Common Ground: The Spirituality of Sensuality

February 2007 | Sex in SF

The Spirituality of Sensuality

SF’s One Taste fuses Buddhism and Theosophy with the orgasm to forge “Urban Monks” in SOMA

By Todd Spencer and Chandanni Miglino

Whether for Buddhist monks or Catholic priests, the monastic life of spiritual seekers over the centuries has been rooted in denial of the carnal. As Jews regard the pig as an unclean animal, the world’s major religions have viewed sex and lust as mire-splattered interlopers.

The Urban Monk Program at San Francisco’s One Taste Urban Retreat Center sees things as completely inverted from that ancient precept. Sex and sensuality, instead of being denied or purged, are isolated and then focused upon in the pursuit of a personal or a kind of spiritual transformation.

Marketing material promoting it describes it as “an integrated program that takes care of your whole being … by expanding the delicate and potent energy of orgasm.”

Pop theologians like Stephen Mitchell have widened the definition of prayer from “talking with God” to include everyday pursuits like concentrating deeply on a math problem. Similarly, Nicole Daedone, founder of One Taste, views sensuality as one of many circuits to the divine — or at least to liberation from societal “hangups.”

The Urban Monk Program offers its acolytes a range of programming from lectures on communication to 12-step inspired “sensual recovery” to hands-on “stroke clinics” and “orgasmic meditation (OM).” The tuition runs upwards of $12,000, or $2,000 per week, “with special arrangements for work trade.”

Thirty-nine-year-old Daedone opened One Taste on Folsom Street in SOMA in 2004. Daedone studied semantics at SFSU and theosophy on her own in The City before living in a series of sex-positive cooperatives in Oregon and Northern California. Together, the two experiences gave her the spark for One Taste, which takes practices from underground sex communities and brings them to the public.

We spoke with her and Beth Crittenden, 31, the director of the Urban Monk Program. Daedone and Crittendon live in the community loft space near the center, along with 40-some other members of the One Taste cooperative, many of whom staff the center and facilitate its offerings of bodywork, yoga, organic café creations, lectures, weekly intimacy communication games, and sex-themed events.

Below, Nicole and Beth talk about the Urban Monk program, and about their take on sensuality’s relationship to the divine.

Common Ground: Can you explain a little bit about how One Taste came about?

Nicole: I lived in a [sex-positive] community in Hawaii, I lived with a community in the Klamath River, near Oregon, and … there came a point where my original teacher said, “How do you want to pass on what you’ve learned? In what arena?” and I was debating between some kind of Buddhism-semantics kind of realm, or sensuality. Both were interesting to me. I was celibate when she asked, and I thought sensuality looked like the most interesting realm because it looked like the most terrifying and the most daunting. They say that people who need therapy become therapists, so maybe I was interested in sensuality because it was this dark, haunting area.

CG: Tell us about these “communities” you lived in.

Nicole: Everyone was very underground, everyone was teaching sort of privately but … none of us seemed connected. Here we are, all these sensuality people and yet nobody really felt connected. [Eventually] I went back home and we had this little [sex-positive] community of 17 people in San Francisco. And for the first year and a half after we opened One Taste we were losing $10,000 a month, and we didn’t have any idea what we were doing. Now we’re 40 people, we have five buildings, four buildings on this block and we just got one right around the corner. And then we’re kind of looking to open a house in the East Bay and I’m looking to open another place in New York. So it’s…

CG: growing like crazy, sounds like.

Nicole: Yeah. We lost as much as you could feasibly lose every month and then, right at the two-year mark, everyone here started getting really turned on and individually stepping up as leaders in their own field.

CG: What do you attribute the traction to?

Nicole: We have tried some of the craziest things to get it off the ground. And then we really did stop trying. I actually closed the center, basically, and just started doing a teacher training program [20-some people are now qualified to teach Urban Monk programming], and then all of a sudden it started filling up. I mean, we refused to go off path, which is sensuality.

CG: It sounds like this is where you enter in a little bit, Beth, with the Urban Monk Program.

Beth: The current Urban Monk that we’re in is a three-month immersion program, residential. Starting in February we’re going to a six-week length. So, it changes by desire just like everything else around here.

CG: Who enrolls?

Beth: We have people come from all over the place now. We had someone in our first program come from England who found us on Tribe.net. We have a couple from Dallas who’re finishing grad school and they want to do something meaningful and pleasurable and found us online.

CG: How did you come up with the curriculum?

Nicole: Some really salient ideas were put in by those teachers [in Hawaii and Klamath], but then we operate on appetite. And so it grew organically out of what was happening here.

CG: Do people take the training and go? Or do they stay?

Beth: There’s a mixture. Some people use it as a way to make all the adjustments in their life and want to continue on [as members of One Taste]. And then others just want to have it be like a retreat, literally.

CG: People live on campus here while they’re doing it?

Beth: Yeah. Sometimes they come in with a partner, sometimes they come in by themselves. Some continue working [their day jobs] and then in the evening they’ll do the practice and hear the different lecturers — we call it a hybrid practice. And then we’ve had other people who’ve completely unplugged from the way they were living before to make a significant change.

CG: Is there a common goal that they’re all trying to reach at the end?

Beth: That’s a really good question. Our practice here is goal-less and when living orgasmically, you go with what’s right in front of you. So if there is any goal, it would be to be in each moment and to feel what’s happening in the moment. And that requires getting past some conditioning and some resistance [to create a] connection with others. So there isn’t a finished product. There isn’t a diploma that says, “You passed the sensuality certification.” They know it in themselves and then they are able to feel more, which is the reward itself.

CG: It sound like what the program aims to offer is a little bit like what you would receive going to a temple, only it’s starting in a different place and going through a different channel. Is that accurate?

Beth: It is accurate, and we go both higher and lower. So the practice doesn’t say, “We’re going to ascend,” it says, “We’re going to feel everything in the whole spectrum.” So there isn’t a “better than.” There isn’t any other place to get to that is heightened consciousness in and of itself. And another part is that we want to feel the sensation underneath the story, instead of having sensuality need to go through a romantic filter or something that would make a great movie.

CG: Where does your program differ from, say, seeking out a sex therapist?

Nicole: It’s integral — it isn’t solely focused on sexuality, it simply includes sexuality.

CG: So it’s more holistic.

Nicole: Yeah, it’s holistic. And I think a sex therapist — and this is just my assumption — would begin with an idea that there was something wrong, and I don’t necessarily think that anything’s wrong with anybody [who enrolls in the program]. What I hear most people who come here say is that they’re interested in either connecting or reconnecting with different parts of themselves at a much deeper level. We show people how to move through the powerful value judgments that they normally collapse into, and to walk into that fire.

CG: And with a sex therapist, you’re sitting there for 90 minutes or an hour and then you’re going home.

Nicole: This is complete immersion. There are people who come and take a one-day course, but being in a community you are polished by having other human beings witness you in different experiences.

CG: That’s something I’ve noticed a lot about San Francisco: We do a lot of sex and sensuality in public. And your classes could also be in private, but they’re not.

Nicole: When we take what’s on the inside and put it on the outside all of these elements like shame begin to fall away. Because we find out, we get to experience, “Oh wait, you have that thought too? Ah right…” and those I think are just things that keep us shrouded in unconsciousness. If I’m living an extreme private experience, there’s a lot more opportunity for me to take those things that I feel are bad or wrong or shameful about myself, and to go into a private room — I call it the fungus garden — to go into the fungus garden and just begin to nurse those things and never actually bring them to light. Being witnessed is the help that we need. In Buddhism, you have the observer, the witness inside of you and when you allow the witness to reign, clarity comes. And that can occur in an interactive way as well: Simply being witnessed can completely transform a life.

CG: Where does sensuality meet spirituality?

Nicole: Ken Wilber said, “They’re all different waves but they’re all made of water.” Sensuality lets you dive back into all of these different experiences: the heart experiences; the spiritual experiences; the pain; the dirty, ugly experiences. Sensuality will go into any one of those realms. I don’t think it’s particularly spiritual, but I don’t think spirituality is particularly spiritual. I think it all is. So, does that answer the spirituality question? It goes everywhere.

CG: Speaking of the idea of “monks,” what do you feel about celibacy today? Do you feel that celibacy is something that will naturally manifest throughout a life that evolves spiritually? Or do you think celibacy is not necessarily a spiritual evolution? Like it’s just gonna naturally fall away.

Nicole: No, I don’t think it’ll fall away. I don’t think celibacy is the answer, but I think it’s an answer. It’s a specific sensory field to play with. I’m interested in knowing all sensation fields. Celibacy is a fascinating and rich sensory field to explore, but I don’t necessarily believe that we’re all marching forward to some specific end.

CG: People don’t need to be having sex or not having sex in order to find some “answer.”

Nicole: Andrew Korn wrote, “Sex is value neutral. It just is.” It’s just an incredibly powerful force. A friend of mine said, “Nicole, you’re always trying to live on the top deck of the Titanic, but it’s really the people on the lower deck who are having all the fun.” And that’s kind of what sensuality has been to date. It’s been sort of hedonistic. And it’s kind of like the kids in the smoking section have a certain level of freedom, and that’s what sensuality has been. My desire is that it actually be recognized on every level.

CG: One last question. Why is it attractive, this public manifestation of these different forms of sexuality and expression in San Francisco? Even the group “swinger” events, which are just another one of these smoking rooms you were talking about, is just another place for people to express themselves.

Nicole: We’re actors and we want to act in all different kinds of movies. I think when you enter those realms you become equipped with the script, the implied rules of the location, and the sensations that go with being in that field. And so you get to have this whole experience, and for me, I want to have every experience that I can possibly have. The trick is learning how to get in and how to get out. Those are things I’d like to explore. I don’t want to live there — I want to live a constantly moving life.

The newest Urban Monk Sensual Immersion Program starts Feb. 5. Visit onetastesf.com for info.

Recommend this page to a friend

Top Ten pages recommended to friends: