This week Nicole Daedone gave a talk at TEDx San Francisco on orgasmic meditation (embedded below). Orgasmic Meditation existed on the fringes of San Francisco society until 2009, when an article in the New York Times shone the spotlight on her retreat centre.
It received further widespread attention through Tim Ferris’s book, The 4-Hour Body. Tim Ferris, formerly (but probably no longer) best-known for The 4-Hour Work Week, published his most recent book this year. Featuring sections on weight loss, adding muscle, perfecting sleep and reversing injuries, I suspect the most-widely read chapter is the one entitled Improving Sex, which begins with a description of the 15-minute female orgasm as taught by Nicole Daedone at her OneTaste retreat centres.
Orgasm is a word that comes with so much negative baggage, but Nicole describes it simply as rooting the fundamental capacity for connection. Her first experience of the particular practice began as do most sexual experiences – in her head. How did she look, was her stomach was too fat, was she doing it right?
Until, all of sudden, as she describes it, the traffic jam that was my mind broke open and she moved from thought to feeling. Meditation through orgasm, where instead of using breath or sound as a meditative focus, she’d used sensation, and had broken through.
I enjoyed her talk – I’d only read Tim Ferris’s account, very much from (and for) a male perspective, as have been all the related readings on Taoist sexuality I’ve come across, so it was interesting to hear her perspective.
I’ve tried the practice once without much happening besides a sore wrist for me and bored indifference from the partner.
Like all meditation, the danger of talking about experience is that it creates expectation when the process itself is goalless. With expectation, each time we meditate, if instead of experiencing the blissful ecstasy of a world beyond thought, we experience nothing more than a stiff back, we’ll view it as a failure when it’s anything but that.
Tim was lucky enough to hone his technique with some personal clitoral training at the OneTaste retreat centre. I’ll just have to make do with more practice.
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Ian, thanks for this post. V interesting.
I had an interesting experience recently around orgasm where I made a shift to loving self-affirmation in my mind, with interesting results. But this all reminds me, you have a book of mine, baba dez, that I’d love to have back, a I want to do some of the practices.