An early taste of OneTaste

In 2004, I spotted a OneTaste flier in my grad school cafe touting Orgasmic Meditation, known among Nicole’s adherents as OMing, a practice of partner-supported clitoral stimulation that, when done correctly, encourages the receiver to focus on surrender and the giver to focus on listening, and both, to be in the present moment. I’d just gone through a breakup, and I wanted to reclaim my orgasm. OneTaste’s feminist approach to sexual liberation and the attention paid to the female orgasm, something that dominant culture neglected, also appealed to me.

By that time I’d already come out as bisexual — mostly identifying as a lesbian through my twenties — and longed to belong to a community where my values for healing were shared and we could speak in less peniscentric ways about sex. I’d worked as a sex educator at Good Vibrations, San Francisco’s beloved worker-owned toy store, become a certified and trauma-trained somatic coach, and begun graduate studies in psychotherapy. I had done — and was doing — the work and feeling safe in my body, I was ready for whatever was next. 

When I attended their meeting at their Folsom Street location in SoMa, OneTaste members greeted me with warmth, authenticity, and directness. I was excited to find a resonant community of embodied, shame-free people interested in sexuality and healing. Nicole’s bold presence — she occupied spaces unapologetically, was a master of eye contact, and an intuitive connector — drew me in, as did her communication style. With her confidence and her short-cropped blond hair, Nicole reminded me of Staci Haines, my mentor, somatic coach, and trauma trainer. I associated safety with Staci, so Nicole’s resemblance to her bred trust in me.

At the first process group night I attended, I witnessed the “Hot Seat,” an exercise in which one person sat in front of the group as people asked exposing, penetrating questions. Watching this person, I felt vicarious discomfort — my face flushed with shame and heat, and my chest tingled —  but as the game escalated, it felt like we were sharing secrets and had been friends for years.

This sparked enough interest for me to go to another OneTaste gathering: a demonstration of a 30-minute extended orgasm. The modest staging was decorated with a massage table surrounded by candles; the audience sat in folding chairs. When it was time, a thin young woman wearing a silk robe was ushered out and gingerly laid upon the table. She disrobed, and I remember thinking that her body looked prepubescent, especially compared to the man standing over her.

During the demo, the man, whom I later learned was OneTaste cofounder Robert Kandell, hovered his hand above the naked woman’s body, slowly moving it up and down from her chest to her legs as she writhed subtly in a trance, possessed by something bigger than her.

Audience members were then invited to come up and run their hands over the top of her body and feel her energy as she vibrated in response. This reminded me of plasma balls, those novelty glass globes with pink and blue electrical currents inside that responded to touch. 

I learned later that she’d been training for this marathon, so to speak: she’d been stroked for numerous hours over weeks without going over the edge of a hard orgasm, putting her in a perpetual state of turn-on.

It didn’t take long before electrical currents crackled through my limbs, and my torso began to spasm and shake.

As my body convulsed, Nicole came over and placed her hands on my legs to prevent me from being propelled out of my chair. Another person placed hands on my feet. I’d lost the ability to speak. Nicole vocalized reassuring tones similar to those used by midwives, and I joined her. Soon my sounds became cries. And just like a woman in labor, the moaning offered me a release. I cried and shook and had what they referred to as a crying, whole-body orgasm. I know now that this was a kundalini awakening — an introduction to my lifeforce. I’ve revisited it in a range of trainings and life experiences, both pleasurable and painful, and learned to harness it, but back then, it was a shock to my system.

While this response was mind-blowing at the time, I’ve realized that as an empath who receives kinesthetic information, this is how my body sometimes reacts to people’s emotions and sensations. This can be a powerful way to connect with other people’s pleasure, but it can also be painful when it comes to feeling others’ trauma or grief.

After the demo, Robert and Nicole sandwiched me between their bodies. I told them, “I feel like I am a baby, and you are my mother and father, yet I also felt like I gave birth.” 

“Exactly,” Nicole whispered to me. “We are all of it.”

I was sold.

That night, they set me up with a man I’d never met before for my first Om’ing “date” later that week. He was a bald, thick man with a fringe of dark eyelashes that made him look like he was wearing eyeliner. He was shy, and when he smiled, his gapped teeth made him resemble a sexy Jack-o’-lantern.

Our meeting was something between a romantic date and a pelvic exam. Similar to a Kaiser visit, I knew the stroking practice had a clear time boundary, and climax was not the goal. A timer was set for 15 minutes, and we got down to work. 

Yes, my pants were off, and a man I was attracted to was touching my genitals, but it felt clinical. I’ve been more turned on during a pap smear. As I lay there not feeling much of anything, I found myself wanting him to touch my clit with more pressure. But as he moved up and down longer, the tissue under the tip of his index finger became sensitized and I began to feel more aroused. I appreciated that the focus was on riding waves of sensation rather than racing to a climax. I still see the value in this kind of practice and explain it to my clients as a tool that teaches full surrender, the receiving and giving of pleasure without the pressure of an orgasm. 

It’s not that OneTaste’s practices were problematic; it’s how they were wielded and the fact that Nicole felt the need to scale her small community up into a company she claimed had a revenue of $12 million in 2017. This is where Nicole’s wellness philosophy crashed hard into the Bay Area’s growth mindset: As the Netflix documentary Orgasm, Inc. (2022) showed, in the mid-2010s, Nicole went full-on Silicon Valley founder, with the TEDx talk, the CrunchBase page, and the Market Street HQ right near Twitter’s that come with it.

Over the time I was there, I was growing disillusioned with OneTaste. Once, despite feeling a cold coming on, I dragged my aching body to a OneTaste workshop but wanted to leave early. Staff members tried to coerce me to stay, saying I wasn’t “really sick,” I was being resistant. I was also being told to “listen to my pussy,” a favorite refrain of Nicole’s. The dissonance hit me hard. What about the rest of me? I wondered. What about my whole body and the self attached to it? 

This kind of compartmentalization was familiar to me: As I learned in my somatic and psychotherapeutic training, disconnection within one’s body, mind, and genitals is common after sexual trauma. I had worked so hard to reconnect to and embody all the parts of myself, and here I was being aggressively told to disconnect.  When these OneTasters said, “Listen to your pussy,” the unspoken message was, We know what will help you better than you do.

That night, we were instructed to stand in two lines, men across from women, with the women blindfolded. A woman in her 50s asked if she had to and was told yes. She obediently, if reluctantly, put on her blindfold, but soon began to sob audibly, eventually crouching on the floor with her arms over her head screaming.

This was not a sensual, liberatory exercise. This was crossing a line and this woman was having a trauma response. Since no one on staff did anything about it, I intervened. 

Talking with her, she explained that her father used to blindfold her and beat her. That’s what was coming up for her at that moment. Growth-pushing exercises like that can be re-traumatizing, especially when done without attention to wounds that get activated. By leaving this woman sobbing on the floor, the OneTase crew inadvertently repeated her original trauma. 

There was the possibility of a new healing outcome here if handled correctly. Offering her a comforting ally, someone to calm her nervous system, help her breathe and orient to present, and see that no one would hit her if she said, “No, I don’t want to” would’ve been the compassionate and skillful thing to do, but no one else in the room seemed capable of doing it.

I was done, and I wrote an email to my contacts at OneTaste saying I would not continue participating in the course. They proceeded to call me nonstop. Eventually, I threatened to get a restraining order, and the calls ceased. 

One Sunday, four years later, I looked up from my menu at a restaurant where I was having brunch in Berkeley, and I instantly recognized my waitress: It was the woman I’d seen guided through a 30-minute orgasm on the massage table by Robert Kandell. 

Amazingly, she remembered me from my brief time at OneTaste and greeted me warmly, yet her vacant, flat stare held so much grief and fear. When I asked her if she was okay, she almost levitated with emotion and shook her head around as if disoriented and unsure. She wouldn’t be the last person I met who carries trauma from their time at OneTaste.

Nicole’s oft-repeated advice to “Listen to your pussy” might’ve built an empire before it all came crashing down, but it didn’t seem to have done much for that fragile, wounded woman or so many others. In the years since I exited OneTaste, I continued the work I’d started healing sexual trauma and developing healthy, embodied boundaries so I could offer the same tools to others. While I’d hoped OneTaste would bridge the gap between the sex-positive and sexual trauma-healing worlds, it clearly did not. Instead of searching outside of ourselves for resources, we often need to create them for ourselves. As Nicole and Rachel face sentencing, I’m so glad I didn’t just listen to my pussy. I listened to myself.