Nicole Daedone

I want to know life biblically, the way a man knows a woman, the way a lover knows a beloved. I want to know the water by getting wet. Theory, commandments, concepts leave me hollow. My driving questions when I come across dicta and dogma are, Is that true? Is it wholly true? Where and how is it true? For whom is it true and why? Can it withstand the test of time? Is it true for me as a woman? The last one has taken me off many a beaten path. Givens are often no longer givens when I ask this question. The world turns upside down. As a free woman, I want all things to be free, liberated from any ideas I would impose on them. We are constructed of the divine. I believe everything—and I mean everything—when properly tended to, reveals an untold beauty. But my work is not as activist, reformer, saint, teacher, guru, or shaman—it is as artist. Erotic artist. The art I do is akin to found-object art: art made from what has been thrown away. It’s an art that turns something back into itself. Like turning prisons into monasteries; the unconscious realm of sex into the spiritual plane of Eros; the degradation of addiction into the art of addiction that isolates the addiction drive for purposes of realization; the life sentence of trauma into human flourishing; the feminism of subjugated women into the feminine collective of inestimable power; those who have been canceled, exiled, and banished into the leaders of the next era; desertified soil into not only carbon-absorbing but nutrient-producing; hunger and food deserts into farm-to-table, free, pop-up restaurants; black culture into the black box for society that holds the secrets. These programs exist, and you can find them here: www.unconditionalfreedom.org. I founded OneTaste to reawaken our connection with intimacy, with each other, and to the primal source of energy that drives our creativity—sexuality. I created a contemplative discipline around Orgasmic Meditation (OM) that offers an immediate experience of what happens when we unleash rather than repress who we are. Since then, we have gathered some of the greatest research psychologists and neuroscientists to study the intersection of sexuality and human potential, in the largest study of its kind since Masters and Johnson. We know that OM has perhaps the most powerful effect of any natural process on healing trauma, promoting well-being, and transcendental experience. I have gathered people and created systems so that the vision can be manifested and grounded in observable benefit. My work remains as it always was: to turn poison into medicine and make it available to those who want it. But for those who need it, here is the conventional side of things: I graduated from San Francisco State University with a degree in semantics and gender communication. I cofounded the popular avant-garde art gallery, 111 Minna Gallery, in San Francisco’s SoMa district before founding OneTaste. I have appeared on ABC News Nightline, and my work has been featured in The New York Times, New York Post, San Francisco Chronicle, and 7x7 Magazine, among others. I’ve written for Tricycle: The Buddhist Review and I wrote the book Slow Sex: The Art and Craft of the Female Orgasm (Hachette, 2011). My 2011 TEDxSF talk on OM has been viewed over a million times on YouTube.com.