OM—Orgasmic Meditation—Hits Pleasure Point Tuesday

Written by Brad Kava

The talk at the Chi Center in Pleasure Point Tuesday night was about pleasure, of the sexual and spiritual kind.

A new national movement called Orgasmic Meditation has popped up in San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles and Santa Cruz County, among other places. Saturday the group called One Taste, advertised in downtown Santa Cruz by wearing shirts that said "Powered by Orgasm" and giving volunteers a G-Rated questionnaire about their love lives.

"Like Vitamin C, Orgasm is a nutrient that has been missing from the standard human diet for centuries," the website says.

They hold regular meetings called TurnON Santa Cruz Tuesday nights at the Santa Cruz Integrative Medicine and Chi Center at 21511 East Cliff Dr. The group of about 20 people Tuesday included most in their 20s and 30s, but had a few representatives in their 40s and 50s. The sexes were about evenly divided.

The exercises consisted of going around in a circle and saying the first thing that popped into your head after a prompt, such as "My last kiss was..." or "What I offer the opposite sex is..."

Answers ranged from the banal ("hot," "wet") to the shockingly graphic (which won't be printed here, but think porn), which one of the organizers said later was an aid to get people to open up about things they usually don't talk about with strangers. 

The overriding theme was that women are tired of being treated like sex objects and of sex being like an act of commerce by men, according to organizers. Men want more sex; women want more intimacy. Through this act, which is not sexual, they said, partners can meet and open up to a new level of intimacy and bliss.

The organizers suggested that participants may want to take a $200 course in how to do Orgasmic Meditation properly or go tothe national OM convention which will be held in San Francisco August 9-11 with experts on orgasms and their effect on life, and of course, "stroking clinics." The basic training includes lessons in how to do a 15-minute session stimulating a woman's clitoris in such a way as to give both participants a meditative joy, they explained.

Here's an account of an OM session in San Francisco described in the Cabrillo Voice newspaper. The founder of OM, Nicole Daedone,gave a TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) talk on the topic here, saying that she hoped one day she could talk about yoga, meditation and orgasm without having to whisper the last word.

Her movement wasn't growing until the New York Times wrote a story about it and people began to flood into her doors. 

"They were saying some version of 'I'm hungry,'" she said in her TED talk. "'There's this gnawing sense of something I can't reach and I don't know how to touch it.' I was very clear and I would say to them 'Orgasm.'"