She was 42, a physician, and sitting on the floor of her bedroom surrounded by pillows with a timer set for 15 minutes. By then, she had already seen what it did to her heart, brain, and nervous system.
The New York Times put her onto it. [1] The author of the article entitled The Pleasure Principle, Patricia Leigh Brown, an acquaintance, had described something radical that the medical literature had never broached before: female arousal that is not going anywhere.
That means no orgasm during or at the end of it, no partner to satisfy, and no performance to turn in. Directed attention on one square centimeter of a woman’s body, the one o’clock position on the clitoris, and then a timer, and then nothing.
The woman had spent two decades with women decoding what their bodies were doing. She had never been taught what her own body did when nobody wanted anything from it.
That woman was me.
I have been a board-certified gynecologist for 26 years. I trained at Harvard, MIT, and UCSF. I’ve written six books about women’s hormones and never once shared this story.
Fifteen years after that time, I would be a co-author on two peer-reviewed neuroimaging studies of the practice I was doing on my bedroom floor. The studies were run out of Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia, in the Department of Integrative Medicine and Nutritional Sciences, where I am Director of Precision Medicine and Longevity.
Four months after I sat down to write this post, the woman who build the company promoting orgasmic meditation was sentenced to nine years in federal prison for forced labor conspiracy.
Nicole Daedone, 58, founded a company in San Francisco called OneTaste, which sold sexual wellness education. OneTaste promoted a practice called orgasmic meditation, which is partnered practice of directed clitoral stimulation held as an attentional discipline for 15 minutes, with no goal of orgasm.
In 2011, Daedone gave a TEDx talk called Orgasm: The Cure for Hunger in the Western Woman. It had more than two million views, and I can no longer find it on YouTube. In it, she describes discovering the practice at a party, when a man she had just met asked to introduce her to what he called a sexuality practice. That one encounter became OneTaste.
Daedone’s stated goal was to make orgasmic meditation (OM) as available to women as a cup of coffee. Daedone popularity rose. She stated the mission of OneTaste was female empowerment. OM was featured and praised in Tim Ferriss’ book, The 4-Hour Body (2010). He devoted a two-part chapter to the practice. He stated that OM “should be required education for every man on the planet.”
A Brooklyn jury convicted Daedone and another OneTaste executive, Rachel Cherwitz, 45, head of sales, of forced labor conspiracy in June 2025, after a 5-week trial. Forced labor conspiracy is a federal charge that means agreeing with someone else to obtain a person’s labor through improper coercion, even without physical force.
Daedone was sentenced in March 2026 to nine years, and Cherwitz was sentenced separately to six and a half years. Daedone’s appeal is now before the Second Circuit. Restitution came to $887,000, awarded to seven victims. Forfeiture came to $12 million, which is what Daedone got for selling her stake in OneTaste in 2017.
According to Department of Justice records that I reviewed, OneTaste put women into debt, surveillance, sleep deprivation, and sexual labor for the financial benefit of Daedone and Cherwitz.
I’m putting the facts first about the conviction because the science of orgasmic meditation doesn’t matter if you do not know about the harm. The founder and one of her executives that ran the company and marketed the practice were convicted of a crime. They took vulnerable women who came for healing and exploited them. I cannot share the neuroscience without stating this clearly.
Here is the reason I am writing about orgasmic meditation. A company and a practice are not the same. We need to separate the harm from the science. What OneTaste did to women tells you nothing about what 15 minutes of partnered clitoral stimulation does to a vagus nerve. The first part is being addressed in the federal courtroom, and the second part is being answered in a PET scanner in Philadelphia at Thomas Jefferson University, where I work.
What I was taught in my medical training:** **the clitoris is not a serious topic of study, a woman’s arousal or desire complaints get a nod and not much more, and female pleasure sits outside of the scope of medicine.
- What I now understand: *directed attentional arousal produces a measurable, reproducible signature in the female brain, it has been published across seven articles, and the reason no physician has mentioned it to you is a story about stigma and a criminal case rather than a story about evidence.
Nicole Daedone founded it. Rachel Cherwitz sold it. Both went to prison. The researchers who studied the practice did not. We need to separate the criminal activity from the potential value of it for women by looking at the science. That’s the aim of this post.
When you strip away the branding, the practice of orgasmic meditation is simply the following: sustained, directed attention to clitoral sensation for a set period, with no goal of orgasm or any particular outcome. Attention goes purely to sensation instead of performance or completion. Arousal builds and is never required to be pushed to climax. Arousal can go wherever the woman wants.
Every one of the seven studies that I’m about to describe was published in a peer-reviewed journal. Every study used the 15-minute session, because that is the interval that the company standardized and the research followed the practitioner. I will refer to orgasmic meditation in the research as “the practice.”
Note that the structure differs from the directed masturbation protocol that I’ve covered elsewhere in one main way. Directed masturbation has been a first line clinical intervention protocol used by sex therapists (and sadly, few other clinicians) for over 50 years, and it is organized around the arousal-to-completion arc. [2] You are learning to reach orgasm through deliberate, informed self-stimulation. It works, it’s evidence-based, and it’s also a protocol with a finish line.
Non-goal-directed arousal has no finish line. The arousal itself is the practice.
For a female nervous system, the difference of outcome versus no outcome can be a big deal. A body oriented toward completion is running low-grade demand, and the sympathetic nervous system gets recruited in the service of the ultimate goal.
If your autonomic history trained you to associate arousal with someone else’s expectation (which is the operating system of most fawn profiles and many freeze profiles), that demand is the thing standing between you and your own authentic sensation. Remove the outcome and you remove the demand.
A nervous system that does not have to produce anything can sometimes stay in arousal longer, more fully, and with more of your present inside of it.
Of course, none of this was invented in San Francisco in 2004. Sustained, non-goal arousal appears in Taoist sexual cultivation 2,000 years ago. Tantric practice dates back 1,200 to 1,500 years. (Let me know if you want to learn more about these practices in the comments; I’ve been a student for decades.) Reichian somatic work was developed 90 to 100 years ago. There’s a set of five exercises derived from Hindu and Buddhist ceremonial sex rituals that were published in the* Journal of Sex and Marital Therapy* in 1991. [3] It shows up again in mindfulness-based sex therapy that’s been growing since the 1990s. [4] OneTaste codified one version of these ancient practices, trademarked it, sold it, and then built a criminal operation on top of it.
However, the practice underneath it is ancient.
Turning to the data that has been published, I want to begin with the academic institutions, which include the University of Virginia, the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, the Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles, a private research laboratory in Los Angeles, and Thomas Jefferson University, where I currently teach, see patients, and work.
Every study is exploratory. None are randomized.
Here is the complete scientific literature, who produced it, and what each study found.
Newberg, Wintering, Hriso, Veda, Stoner, and Ross. Departments of Integrative Medicine and Nutritional Sciences, Radiology, and Obstetrics and Gynecology, Thomas Jefferson University, Philadelphia. Frontiers in Psychology, 2021. [5]
20 female and 20 male subjects (40 subjects, in 20 pairs), scanned with resting BOLD fMRI after a 15-minute session and after a neutral condition in which the man stroked the woman’s upper leg for the same interval. [BOLD stands for Blood Oxygen Level Dependent; it’s the specific signal that the functional MRI measures as a proxy for brain activity.]
Across the entire group, altered connectivity involving the left superior temporal lobe, frontal lobe, anterior cingulate, and insula. The last two regions are core nodes of interoceptive processing and the salience network. That is, the location of the am-I-paying-attention-to-myself-right-now system lives. If the practice is working the way we hypothesize, through attention chemistry and not arousal chemistry, that’s exactly where you would expect to see a change.
In women specifically, altered connectivity was seen in the cerebellum, thalamus, inferior frontal lobe, posterior parietal lobe, angular gyrus, amygdala, middle temporal gyrus, and prefrontal cortex.
The authors described the pattern as a hybrid, sharing features with meditation practices and features with sexual stimulation, resembling neither alone.
Note: Andrew Newberg, MD, is Research Director at Marcus Institute of Integrative Health at Thomas Jefferson University. He is board-certified in internal medicine and nuclear medicine and pioneer in neurotheology, the application of brain imaging to study what happens in the brain during prayer, meditation, and other altered states. While I am not an author on this paper, I joined the research team afterward.
Newberg, Wintering, Hrisa, Veda, Mohamed, Gottfried (Szal), and Ross. Thomas Jefferson University. F1000Research, first published September 2022, revised version December 2023. [6]
20 female and 20 male subjects (40 subjects, in 20 pairs), same as the first study.
Radiolabelled glucose was injected midway through the 15-minute session so the scan would capture metabolism during the practice rather than after it. That design choice is the reason this papers matters more than the fMRI: it is the only look at the brain in the act.
In women, significant decreases in glucose metabolism in the left inferior frontal, inferior parietal, insula, middle temporal, and orbitofrontal regions, and in the right angular gyrus, anterior cingulate, and parahippocampus, against a neutral state (p < 0.01).
In men, decreases in left middle frontal, paracentral, precentral, and postcentral regions and right middle frontal and paracentral regions, with increases in the cerebellum and right postcentral and superior temporal regions.
Frontal deactivation of this kind is seen in deep meditative states. Orbitofrontal deactivation is associated with behavioral disinhibition and is seen at orgasm. The female pattern contains both.
Note: I got divorced in 2023 and legally changed my name from Gottfried back to Szal, my maiden name.
Newberg, Wintering, Hriso, Veda, Gottfried (Szal), and Ross. Thomas Jefferson University. Frontiers in Neuroimaging, June 2024. [7]
N=40 subjects (20 women, 20 men) with more than a year of practice at two to three sessions per week.
FDG was injected during the OM practice and compared to a neutral condition within the same subjects.
Women showed significantly decreased metabolism during OM in frontal, parietal, insular, temporal, anterior cingulate, and parahippocampal regions.
Men showed decreased metabolism in frontal and paracentral regions, with increased metabolism in the cerebellum and superior temporal regions.
The regions involved govern cognition, attention, and emotional regulation, supporting the authors' argument for potential psychotherapeutic applications rather than purely recreational ones.
Siegle and Prause. Department of Psychiatry, University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, and Liberos, Los Angeles. International Journal of Psychophysiology, 2022. [8]
N=93 subjects, with subjective affect and skin conductance measured across a single session.
Almost all participants reported sustained positive affect.
Roughly half showed sustained increased skin conductance (meaning sympathetic activation). The other half showed sustained decrease. The split appeared within seconds of onset and held throughout.
Siegle and Prause’s study may be the most clinically useful finding in the entire literature. Intense positive affect is reachable through two opposite autonomic routes, which provides empirical support for the orthogonal model of valence and arousal, demonstrating that intense positive affect can occur without high sympathetic activation, a state that has been theoretically predicted but rarely documented.
This study is real-world proof of something that scientists have long suspected but rarely documented: you can feel intense pleasure without your body revving up into an stress-like state. Normally, intense positive feels come paired with a racing heart, from a spike in adrenaline and cortisol, that keyed-up feeling. This paper shows the two things can be pulled apart. That’s big.
For women who have spent thirty years believing that if the heart is not pounding then nothing is happening, this is the paper to read.
Note: Nicole Prause, Ph.D., is a neuroscientist who left UCLA and founded Liberos, an independent, grant-funded research lab, focused on identifying the general health benefits of sexual stimulation. As you may imagine, her public record is contentious.
Prause, Siegle, and Coan. Liberos, Los Angeles; University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine; Department of Psychology, University of Virginia. *PLoS ONE, *2021. [9]
N=125 dyads, roughly half romantic partners and half not, measured on self-other overlap before and after a session.
Closeness increased significantly on average, for the person stroking and the person being stroked.
Non-romantic partners showed the larger increases compared to romantic pairs, which means the effect seems to be produced by the structure of sustained attentional contact rather than by the relationship.
*Note: *This study was funded by the Institute of OM Foundation, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit connected to the practice.
Prause, Cohen, and Siegle. Children’s Hospital Los Angeles and Liberos, Los Angeles; University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. *Sexual and Relationship Therapy, *2023. [10]
Examined whether adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) predict partnered sexual arousal, and found the answer depends on context. [Read more and
determine your ACE score here.]A structured sexual context was associated with increased arousal in people with a trauma history, relative to people without one. The authors concluded that providing safety signals in intimate contexts may facilitate sexuality in trauma survivors.
I want to be careful with this study because it’s the finding most likely to be misinterpreted. The author do not state that the practice treats trauma, they state that the structure and predictability appear to help a nervous system that is dysregulated. Section V of this post is where that gets its boundaries.
Siegel and Emmert-Aronson. F1000Research, 2021. [11]
Both partners, not only the woman, report mystica…
