formalized version of their once-secret Facebook group, accessible with an OM badge ($49/year.)

Van Vleck, who launched a menswear e-commerce company that was acquired by the cofounder of Bonobos, told me that she had been working as head of marketing for OneTaste for months before she agreed to try OM. "I was like, uhh, this is so gross," she said. "We can sell this online, but ugh... I was ultimately scared. It's vulnerable. Sometimes I still lay down to OM and I'm like, 'What the fuck is this?' If there weren't such incredible benefits, I would not lay down and have a man stroke my genitals or stroke my clitoris. I just wouldn't."

Her smile was infectious and her complexion dewy. Every time she talked about stroking, she would stick out the index finger of her left hand, straight as a ruler. She curled the tip of her other index finger and rubbed it back and forth, along a centimeter's worth of the ruler, like a DJ scratching the world's tiniest record.

OMing, she said, was fuel. "We call it 'tired and wired,'" she said. "Most women are 'tired and wired,' and OM is the exact opposite of that. It's like eating breakfast. That's what we eventually hope: Instead of a latte, women will have an OM. Because that's what regulates your body. An orgasm for breakfast, you know?"

I was on my second iced coffee and third interview of the day, eyeing my iPhone in the middle of the table in fear of whatever news I might be missing online. I felt like she was talking about me.

The notion of a therapeutic female orgasm has its roots in the pelvic massage, a cure for hysteria recommended by Hippocrates and a catalyst for empowerment prescribed by Austrian psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich. But its current iteration originated in the '60s at Lafayette Morehouse, a self-described "intentional community" in San Francisco's East Bay suburbs espousing a philosophy of "responsible hedonism." There Victor Baranco, a Svengali-like former appliance salesman whom Rolling Stone once called "the Colonel Sanders of the commune scene," upgraded the practice for the Sexual Revolution. Residents called it a “deliberate orgasm” or “DOing.”

Baranco, who died in 2002, was featured alongside Charles Manson in Mindfuckers, a book published by Rolling Stone's Straight Arrow imprint in 1972 about the rise of acid fascism and the darkness that “lurks beyond the Aquarian Age.” He was infamous for pioneering three-hour public demonstrations of his disciples in orgasm, where “students sometimes passed out, fell out of chairs, and pictures fell off walls.”

(Mindfuckers: A Source Book on the Rise of Acid Fascism in America, Including Material on Charles Manson, Mel Lyman, Victor Baranco, and Their Followers by David Felton, Robin Green and David Dalton)

The Rick A. Ross Institute, an online forum about cult education, has devoted pages of commentary connecting Daedone's work to Baranco's. Similar accusations arose in Yelp forums after the New York Times profiled Daedone in 2009 and even in the YouTube comments on Daedone’s TEDx talk. Both OneTaste and Lafayette Morehouse told me that Daedone only took three classes with Baranco, clarifying that she actually worked more closely with Ray Vetterlein, one of Baranco’s disciples—“who had studied some with Vic but had gone on to develop his own variation and approach,” as a OneTaste spokesperson put it. A post by OneTaste's cofounder Robert Kandell from 2006 tells a different story, saying Daedone had "spent the last seven years devoting her energy to the work of Dr. Victor Baranco."

The crowds that show up for OneTaste’s introductory “TurnOn” events or How To seminars are not briefed on the free-love origins of OM. On stage at TEDxSF, South by Southwest, and even at OMXperience, Daedone prefers to tell a more cocktail-friendly anecdote about how she, a former Buddhist nun-in-training, once met a guy at a Buddhism party who introduced her to the practice.

Quote

Why do men sign up for an exercise that tells them to keep it in their pants? After some confusion about the upside, OneTaste addressed the question directly last year. “What’s In It for the Men?” a 13-minute free video produced by the company, features five guys praising the “revolutionary” benefits of OMing: increased confidence and intimacy in the bedroom, better communication with their (now more turned-on) girlfriends, and less pressure to perform. Left unsaid is that immersion in the OneTaste community also offers proximity to lots of sexually liberated women.

Quote

At the training session, Saturday morning, I sat in the front row to make sure I didn’t miss anything. Seated next to me was a cognitive scientist who does research for a major retailer, dressed in all-white like a cricket player on his day off. The retail scientist, who also leads a biohacking meetup in the Bay Area, told me that he learned about OneTaste after he heard a talk by Dr. Sara Gottfried, another oxytocin enthusiast who was also speaking at the conference. He said the practice sounded like the “ultimate hormone hack.”

.... The hosts were fully clothed: Justine Dawson, a petite blonde Canadian who used to be a social worker, and Ken Blackman, a former software engineer for Apple, with the air of a competent accountant...Among us students was Naomi Wolf—author of Vagina: A New Biography, due out in paperback this holiday season—in the same tight blue dress she would wear during her evening presentation....

Quote

For one exercise, I partnered with a computer security manager at a Fortune 500 company who said he liked to watch his wife get fucked and uses ropes. I did not doubt him. My next sharing buddy was a sweet, soft-spoken engineer from Alameda, who looked like an Amish Paul Bunyan. He made soulful eye contact as we asked each other Who ARE you? Who are YOU? over and over until we were close to tears. In short bursts, we shared how other people perceived us versus how we wanted to be seen. Those long, meaningful hugs started to seem less dopey.

....

I had been given a seat in the second row, next to a certified hypnotherapist named Clyde, who runs an academy in Los Angeles for ex-offenders. The only other reporters were from Playboy and Haaretz; OM has apparently gotten some traction with Orthodox Jews both in New York and Israel. "Sex is like drugs," Clyde volunteered, while we waited. "It sells itself. Now, what makes your drugs better than the other drug?"

Clyde's biceps were immense. He said he had been through the Landmark Forum—another "personal development" company, with its own cultish undertones—and said Landmark and OneTaste were similar in "finding language that releases the inhibitions you have."

Quote

“Some people are stiff as a board,” Ryan said. “Your orgasm really opened up.” I thought about telling him that I hadn't really climaxed, but I realized that was besides the point: the oxytocin had kicked in. When it came time to offer “frames,” suddenly there I was, whispering to Ryan, sounding just as shroom-y as every other motherfucker on the mic.

Afterward, I wandered around the Regency from panel to panel, delightfully faded, with an occasional tingling sensation in the back of my legs. Is this what Trudy and Sting feel like all the time? I still wasn’t sure if OMing was something I could actually get into. I just knew I wanted to try it again.

And so I did, an hour later with the cognitive scientist. Then the next day with the yogi, whom I’d swiftly dismissed the first time he asked, then lastly with Ryan again. During one session, a woman wailed through the entire 15 minutes. Happy sobs, or cathartic ones, I think. At registration, everyone had been given a red card to hold up if they ever felt uncomfortable. I never saw anyone use it.

After the 15 minutes were up, the cognitive scientist told me the group OM topped that time he'd asked a cabbie in Tahoe to drive him somewhere weird and ended up at the Bunny Ranch while Marilyn Manson was visiting. I just nodded. The yogi told me his “Indian spiritual name” and bemoaned the fact that the world has “separated the clean chakras from the dirty chakras.” I took a deep breath and nodded again.

Speaker after speaker, through the weekend, traced a path from despair to enlightenment, guided by the power of orgasm. The energetic and self-assured Van Vleck talked about how she had formed an elaborate plan to commit suicide before discovering OneTaste. Dr. Lakshmin recounted a failed marriage to husband who'd looked like J. Crew male model, and her subsequent self-discovery. Her Meetup.com profile now lists her as a member of the Radical Feminist Activists group, as well as the New York/New Jersey Polyamory Meetup Group and the New York Pick Up Artists group.

At one point on Saturday afternoon, though, the immersive optimistic mood took an unwelcome turn. The speaker was Robbie Richman, the former Zappos culture strategist. Tony Robbins is among his other clients, so I expected light-hearted platitudes. The organizers played "Blurred Lines" for his intro, and he sang along, rigidly rolling his head: "Maybe I'm out of my miiiiiiiind."

He had discovered OneTaste, he said, at one of its TurnOn events, which mimic the emotional ups and downs of OM the way the introductory "Who ARE You?" drills had. "I've done so much personal development work," Richman said, "and rarely have I had that feeling of shaking and fear."

"She said, 'I think you're a predator masking around as a New Age nice guy,'" he said. The audience cheered.

He followed up by phoning one of the OneTaste coaches. "She came up with this one line that just zapped me," he said. "She said, 'I think you're a predator masking around as a New Age nice guy.'" The audience cheered, as if they had heard the phrase before.

The coach told him, he said, "We gotta get your beast out. We gotta get the beast out, and in order to do that we gotta turn up the heat, we gotta heat up the system to get that beast out...There wasn't a hesitation, I didn't even know what they were gonna charge. I just said, whatever she's gonna say, I'm gonna say yes."

He'd been in therapy for anxiety for years, he said. "Nobody ever said to me: Maybe you're Just. Turned. On." Applause.

But then he recounted his OneTaste experience, which began with his arriving at 1080 Folsom and turning over his clothes, cell phone, and keys. "Of course this is all by permission, this isn't forced," he said. They sent him "to the edge" of his comfort zone, he said, sending him out to the Tenderloin to talk to homeless people. Then came the "beast exercise": "It wasn't sex. It wasn't sexual. It was, we went to a room, and I had this desire to just like rip her limbs off, and it was interesting because I felt it all, and she felt it all, just screaming. But the interesting thing was, I was barely touching her."

The approval had drained out of the room. You could hear the folding chairs creak. Sadism, it appears, was too off-brand for OMers. After all his self-discovery, Richman's stiff smile still looked like a mask that was about the crack. At the end of the conference, the white-haired yogi would tell me that when he witnessed these transformation stories, he could see both people at once: the one the speaker wanted to become, and the one they were.

Richman concluded with a grand pronouncement: "It was this feeling of religion... And as a person who studies culture like me, that's one of the highest echelons, because religion involves the full body, the full spirit experience...And it's got its articles of faith, the principles of OM, that blow my mind. Principles that apply to life, not just orgasmic meditation. And this lifestyle I was starting to see, it resembles a monastery... Except rather than deprivation, it's to acceptance. It's to desire. It's to pleasure. It's to freedom. It's to connection."

It made me appreciate how charming and skillfull Daedone is. Because coming out of Richman’s mouth, it sounded insane.

Daedone was unavailable for interviews till the very end of the conference, after they'd handed out glow bracelets and insisted that everyone "agree to come down pleasurably." I asked her how she felt about cult accusations that followed her online.

She stammered a bit, then opted for frankness: "If I were a person out there, and I heard about a group of people who were living together and were doing this practice where they were stroking genitals, I would probably think the same thing. Because I wouldn't have any context to understand. Because there IS no context for connection in our culture. There's no context for any kind of female pleasure. There's no kind of context for sexuality within a rigorous practice.

"These things, as far as I know, have never been explored skillfully. Any time it's been explored, it's been sort of on the fringe. And that's one of the reasons why I absolutely wanted to bring it into the mainstream...because that stuff hurts, it's terrible, really terrible, because it's the OPPOSITE of what I want to do...One of the reasons why I wanted to bring it into the mainstream was so that there were checks and balances. Really, the model is Wikipedia, where everyone gets access and everyone puts their part in."

Like the speakers she brought to the stage, Daedone has her own twisted road to enlightenment to share. When she was in her mid-20s, her father, who had always been a distant figure in her life, went to prison for molesting two girls. She said he never behaved inappropriately to her; they had long been estranged. At 27, she learned that he was dying of cancer and only had hours to live. That trauma propelled her to study at what she called a “mystery school of theosophical studies,” then graduating to Buddhism and celibacy before finding orgasmic meditation.

Her desire now is for OneTaste "to go into the belly of the beast and begin to heal this trauma about misused sexuality." I asked her if it tied back to her relationship with her father. "Mmmhmmm," she murmured and softly nodded her head. “Yeah, I think amends in the world. There's this beautiful idea in somebody white's book—the idea that your darkest spot is actually what becomes your purpose.”

Earlier in the article, the reporter wrote:

"Laid bare at the training, OM started to sound retrograde, quaint even. I saw a few lesbian couples, and a number of women mentioned their “crush” on Daedone. But here was a heteronormative practice ... The most far-out aspect was the unapologetic emphasis on female pleasure"

The mainstream seemed, to many of the people I met at OMX, a bit out of reach. They also had something in their past that they were trying to work through, or some unnameable need. Jeremy, a skinny twentysomething from Austin, told me during one dinner break that after his first OneTaste experience, "this complete reckless behavior kicked in all of a sudden." He moved into the OneTaste house in Austin, with only $140 to his name, and decided he wanted to become a professional boxer or start his own gym. He weighed maybe a buck twenty. Others mentioned attending Tony Robbins seminars or Mama Gena’s School of Womanly Arts, which teaches women "the art of receiving pleasure."

"I just love the attention, and I think it helps you get better" another twentysomething kid told me, bugeyed and fidgety, on the sidewalk before the alcohol-free Saturday dance social. Did it feel like the company was a front encouraging some kind of sexual deviance? "There's plenty of sex among members of the community." But, he said, "it's a big deal around here not to use OM as foreplay. The OM itself is kept intact...If it's shady, it's as little shady as you're gonna get."

"Sometimes its amazing and sometimes it's brutal," a comedian who lives at 1080 Folsom and performed at the dance told me. "It's not for teenagers, you know what I mean? Its only probably the right place to play if you're an adult.”

The normalizing effect of being surrounded by these people in a hyper-sexualized environment had warped my boundaries. At night, I would take the Muni back to my Airbnb—located across the street from Twitter’s Mid-Market headquarters—and collapse almost immediately from mental exhaustion. Before I boarded the bus, I made sure to take off my lanyard, which featured the words “AGENT OF ORGASM” above a picture of my face.

Quote

I asked if any of the tech workers in SOMA were One Taste clients. “There are a lot of people who learned to OM that are not necessarily public about it," she said. "It might surprise you." Dawson responded to my questions politely. But even her face, now blank and guarded, looked different from the melting woman I saw after the demo.

Quote

When Michal got married in August 2015, her family and longtime friends didn’t attend. The woman who walked her down the aisle, the dozens of beaming onlookers, her soon-to-be husband—all were people she’d met in the preceding 10 months. Wearing a loose, casual dress borrowed from one of her new friends, Michal spent the ceremony in a daze.

She knew she didn’t want to get married like this, in the living room of a rented San Francisco house without her family’s support, yet she felt compelled to do it. That uneasy feeling could apply to most of her experiences in OneTaste....

In OneTaste, Michal was constantly surrounded by people who were her colleagues, roommates, sexual partners, and, suddenly, closest friends. She was also $20,000 in debt from buying its classes. She was married during a two-week, $36,000-a-person retreat called the Nicole Daedone Intensive. By the time she and her husband left OneTaste a few months later, they’d spent more than $150,000. “The deeper I went, the more courses I did, the more I worked for them, the closer I got to Nicole—I knew I was doing something that later would be very difficult to unravel,” she says. “I knew I was losing control. In OneTaste, I’d done that again and again and again.”

Michal’s story is far from unique among those who venture deeper into the organization, though it’s almost unknown to the outside world....

Quote

OneTaste says these were individual missteps by members of an edgy lifestyle community that has, since 2016, become a legitimate business. The company no longer organizes group OMs among students or leases communal homes in its own name. It has added teaching centers in London, New York, and Los Angeles alongside the one that sits across from Uber’s headquarters in San Francisco. It says it made $12 million in revenue in 2017 and will expand to Atlanta, Chicago, Minneapolis, and Washington over the next two years.

The company has hired executives and advisers who worked at CrossFit and the juice maker Odwalla, and OM has won endorsements from Khloé Kardashian and Tim Ferriss (The 4-Hour Body). OneTaste’s nonprofit arm has commissioned a study on the health benefits of OM and expects to publish findings later this year. “OneTaste is the Whole Foods of sexuality—the organic, good-for-you version,” says Chief Executive Officer Joanna Van Vleck, the former head of Trunk Club LLC. “The overarching thing is, orgasm is part of wellness.” OneTaste didn’t make Daedone available for interviews, nor did she respond to requests for comment.

OneTaste has also begun targeting businesses as customers—not teaching their employees how to stroke one another, but how to apply OM principles such as “feel over formula” and “stay connected no matter what” to running a company. “We’re having conversations with companies about #MeToo and how to teach connection as preventive health for companies rather than treating the disease of sexual harassment,” says Van Vleck. She says the National Hockey League is among the businesses that have expressed interest, though the NHL says it can’t confirm any record of a conversation.

A decade’s worth of periodic OneTaste press coverage hasn’t really gotten past the titillating veneer of OM. Reporters have occasionally used the word “cult” jokingly because of the practice’s inherent kookiness and fierce devotees, but Michal and others say OneTaste deserves the term’s full weight. “I lost my understanding of money,” Michal says. “There was a lot of psychological manipulation. This is an organization that really preys on people’s weaknesses.”

Quote

OneTaste says the company has changed, especially since Daedone stepped down as CEO last year to work on her next book and teach the occasional class. (She also sold her stake in the company to a trio of OneTaste members.) Van Vleck says OneTaste isn’t a cult, but that it’s common for people to use the term when something “changes their internal perspective.”

The newish CEO is betting that the study OneTaste has funded on the health benefits of OM, which has taken brain-activity readings from 130 pairs of strokers and strokees, will draw fresh crowds. Led by researchers from the University of Pittsburgh, the study is expected to yield the first of multiple papers later this year. “The science that’s coming out to back what this is and what the benefits are is going to be huge in terms of scaling,” Van Vleck says.

Quote

D C.
Southend-on-Sea, United Kingdom

5/3/2016

If I had written this review 6 months ago I would have been one of the people giving it 5 stars. I wonder if many of the 5 star people will come to the same conclusion.

First up, the practice is amazing. It is something that you can benefit from greatly and open up energy and feeling in both your and partners lives or to connect more with the opposite sex,

Now, for onetaste. There are many posts written about how they use techniques similar to a cult. some of the techniques seem similar to scientology such as being lovebombed (be made to feel welcome as you spend cash).

The truth is many people need similar exercises to the practice but getting caught in onetastes clutches has left a number of people on an expesive ride.

There is also a number of people that have got together to share their traumatic experiences with this company. If I could turn back time and not get involved with this company? It is hard to say. I would do the introduction course which is £100 roughly and then not go near them again.

I hear they may be changing their business practices in the future which would be greatly welcomed. You get cuaght in a situation where you want to be a part of the community as you get to share wonderful experiences which explorers. However you find yourself being sold to and made to feel awkard if you don't spend money. If only they practiced what they preached is a common utterance from community members. You find yoursrelf putting up with their poor behvaiours because you don't want to lose contact with the rest of the community.

There courses other than the introduction are vastly overpriced.

I did the mastery courses which was £2,400 for 3.5 days (they advertise it is 5 days) and told it was by the founder when in fact she only did a few afternoons. The highlight of the course was given by a gentleman who runs sacred pleasures. He was amazing and loving guy without the alternate agendas I felt onetaste had. He charges £150 for a whole weekend, not quite sure how onetaste then charged so much for the course. They get many helpers to help out free of charge so they make more money.

I stopped going because I quite frankly didn't trust them with my attention.

I hope they change soon and people can explore without the hassle. I wonder if the £16,000 for 10 days is really wortth it?

Quote

Chelsea D wrote this on Yelp

12/17/2016

Nothing is more disgustingly shameless than exploiting peoples emotions for money.

My boyfriend and I went to TurnOn seeking to connect with empowered, open minded people. We left realizing the whole hour session was a sales pitch for OneTaste's other, much more cult-like expensive retreats and workshops.

Let me break OneTaste sales pitch down:

1. Lure in potential new candidates with catchy title (TurnOn) and low price (just $10!).

2. Appeal to the candidates' senses (nice location, free tea).

3. Encourage candidate to engage on a personal level. (interactive games)

4. Build the candidates self-esteem and empowerment up. ("Your really unique" etc etc)

5. Herd the candidate towards spending money in a way that makes it seem like it was their idea. ("You seem like the type of person that would really get a lot out of this class")

6. Close the deal by making the candidate feel like their both special and like their getting a great deal ("We don't normally let people skip the Om class, but I think you seem pretty in touch with yourself." or "I'm actually authorized to give a discount" etc"

The first red flag should have been their enormous meeting space on market street. "How do they pay for this?!" I thought.

I soon learned.

We played games in the session which seemed to be a way to rapidly get to know people. I found it extremely rude that we were encouraged to cut off people mid-sentence with "thank you", when were satisfied with an answer they gave to our question, or if we just wanted them to shut up. Was this meant to keep the person being interrogated on their toes? To not allow them to think about their answers? Whatever the intent was behind encouraging interrupting people, did not seem funny or remotely therapeutic.

Its extremely difficult for me to open up and divulge intimate things, but I took a leap of faith and answered every question honestly and with enthusiasm. I felt extremely vulnerable explaining dark, unexplored aspects of personality and sexuality to a bunch of strangers.

You can understand why, when it began to dawn on me that the session was just a sales pitch, I felt very gross and taken advantage of.

Elyna approached me at the end of the session and began to insist that I sign up for the orgasm class. She was not truly engaged in me as a person, just appeared to be enthusiastically pushing for me to sign up right now for it. She said that I'd get a discount if I did it right then and there, and that I could skip the OM class. I'm not one to hastily toss $150 away before I do a little research and sleep on the decision. Thankfully I have never experienced sexual trauma, but I have emotional trauma (due to abusive past relationships), surrounding sex and my orgasm.

To not even personally engage me to make sure this very intimate class would not trigger buried emotions is transparently careless.

Elyna told me to go ask my boyfriend to sign up with me. I found him being cornered by Erik and being subjected to a similar sales pitch, except it was for a $500 men's retreat in LA.

He had the same sales methodology. When he finally turned his attention on me, he continued to push for me to sign up for the orgasm session. When I said, "I don't know. I don't really have that kind of money right now".
He looked at me with utter disbelief and condescending said "You don't have $150?"
Like $150 is just chump change that he wipes his ass with every morning. Yeah. That's a huge amount of money for me.

He seemed to be getting irritated that we weren't caving to the high pressure sales tactics. This continued on for a while until my boyfriend finally said "You know, I really might have gone to the retreat if you hadn't laid into me with these high pressure sales tactics at the end".

Not only is OneTaste a shallow, pale imitation of actual group therapy, it can be extremely damaging.

Do not support this predatory money mill.

Quote

5/29/2015

OneTaste is a company that teaches genital stroking in a technique called Orgasmic Meditation. They have events called "Turn Ons" which are modeled after the Mark groups of the 60s by the sex commune Morehouse. (They were called Mark groups because the people who attended the events are 'marks' to be conned.) If you go to one of these events to 'learn' you will get the hard sell a few days later from their staff.

No matter how eager these OneTaste people seem to be your friend, no matter how much they seem to have something you want, they are salespeople first and will drop you like a hot potato if you don't buy expensive workshops and coaching sessions from them. Nobody will admit it's like a pyramid scheme, but that's what I saw.

I was involved with this group for over a year, took 2 classes and even some private coaching sessions from them. And this was the #1 complaint from many people. Many leave. Bad for business.

OneTaste has a sex class for about $6000 and their coaching program costs in the $15,000 range. The basic OM class is about $195 at last I heard. You take this one-day class, the "How to OM" class, to learn their technique of female clitoral stroking. It's like learning a new form of sex. This part is actually cool. Orgasms, what's not to like?

The uncool part is that the staff and coaches are focused on liberating you from your money and protecting their status in the organization, and if you criticize them you will be kicked out. This is getting into the culty part.

OneTaste promises women better orgasms, but getting past all the sales, emotional manipulation and starry-eyed fellow culties is a big turn off. It's a good place for older, or shy men, to pick up on women who would not normally consider becoming sexually involved with them. The gender balance can be a little skewed older, white male.

Bottom line: Look elsewhere to expand your sexual education. Don't put your faith in sex gurus or their acolytes. Their main goal is to make money teaching sexual techniques with a veneer of psuedo spirituality. Trust yourself. Remember that the teachers are salespeople first and foremost, not your friends. Also remember that as soon as you quit paying for expensive classes, or quit recruiting new customers for them, you will be of no interest to them.

One telltale sign of a culty pyramid scheme is the range of the reviews: people who've drunk the Kool-Aid are encouraged to put up a supportive review, and it's *always* five stars, isn't it? They are rewarded for building the pyramid underneath them. Stay away!

There are other groups all around the Bay Area doing the same thing, with more care and honesty. Find them.

Quote

So I ended up here after a really bad (kind of traumatic) break up and was immediately enchanted. The attention I got made me feel I was deeply cared for. But my experience ended pretty sour.

Things to consider about onetaste:

I'll start with the positive: I learned a lot about my preferences and sexuality through spending time with this group of people. I also got to see a great deal of vulnerability from a lot of other people who showed up here. The world can be really lonely and so many of us simply desire connection. I do also think a lot of people who work here do genuinely want to help people. Most of them really are good people.

That being said these are the negatives:

1. There are two components of onetaste. The business and the community.

Ultimately onetaste is a business and it's important to remember that.

Even their $10 event turn on is just a sales pitch to sell more expensive programs that are offered. Mainly the coaching program (which costs 13,000 to attend not including board, transportation or food - Corboy italics) so if they can convince say 200 people to sign up they can make 2.6 million per program. Or probably about 2 million factoring in the costs to run it. Similar math can be seen for the intensive which costs 36k and only runs 10 days.

The thing that is troubling about this is people often open up at turnons which can tell sales people a lot about how to exactly market their programs and services. Each subsequent program is marketed as the magic cure for the things people are missing within themselves. The community aspect of it is cool but the ideals and the values of the community can be troubling at times.

As a 23 year old I was approached by many men twice or three times my age who repeatedly asked to have sex with me. I think learning to express your desire is great but in a place that's supposed to be about female empowerment it made me feel objectified.

The community also heavily advocates for polyamory although it seems that the main leaders of the group all got monogamously married to other people in the group around the same time?

2. Most people who show up here are lonely, vulnerable or insecure. And they usually fall into one of two categories: Proprietors and whores. The first group are usually lonely older men with a decent amount of money. The latter are usually young women (occasionally attractive young men). Who are encouraged to sleep with the former and of course sign both parties up for the aforementioned programs. Men often leave feeling financially taken advantage of and woman used for their bodies.

Heck I know there are people who did have sex for money to pay for their coaching program. And I know when I think of who I became during the time I was there I feel sad. I became someone who thought it was perfectly fine to use my sexuality to get things from men. I felt empowered but I realized the only person I was really exploiting was myself.

3. There's no regulation. Even if people spend 13k on the coaching program. They spend 6 months having whatever done to them for a weekend once a month and come out thinking that being encouraged to sleep with people they find unattractive or tying eachother up or spending hours listening to indoctrinating lectures somehow qualifies them to "coach" other people.

People who could spend the same amount of money seeing a formally trained therapist who probably has some medical background and actually adheres to a set of policies and procedures.

4. It's mostly pseudo intimacy. I had so many people "up stroke" me when I first showed up. And when it became apparent I couldn't or wouldn't shell out the money for their programs I was almost completely ignored by the staff. And I noticed how they poured attention on the new people that showed up which was part of what hooked me initially.

Even the men there. Seem like sensitive guys who want to have deep meaningful sex but it's all just casual sex disguised as something more than skin deep with people who are worse than people who admit they don't care. Because they only pretend, to get their own needs met.

5. The communities are run by this idea that everyone should just follow their desire without shame. Which is a good thing to learn how to do. But it results in grown adults running around like children and using eachother then refusing to take responsibility or be accountable for their own actions.

6. Almost every one of the 5 star reviews has been written by someone employed by onetaste. (I've met a lot of them do I know). So just be aware.

My take away: if you're feeling adventurous you can learn some interesting things from this group. But be careful what you share and be mindful of how you're approached. Remember that there's no magic pill for loneliness and no instant solutions for disconnection. Know that everyone feels lonely and insecure sometimes and it's ok. It may seem like it, but for women it's probably not the best place to learn to love yourself.

Quote

Now, all of this may be innocent – and emancipating for women – – or like NXIVM — it may be disguised as women’s empowerment, but is actually female enslavement and a criminal enterprise.
There is a strong financial component. According to one source, there are numerous shell companies:
These may be such as:
One Taste

OneTaste Incorporated

OneTaste Lineage, LLC

OneTaste Cooperative, Inc

OneTaste Media, LLC

Ehrlich Photography & Shutterbug Studio

Shutterbug Shop

Ehrlich Photography

Del Monte Realty, Inc.

Caravan, Inc

Caravan Incorporated

Caravan Retreats Incorporated

Mirror Clan, Inc

Insight Institute, LLC

DBDD, LLC

***

Another source tells me that an heiress of the Wrigley’s Gum fortune is a high rank member, possibly part owner.

More on that later.

Quote

About 1,450 results (0.37 seconds)

New Page — Institute of OM
instituteofom.com › media(COr
Nicole Daedone is a longtime proponent and teacher of a practice called orgasmic meditation, which has been called the yoga of sex. She's also the author of ...

Blog — Institute of OM
instituteofom.com › blog
Jan 4, 2019 — Nicole Daedone is a longtime proponent and teacher of a practice called orgasmic meditation, which has been called the yoga of sex.