OneTaste of Community: Orgasmic Meditation as Community and Corporation

OneTaste is a personal development and spiritual movement founded by Nicole Daedone in early 2000s San Francisco as vehicle to teach Orgasmic Meditation (OM) to heal past trauma, create human connections, and evolve spiritually.  The center of this movement was a successful business of offering classes, retreats, and one-on-one training that have attracted 1,400 people to its coaches training, 6,500 people to its introductory classes, and 14,000 subscribers to its online classes.  In 2014, OneTaste was listed in Inc. magazine as one of the fastest growing companies in America.  OneTaste also created multiple communal living centers where the communitarians were simultaneously disciples, mutual lovers, practitioners of OM, and employees of OneTaste.  This paper will examine these communities and their unique conflation of capitalism and community, sexuality and spirituality.  What distinguishes a community member from an employee?  What happens when there is no functional difference between guru and boss? Is there inherent tension between changing the world and becoming personally rich?  In the last few years, community members revealed that they were pressured to enroll people in seminars, even at times being forced to offer sexual favors to lure patrons, as well as relentlessly recruit new members/disciples/clients, creating an environment some might call an Orgasmic Pyramid Scheme.  In June of 2023, Nicole Daedone was indicted in New York for engaging in forced labor and subjecting people in the community to “economic, sexual, emotional and psychological abuse, surveillance, indoctrination and intimidation.”  But when spiritual healing is the goal, what are boundaries between corporation, community, and religion?