with depth and with desire.

For me OM has been more about surrender,

helping me open my orgasm.

Confidence and clarity.

It's a connection to that, like,

sexual and powerful woman inside.

This story's about a company called OneTaste

that is a sexual wellness company

that teaches a practice called orgasmic meditation.

When it feels that good, you don't want to move an inch.

Everyone should be experiencing this

and talking about this part of our lives.

This is the food I was searching for, you know?

And that I didn't have name for,

and they were calling it orgasm.

How did they say it?

It's like orgasm is God.

Desire is the force on this planet

meant to grow us into the person

that we know we can be.

It's just so incredible, and I really genuinely

want everybody to have access.

It just felt so understandable to me

how they could take those first steps

toward something that ended up in a place

that was really predatory and maybe even a cult.

My name is Ellen Huet, I'm a reporter for Bloomberg

and I wrote the story

The Dark Side of the Orgasmic Meditation Company.

OneTaste has several different philosophies

that kind of guide what it does.

They first and foremost believe

that doing the orgasmic meditation practice,

which is a 15-minute partnered clitoris-stroking practice,

helps open up your connection to your body,

your desire, to other people.

Basically it just does many, many good things for you.

And they see it as a practice that should be taught

alongside meditation and yoga.

OM is a partnered practice where

the upper left-hand quadrant of a woman's clitoris

is stroked lightly and deliberately for 15 minutes.

Some of the benefits of OM include

feeling confident and self-expressed,

increased vitality, learning to use desire as your guide,

better sex and deeper relationships.

You know, some people just take a few classes

and some people it becomes their life.

And I think for those in the group

where it really takes over their life, some people love it

and some people feel like it's the worst thing they've done.

I spent a long time talking with,

she's named as Michal in the story,

that's just her first name.

She struck me as someone who was just really relatable,

she was in her late 20s when she joined,

she had been a teacher in New York.

And she had recently gotten out of a relationship.

She was feeling a little low, and thinking to herself

maybe I need to meet some new people

to make a change in my life.

And she encountered OneTaste the way that many people do,

which is through one of their free events.

Hi!

Ia, of course, let me back up,

is in our Desire Room.

You would show up, and it's a bunch of people,

and maybe you do something like play communication games.

I'm about to write down some desires

and put them on the wall.

Yeah, we're just going to paper the walls

And she leaves with this impression

that these people, like they've figured something out,

and they continued to get in touch with her and they said

hey if you want to learn more about orgasmic meditation

maybe you should take our Intro to OM class.

And this is a class where they talk

about the philosophy of OneTaste,

they teach you about orgasmic meditation.

They have a demo in which the two teachers

demonstrate one OM session in front of the class.

So how we'll do it is,

I'll describe what's going to happen,

and then I'll bring in two people

to do the demonstration for you.

And then at the end of the day's class

they would let students pair up if they wanted

and try orgasmic meditation for the first time.

So that's what she did.

And after that, they just kinda

kept getting in touch with her.

And it happens gradually and then all at once.

Like she got closer with these people, she left her job

to come start working for OneTaste.

And she moved out of her home to move into

an OM house, as they called it, in New York.

I don't think there are very many places in the world

where we can feel a full range of emotions,

even to their highest intensity,

and not have to shut them down in one way or another.

I've had people describe orgasm to me as a force

almost like the Force from Star Wars,

so people would talk about how like,

listen to your orgasm, what is it telling you?

And is it telling you to do this or that?

And they would rely on people

who were very advanced in OneTaste

to help them understand how they should be

sort of following their orgasm.

Hi everyone!

So, my name is Maya, I have been OMing for eight years now.

I was in the class, and I remember this experience

of feeling like I was having questions answered

that I didn't even know I had the question of.

The people I talked to who got involved

seemed really similar to myself.

They just seemed really normal, right?

These are people and I felt that there was something

pretty universally human about what they wanted.

They were looking for community, meaning.

They wanted to belong to a group of people

who felt like they were working all together

towards something really special and important.

For a while it was very popular within the group

to believe that if you were having sex with a lot of people

that you would free yourself from

the things that constrained you

in terms of how you related to other people.

And they often talked about how preferences

were something that would hold you back.

And this meant that you gained more spiritual enlightenment

if you had sex with or did sexual acts

that you didn't want to.

It taught members to ignore their personal boundaries

about what they did and didn't want to do.

Ultimately, OM is a practice.

So you don't need to be turned on or in the mood to do it.

In fact, OM cultivates libido.

And so Michal's taking more classes,

and these classes are very expensive,

they can cost anywhere from several hundred dollars

to some of them are thousands of dollars for a retreat.

And you can pay $60,000 for a year-long membership

which lets you take any of the classes you want.

So quickly she started spending more and more money.

It kind of leads into this larger teaching that OneTaste had

which was that money is just sort of an emotional obstacle

to getting what you want.

Going into debt to pay for courses was really common.

This was actually something that salespeople at OneTaste

would encourage students and customers to do.

They would say, "Oh, if you really want this course,

you'll find a way to pay for it.

Look, you could even open a new credit card."

There was a woman who I was dating, and she said,

"Hey I want to take this class with you,

and I want you to pay for it."

And I was like, what?

And we hung up the phone, and I just sat in this chair.

And I could feel the desire start

to almost like necrotize inside of myself,

I could feel it starting to die.

And I picked the phone back up and I said

no, no, no, wait, I want to do it.

The company pressured customers to buy classes

and to even take on debt to buy classes.

The company used sex to get sales,

and they did this in several different ways.

We have people who talk about they were, as salespeople,

instructed to OM with or have sex with somebody

who was then called up to, you know, buy a course.

Partway through the year, Michal met somebody in OneTaste.

They got married; they got married at a OneTaste retreat.

And all of a sudden she and her husband,

they just had sort of gotten swept up

in this whirlwind of the OneTaste life.

She was around $20,000 in debt.

She and her husband together had spent

about $150,000, that's their estimate.

Eventually, soon after they got married,

Michal kind of reached a breaking point

for a variety of reasons.

She was feeling really stressed.

Someone that she worked with, who was

like her closest friend in OneTaste, left,

and over time she and her husband

decided like, we need to leave.

Leaving OneTaste is this very lonely thing,

because once you leave the group,

people inside the group are told to never talk to you.

People sometimes refer to people

who had left the group as dead.

And so it can feel very lonely,

because you have left this group that was your friends,

often the people you lived with, the people you worked with.

And you often break from them very suddenly,

and then you don't really have anywhere to go.

And the people out here think that

the group that you just came from is super strange

and they don't understand.

There are a series of allegations in the story

and OneTaste had different responses to each of them.

So they say that they never required anybody

to have sex with each other in the work context.

Generally the company says they never used sex for sales

and that this is not something that they taught

Many people who had past experiences with OneTaste

said that they felt pressured to take on debt to buy courses

and the company said we took money

from people that we shouldn't have,

and that we've changed our policies since.

I saw parallels between the way that OneTaste ran

and the way that some startups run,

which is like, you really want

to be part of a tightly knit group

that is charging toward a very unique solution

that has a lot of meaning.

That's what drove people to become

super involved in OneTaste.

That's part of what drives people

to work crazy hours for very little money

for the chance at equity at some company

that you think is going to change the world.

And for many of the people I talked to

after the story ran they were grateful

that this was something that was finally being told.

And their reactions to seeing their personal and confusing

and weird and isolating story told in a major magazine

was really heartening to me,

and was really meaningful to them.