Bodrum
The book was sitting on a shelf at a health retreat in Bodrum.
I had gone to Turkey to stop. Not to think, not to plan. To stop.
Seven children between two families. Seven different schools. Seven different personalities, seven different needs. I had been running a household of nine people and I was doing it well, which is the particular trap of being good at things.
Nobody knew how empty I felt. I barely knew myself.
I was fasting. Ozone therapy. Cryo. Yoga at sunrise. Meditation in the heat of the afternoon. All of it an attempt to give my body back to itself, to find out if anything was still there underneath the organising and the managing and the relentless giving.
The 4-Hour Body was in the room I had been given. I glanced at it. Got pulled in. There was a chapter that stopped me completely. The hair on my arms lifted. My breath caught as I read.
A woman named Nicole Daedone. A company in San Francisco called OneTaste. A practice. A premise: that sensation could be a doorway. That the body, given the right quality of attention, could become a compass rather than something to fix.
At the end of the chapter Tim Ferriss wrote: "This should be required education for every man on the planet."
I made a note. I put the book down. I did not know yet what I had just been pointed toward.
The body speaks
I came home from Turkey and continued as before. The household. The children. The noise of a life that looked, from the outside, like it was working.
Then the fainting started.
Nine months. In and out of hospital. The doctors installed a heart monitor that I wore for two years. Brain scans. Grommets. Every possible investigation. No cause found.
I tried everything: Chinese herbs, acupuncture, electric shocks to restart something that felt stuck, kinesiology, supplements, meditation, hypnotherapy. Nothing moved what needed moving.
The body is not a machine that breaks down randomly. I know this now with certainty. I knew it less clearly then, when I was watching doctors run tests that kept coming back clean while I fainted again on my way to the kitchen.
Chronic stress, sustained overgiving, emotion with nowhere to go. These do not stay in the mind. They move into the tissue. They dysregulate the nervous system at a level that produces real, measurable, debilitating physical symptoms.
The body speaks one way or another. When it cannot find words, it finds other means.
The relationship ended. Something began to shift.
Two months after I woke in a pool of my own blood on the half landing, sticky, metallic, the detail I still hold from that morning, I was sitting on the sofa waiting for my children to come home from school.
I want you to understand what that means.
A woman who had run a household of nine. Who had managed seven schools and seven children and two blended families and every logistical detail of a life that required constant motion.
Sitting on the sofa. Waiting. Because she could not trust herself to walk to the bottom of the stairs without losing consciousness.
I had gone from running everything to depending on my children to keep me safe.
The room
I found the Meetup app. Something called a TurnOn. I recognised it as the same practice I had read about in Bodrum. I went.
A TurnOn was what OneTaste called its free introductory evenings.
You sat in a room with strangers. Someone was put in the Hot Seat. The group directed questions at them, not to extract information, but to give attention. The questioner's job was to ask interested questions. Curious about the person in the seat. No fixing. No reassurance. No advice. Eyes on the person, question after question, all the attention landing in one place.
The premise: that focused, non-judgmental attention is itself a form of nourishment. That most of us are so starved of being genuinely seen that even a few minutes of it begins to change something.
I sat in that room and felt something I had not felt in months.
Seen.
Not assessed. Not managed. Not helped. Seen.
My energy began to change that evening. I signed up for a retreat before I had attended a single How to OM class. I found private training. Two days of intense community, group practice, teaching I did not fully understand. The language was new: tumescent, strokee, frame, turn on.
My body did not care about the language. My body was buzzing. Alive, in a way it had not been in years. Maybe longer.
I got deep into it. I believed it because I watched myself change. The anger that had been sitting like concrete in my chest started to move. I became more conscious. More present. More able to locate, in real time, what was happening inside me rather than overriding it to keep moving.
What I learned
What I learned there is still in my hands every day.
The practice taught me sensation as language. Not metaphor. Actual somatic precision. A warmth in the chest. A tingling in the left toe. A tightening in the throat. The frame, the practice of sharing one specific moment from a session in pure sensation language without interpretation or story, trained me to locate experience in the body before the mind could rewrite it.
That is still the foundation of a lot that I teach.
I learned the dyad there. They called it pulling withholds. One person asks: "What have you withheld from me?" The other answers. The questioner does not respond, does not fix, does not reciprocate. They stay. They hold the space. The speaker empties.
I used a version of that practice with my own coach just this week.
My coaching programme with Dr McDonald brought in Lynne Forrest to teach us. Lynne is known for her work on the Victim Triangle, her reframing of the Drama Triangle. Three roles: Persecutor, Rescuer, Victim. Her central insight: no matter which role you start in, you always end up as the victim. The rescuer who cannot stop helping. The persecutor who cannot stop blaming. All are forms of victimhood.
She calls it the shame machine. The way off it is not blame in the other direction. It is self-responsibility.
The teaching landed in my body because I could see exactly where I had been rotating around that triangle for years, believing I was helping.
Ulysses was a speaker on the same programme, before he later went to work with OneTaste. At twelve years old he watched his father shoot his mother twice in the head. He placed his pillow under her head while they waited for the ambulance. She did not survive.
The following year he served as the state's key witness against his father, sitting in that courtroom, in seventh grade, looking at the man who killed his mother in the defendant's chair.
Thirty-two years later he reconciled with him. He said:
"Often times it's the person who hurt you the most who is the person that can help you heal the most."
I am telling you this because these are the rooms I was sitting in. These were the people I was learning from. The tools were real. The quality of attention in those spaces was extraordinary.
The lineage
What I was learning at OneTaste was not Nicole's invention. The practice of Deliberate Orgasm, the root of what she renamed Orgasmic Meditation, was developed by Victor Baranco at Lafayette Morehouse in California in 1968. His students formed the Welcomed Consensus. Nicole lived there for two years before founding OneTaste in 2004.
She took what was already there, reframed it in the language of wellness, and took it to the world.
The repackaging itself was not what went wrong. Many teachers build on what came before them. What you do with the thing you are carrying is the question.
I became a director. I did all the programmes. I made friendships there that are among the deepest of my life, fifteen years later.
I met Nicole for the first time at a coaching weekend. My eyes kept dropping closed, not from boredom, from the size of the energy in the room. She had that effect. Her capacity was large. When you do not yet have the container to hold that quality of presence, your body finds its own way to leave. Mine checked out. Eyes closed, head heavy, somewhere between here and elsewhere.
That first weekend she had us argue for or against our own perfection. I stood up and said something to her, not a question, more a statement. I remember the silence. I remember her sizing me up. The shift in how she looked at me.
I got special attention after that. I understand now what that was. At the time it felt like being recognised.
I was love-bombed. Seen as someone interesting. Given access. Included. It is a specific feeling, warm and electric and particular, and it is designed to create loyalty before you have had time to think clearly. I did not have language for it then. The loyalty formed anyway.
Nicole and Rachel Cherwitz had a dream: to bring female empowerment to one hundred million people. Maybe a billion. The research into Orgasmic Meditation was real. The community that formed around it was real. I was in the room with a hundred and ten people oming together and I understood, viscerally, what it means for a group of bodies to be in shared attention.
It is not nothing. It is not performance. Something genuine was happening.
She was also a master storyteller. She could take an idea that should have frightened you and make it feel like the most obvious, healing, life-affirming thing in the world. She writes beautifully. She spoke with the precision of someone who had thought deeply about what she believed. Her book Slow Sex is a genuine piece of writing. She spoke at Gwyneth Paltrow's Goop summit. The world was paying attention.
When the dream corrects
What I also watched, over those years, was a dream corrupt when scale overtook care.
The research on power is consistent: the qualities that allow a person to build something, empathy, conviction, the ability to make others feel seen, begin to erode when power concentrates without accountability. The person who started with genuine vision starts to believe the vision matters more than the people inside it.
It is not always a sudden change. It accumulates in small decisions, until one day the container that was built to hold something sacred is doing the opposite.
The sales pressure inside OneTaste was atrocious. I could never understand it. For something that worked so clearly, why the pressure? Why the debt? Why devotion demonstrated through financial sacrifice?
I held the question alongside everything that was genuinely working and told myself the good was worth the complicated.
I am still working out what I think about that.
What I keep returning to is this: the same weekend she had us arguing for or against our own perfection, the same practice that taught me to call out "I'm judging" and "oops, I messed up" in real time, that practice of bringing what is inside to the outside without fear, was running inside an organisation that was simultaneously making it dangerous to say the wrong thing.
To question the sales targets. To name what felt off. To choose yourself over the community.
The practice and the corruption were in direct opposition. That is the thing I have never been able to make add up.
The verdict
Earlier this week Nicole Daedone was sentenced to nine years in federal prison. Rachel Cherwitz to six and a half. One charge: forced labour conspiracy.
The judge said:
"What she was doing wasn't about enlightenment or operating in a different dimension. It was criminal."
The prosecution proved a scheme that preyed on vulnerable women, many of them with histories of sexual trauma, who had come looking for healing. Economic pressure. Psychological manipulation. Physical exhaustion. Emotional degradation. Threats of ostracisation and loss of communal housing. Women coerced into performing labour and sex acts with investors and clients.
All of it framed as the path to freedom.
"Coercion disguised as wellness or empowerment," the US attorney said, "is still exploitation."
I was not there for the period the charges cover. By the time I arrived, the communal living arrangements, Magic School where priests and priestesses disrobed, the earlier inner-circle practices had already ended. OneTaste was attempting to go mainstream. What I stepped into was a different version of the same organisation.
That is part of what makes this complicated to write about.
I was not one of those women. I want to be honest about that. I was in a different part of the organisation, at a different time, with enough existing capacity to receive what was useful and leave what was not.
I knew women who were not in that position. I saw things I did not name clearly at the time. I carried the not-naming alongside everything I was learning, and I told myself the good was worth the complicated.
The women who were harmed were real. Their testimony was real. The verdict stood.
That has to be the first thing said.
Both/and
I have been quiet about OneTaste for a long time. Longer than felt right. Partly because the story is complicated and I was still inside my own relationship to it. Partly because the internet does not have much room for both/and.
What I want to say now is this.
I went into that world at the lowest point of my life. Sitting on a sofa. Waiting for my children. Unable to walk to the bottom of my own stairs. I came out knowing things about the body I could not have learned any other way. I made friendships that have lasted fifteen years. I built a relationship with sensation and attention that is the spine of everything I teach.
I also watched what happens when a genuine vision meets scale without ethical architecture. When the people inside the system stop being the point. When devotion is measured in what you give rather than what you freely choose.
What I took:
- Sensation as language
- The frame
- The dyad
- The practice of bringing what is inside to the outside without fear
- The understanding that focused, non-judgmental presence is itself nourishing
All of it still true. All of it still working. None of it requiring the organisation that once held it.
All of it carried forward into work that has the thing OneTaste lacked: a container that holds the person, not the vision.
What I learned in the negative:
- The container matters as much as the content
- Ethics are not a footnote to methodology
- Structure without consent is just control with better language
The reason I am as careful as I am, as specific as I am about structure and consent and the difference between what the client wants and what actually serves them, is precisely because I have seen what happens when the practitioner stops asking that question.
That is the whole reason I am still asking it.
I also know what it can do when that power is used to take.
These things are not separate.
The question I keep
I will write more about this. The lineage. The tools. What I took and what I had to set down. What the body knows that the organisation forgot.
For now: I see the women who were harmed.
I am glad the verdict stood.
Her defence lawyer told the court she has been serving her time with dignity and optimism. Since her conviction she has been teaching meditation to other inmates at the detention centre. There is an organisation connected to her work running programmes in two California prisons, with a mission to turn prisons into monasteries.
More than 200 people wrote letters for her. Van Jones. Richard Schiff. People from all walks of life who had nothing to do with OneTaste and wrote anyway, attesting to her generosity, her character, her positive influence on their lives.
I believe them.
I also believe the women who stood up in court.
She is multi-talented. She cared deeply. She could see into people's pain with unusual precision. She built something real. She writes beautifully. She taught things I still use every single day.
Yet.
That is the question I keep returning to. Not who she was, or is. Not whether the verdict was right. But the one underneath all of it:
What happens to a person like that?
How does someone who can see so clearly into other people's suffering become unable to see what she is doing to the people closest to her? How does a vision that started with genuine care become the thing that causes harm? How do the gifts and the damage live inside the same person, and which one wins, and why?
I do not have an answer.
I have been in that room. I felt what she built. I also watched what scale without accountability does to even the most genuine thing.
I will keep writing about it.
There is more to say.
If you are someone who has been in rooms like those, or who has been circling the door to this kind of work and could not name why it felt complicated, I want you to know there is a version of this that is safe. Not because I say so. Because I built it from the inside of knowing what unsafe looks like.
Still following the breadcrumbs.
Juliette