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, and 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 one another, and with 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, leading research psychologists and neuroscientists have studied the practice, exploring the intersection of sexuality and human potential, including the largest partnered study involving genital touch since Masters and Johnson. Through years of practice and research, I have found OM to have powerful effects on healing trauma, promoting well-being, and facilitating transcendent experience—findings that are increasingly being supported by scientific research. 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, the New York Post, the San Francisco Chronicle, and 7x7 magazine, among others. I’ve written for Tricycle: The Buddhist Review and the Tattooed Buddha. I’m the author of over twenty books, including Slow Sex: The Art and Craft of the Female Orgasm (Hachette, 2011) and Jailbirds in Flight (Soulmaker Press, 2025), a memoir of my first six months in a federal detention center in Brooklyn. My 2011 TEDxSF talk on OM has been viewed over a million times on YouTube.