Before OneTaste and the practice known as Orgasmic Meditation (OM) existed, Nicole Daedone—who founded both—had already spent roughly fifteen years in Zen, lived in a community that used psychedelics in an explicitly spiritual way, and later devoted to step work and participated in AA. She’d had the kinds of experiences people call “enlightening” across meditation, psychedelics, and sexuality, and she kept asking where to go next—what would carry the depth of Zen, the boundary-dissolving clarity of psychedelics, the self-examination of step work, and the immediacy of sexual experience into one coherent path. That question became OM.
In its simplest description, OM is a physical meditation. A woman lies down and removes clothing from the lower half of her body. Her partner—the “stroker”—settles into a nest beside her and places precise, light, sustained attention on the point of contact between finger and clitoris for fifteen minutes. A timer marks the end. That’s it. The structure is deceptively simple, yet it’s rooted in a deeply Zen intuition: even if you’re having “a good sit,” when the bell rings, you get up. Don’t cling to good or bad sessions; build a practice. Nicole carried that ethic straight into OM. The timer is not a buzzkill; it’s the bell that trains non-attachment, the bounds of the experience that allow us to say yes to an OM and dive into the experience.
This is one way these lineages informed each other to become a grounded, repeatable practice that can take people from their ordinary state into a world they might not otherwise touch—and then help them learn to live from there. That’s the point. I’ve been practicing Tibetan Buddhism for almost a decade. I knew about OM for years before I ever tried it, but I needed the scaffolding Tibetan Buddhism gave me—a way to work with my mind—so I could step into OM and actually practice. Other people go the other way and start OMing, have experiences that don’t fit their current map, and the framework comes after.
There’s a poem from the Tibetan tradition I love to bring in here: “Rest in natural great peace, this exhausted mind, beaten helpless by karma and neurotic thoughts like the relentless fury of the pounding waves in the infinite ocean of samsara.” You can feel the two sides of practice inside it. There are the waves—emails, deadlines, the text you forgot to answer, the car alarm outside. By 3:30 p.m. on any given day, most of us have been tossed around a bit. And there’s the depth, the “natural great peace” underneath those waves. Buddhist texts love the ocean metaphor, and so do I, even if it’s funny that it comes from a landlocked place like Tibet.
In Mahayana and Vajrayana Buddhism, that ocean is often described in terms of the three (sometimes four) kayas, or “bodies,” of a Buddha. At the bottom, the stillest layer, is dharmakaya: emptiness, ultimate reality, the timeless ground. In OM, this shows up as the quiet that can open in a sit—a stillness that’s not separate from anything else but holds it all. Above that is sambhogakaya, the “enjoyment” or bliss body—the level of felt sense, energetic nuance, the way connection can be palpably present even when you can’t point to a single discrete “thing” causing it. This is OM’s native element: the texture of contact and the currents of attention. At the surface is nirmanakaya, the emanation body—the level of concrete forms and events. It’s the distinct wave you can point to: the phone ringing, a teacher you meet, a conversation in a specific room at a specific time. And then there’s svabhavakaya, which says even those distinctions are empty—useful in the moment, but not ultimately carved into reality. All of this is happening at once: the particular, the energetic, the ground, and the insight that the way we slice the experience is itself an expression of the whole.
If you were an oceanographer rather than a practitioner, you’d segment the water column in entirely different ways—and that’s the point. Your purpose shapes how you perceive and describe experience. That’s as true in how I’m writing this as it is in how we teach OM or how a lama teaches meditation. In Buddhism, the explicit aim is enlightenment for the benefit of all beings. In OM we sometimes say, “Get into flight and create the causes of flight for everyone else.” The language differs; the vector is similar: don’t just have peak experiences—live so the whole of your life expresses that depth.
When we think about Buddhism many of us picture a bunch of monks and nuns with shaved heads, red or yellow robes, quiet halls. One of my teachers, Phuntsok, was a monk for twenty-one years before giving back his robes, though he kept teaching. He once pointed out how much of “Buddhism 101” in the West is basically what monks teach the eight-year-olds who are just starting out at the monastery. When teachers like Shunryu Suzuki Roshi came to the U.S., they had to begin where we were, and that meant basics—discipline, posture, breath, ethics. In Tibet, after a long sutra education in logic and debate, the “Great Five Books,” then a monk might apply to a tantric college. That’s where the Buddhism most people never see comes forward.
What changes in Tantra? Sutra is methodical and cumulative. Tantra is an accelerant. You yoke your mind to an already-enlightened being—Yamantaka, the wrathful wisdom that cuts through death; Vajrayogini, the incandescent drive of awakened passion. It’s like pushing your skateboard along the path with sutra versus grabbing the bumper of a car already headed toward awakening. That doesn’t mean skipping the work; it means re-wiring how you relate to the forces inside you. That’s why Chögyam Trungpa, after his training, chose to meet people in suits instead of robes when he taught in the West. He understood form is a method.
Sexual energy is one of those paths to enlightenment; vajrayana is very unapologetic about it. The drive is powerful, creative, and sticky—and therefore workable. Bodhicitta, the intention to wake up for the benefit of all beings, doesn’t exclude sex; it enlists it. In practices like tummo or Kalachakra, yogis visualize inner consorts, channels, and drops, stoking the body’s heat and bliss until the physiology itself becomes the meditation object. This isn’t about parlor tricks, but the side effects can be dramatic—think of adepts sitting in snow with soaked shawls steaming as their inner fire dries them. And the culture isn’t purely monastic. Alongside the monks, there are the wild yogis—the nakpa—with hair in dreadlocks, having sex, families, traditions and practices carried out in mountains and villages. It’s an entire tradition that may not be as widely known n the west as the Dalai Lama and the monastic tradition, but in Tibetan culture it’s just as widely known and respected.
So where does Buddhism meet OM? OM has been around for more than two decades now, and its form was crafted to be repeatable the way a sitting practice is repeatable. Set a time. Keep the container. Return to the spot. The setting of an OM is—simple, almost austere, nothing extra. Just the elements that matter for the practice, tuned for attention. At the same time, what is being worked with is intensely sambhogakaya: sensation, energy, connection, the way a shared field can coalesce and clarify.
There’s a cultural lineage here, too. Suzuki Roshi arrived in the U.S. in the 1950s. A few years later, Jack Kerouac was meditating in San Francisco and writing The Dharma Bums, wrestling with celibacy in one chapter and tumbling into a bathtub with a woman in another. By the early 1960s, Timothy Leary was evangelizing psychedelics; Richard Alpert became Ram Dass; the pill decoupled sex from procreation; “free love” collided with the postwar, 1950s moral order. The 1960s cracked something open, but it didn’t always provide a path and that’s where “free love” ended up a little messy compared to the purposefulness of sexuality in Eastern spiritual traditions. OM is one answer to the question that era posed: how do we harness what opened—Eros, intensity, contact—without losing the rigor and direction that make transformation sustainable?
That’s where OM’s timer and technique matter. They hold the practice steady so that attention can refine. In Buddhism, descriptions of awakening often emphasize qualities like uncaused spontaneity, non-conceptual knowing, and the felt signatures of love, power, and clarity. The point is not that life becomes free of the so-called “suffering” we complain about, but that the whole shows up as a seamless, workable field—nothing outside the circle. In OM, this parallels what we call being “on the spot.” The stroker adjusts—slightly left, slightly up, a hair faster—until the connection clicks. Then the stroke feels as though it’s coming through both partners rather than from one to the other. The distinctions soften. Time loosens. The car alarm outside, the itch in your foot, the thought about the timer, the surge of sensation—all of it is included. Attention saturates the connection without excluding anything, and intimacy starts to mean “with everything,” not just “with this person.”
OM attracted me as a practice and Buddhism gave me the logic and language to understand that experience. The kayas gave me a map for different registers of experience. Tantra showed me you can harness rather than suppress intensity. Meditation sits had me understand to engage with these energies as a practice. OM brings those sensibilities together in a form that’s physical, precise, repeatable, and oriented toward a kind of everyday mysticism—depth that doesn’t require a special room or a special day, just a willingness to meet the spot and include the whole.
If you’ve had a mystical-feeling OM or meditation, you know what I’m pointing at. Yes, there were two bodies in a room and a sound out the window and the clock counting down. Yes, there was the hum of connection that can’t be nailed to a single event. Yes, there was a quiet that seemed to hold the entire scene. And at the same time, the lines we draw between those layers felt less like hard borders and more like convenient descriptions of one living ocean. That is svabhavakaya in action. It’s also what makes OM and Buddhism feel, to me, like neighbors in the same neighborhood: two different doors that open into intimacy with all things.
