My fellow sex journalist Tracy Clark-Flory was a guest at one of Nicole Daedone’s weekend retreats for women at Le Meridien in San Francisco last year. One of the events was a live demonstration of Daedone’s technique of what she calls Orgasmic Meditation (OM) with a female volunteer. (See references 1-3 below)
During this public OM session, the volunteer apparently experienced one or more sexual climaxes, accompanied by loud vocalization.
Writing later about the experience for Salon, Clark-Flory described the experience as having been “both arousing and deeply bizarre.”
She also noted that during the demonstration two women in the audience were silently crying.
I’m not surprised that Clark-Flory found the experience arousing, or bizarre. But I’m disappointed she didn’t inquire more why those two audience members were crying.
I would love to have asked them.
My guess? These women were crying because the scene, strange as it was, touched something profound inside them. Not unlike what might cause one to cry during especially satisfying sex.
Say what one will about Daedone, one must credit her with having followed an intuition that there is something profound about deeply felt sexual desire.
Peak desire involves a sense of specialness, of connectedness, even of sacredness, that shares something with peak religious experience. It’s not hard to imagine eros and spirituality sharing some special part of the human self.
In her book Slow Sex, Daedone writes about her clients coming in saying that they’re hungry for something, but not sure what it is.
Feed someone who’s that hungry, and you might get some tears.