If you are new to this site, I am a huge fan of Orgasmic Meditation (OM).
A few months ago, I passed through Boulder, CO and had the fortune of being invited to observe an OMing demo (yes, I observed a live demonstration of the OMing technique … it was amazing.) The demo was hosted by the beautiful and wise Kelly Notaras. I am ever grateful that my first introduction to the world of OM was with someone so masterful as Kelly.
In 2010, Kelly left her Associate Publisher position with spirituality publisher Sounds True and moved to San Francisco to study slow sex, man-woman dynamics, and communication under Nicole Daedone—the founder of OneTaste and the creator of OM. During her time at OneTaste, Kelly edited Nicole’s book Slow Sex: The Art and Craft of the Female Orgasm, co-led several couples retreats with Nicole, and served as faculty for the 2011 OneTaste Certified Coach Training Program, all while living at 1080 Folsom, a vibrant community of over 50 OM practitioners. Now back in Colorado, she is sharing what she’s learned about this transformative practice through workshops and consulting with men, women and couples.
I am in LOVE with this interview. It is rich with practical gems that illustrate the radical truth of OM. Read carefully, sisters. Kelly has something very important to share.
It is my great pleasure to bring you this Returning Interview with Kelly Notaras:
Please tell us how you found OMing and your involvement with the book?
It started when I accidentally walked into the OneTaste building in San Francisco. I was in California on my way to a meditation retreat and was staying with a friend nearby. I had no idea what OneTaste was, and certainly didn’t know that it had anything to do with sexuality or orgasm. I just liked the building. I remember thinking, “These are my people,” but I had no idea why! A few weeks later I read an article in the New York Times called “The Pleasure Principle.” It featured a center in the SOMA district of San Francisco called OneTaste that was “devoted to the art of the female orgasm.” I about plotzed. I sent the link to all my friends and was like, “Can you believe I walked into this place??” But still, I didn’t have a clue it had anything to do with me. (At the time I didn’t think I was a very sexual person. I was a Buddhist, thank you very much.)
A few weeks later I got a call from a friend of mine who works for a New York literary agency. She said they had a new author who needed some help on her book proposal, and she thought I should do it. I was the VP of Sounds True at the time and the last thing I needed was more work, but when she said it was about Orgasmic Meditation I was like, “You have GOT to be kidding me. I’ll do it.”
So I helped OneTaste’s founder Nicole Daedone with her book proposal and eventually the book itself. (It’s called Slow Sex: The Art and Craft of the Female Orgasm and it just published in May.) Once I met Nicole in person I realized this wasn’t just a writing gig. I saw something in her that I wanted, and I knew she was going to be very important in my life. A few months after that I went to San Francisco to try OMing, and I got hooked. I decided to move there for a month—and stayed for a year and a half.
How has your life benefited from your OMing practice?
This is such a difficult question to answer without hyperbole. I’ll just say that I woke up one morning about 6 months after I started OMing and realized that I would not change a single thing about my life. This was huge for me, because I had been chronically dissatisfied for the first 33 years on the planet. Something about making a commitment to OM shifted things that my meditation practice never touched. I started to know what my body wanted, and then started following that desire. Where it led was—and continues to be—a rich, connected, effortlessly joyful place.
But in terms of more concrete benefits, I can say I have more energy and vitality, don’t need as much sleep, can feel other people more deeply, have increased intuition, have way less scarcity around relationships, can communicate better, and feel much safer being honest in all areas of my life.
And of course, sex is more sensational. I’m physically much more sensitive now. I’ve also come to appreciate the difference between climax—a momentary release of sexual energy—and orgasm. Orgasm, as I am using it here, is the experience of sensation in the body. It has peaks and valleys and subtle nuances I’d never noticed before. It’s here all the time, to greater or lesser degrees, and it gets drawn out through connection with other people.
How has your experience with OMing influenced how you view spirituality?
Wow, how much time do you have? I would say that when I first encountered Nicole, she pointed out that my spiritual path was all about transcending suffering. I talked about “oneness” but what I really meant was “escape from the stuff that hurts.” I meditated to escape the painful parts of human experience, to work my way into a state of expansive, blissful peace where I became translucent and untouchable. At first I was like, totally! That’s exactly what I want! But then Nicole pointed out that my version of so-called “oneness” honored only half the picture. Life contains both the bitter and the sweet. In her terminology, life is a cycle that includes both “up” and “down,” but I had a raging predisposition for “up.”
That’s one of the deeper spiritual teachings embedded in OM. When you OM, you’re learning how to feel, approve of, and receive whatever “stroke” comes your way. The ones you “like” and the ones you don’t. If you can learn to take pleasure from every stroke life has to offer, you can wake up right in the middle of the relative world. You don’t have to fear anything anymore, because you can trust yourself to be in relationship with whatever circumstances come up. Life becomes a complex, satisfying game where your ability to play is unconditional.
I realized I’d been doing a massive spiritual bypass by pushing away certain experiences I deemed inappropriate, unsavory, painful, or otherwise mundane. I began to reincorporate what you might call the “darker” side of human experience into my everyday life, and watched my overall satisfaction increase almost immediately. OM came in handy in that way. In Western culture, our sexuality is our dark side. Or I should say, our dark side is brimming with sex. Even if we fully own that we enjoy sex (which I never did, by the way) we still keep it hidden away. We do it in the dark and don’t talk about it in polite company. I took a different path with OM. I began openly practicing it at first, then I stepped out and started talking about it publicly. That was a big move—the first time I posted about OM on Facebook! It was a banner day. I still remember where I was sitting. But that, for me, was a spiritual act—because owning your sex is an act of unconditional freedom.
What is the dumbest thing you used to believe?
This one is complex but I’ll try to explain. It was my belief that men didn’t really like me and I had to work to get their attention. Not long after I started OMing I had an experience in a workshop where we had to choose a partner for an exercise. I looked up and realized every man in the room was trying to get my attention—they all wanted me to pick them! In that moment, it’s like a whole belief system fell crashing to the ground. I realized I’d been unaware of the extent of men’s interest in me—probably my whole life. I can only assume it was some sort of coping mechanism I developed in childhood to help manage sexual shame. But whatever the reason, I’d been unwilling to see the amount of interest that was coming my way because it was overwhelming on some level.
In order to maintain my belief that men didn’t like me, I had to create a corollary belief that if a man was interested in me, he was suspect and/or creepy. As a result I mostly dated people who felt safe—either whose power didn’t match my own (so they could never really hurt me) or who literally weren’t interested in me at all. But of course I didn’t see any of this at the time.
If you had the ear of all the women in the world for one minute, what would you want them to know?
That they can live their lives from a state of fullness rather than depletion, and the place to start is by cultivating orgasm in their bodies. I’m not talking about climax, I’m talking about investigating the terrain of their own sexual sensation, whatever that looks like. Sensation is the thing we crave. It’s what we’re looking for when we buy that new pair of shoes or that ice cream sundae or that glass of Prosecco. The place it can be found most readily is in right here in our very own bodies.
Also, I would tell them that men (and other women) exist who are willing to come together and have a goalless orgasmic experience. One that is not about “getting off” and comes with no strings—emotional or sexual—attached. I want every woman to know that and to have access to it, because our lives change when we learn how to receive quality attention from others. To be willing to let someone set aside the time and energy to make us feel good—that one act can change everything.
Can you pull a Tarot card for this interview? What does that card mean to you?
Love it! I pulled the Queen of Pentacles. This is actually my personal “signifier” card, meaning the card that represents me in the deck. This is both because of my astrological sign (Capricorn, an earth sign) and also my physical appearance (dark hair and eyes). The Queen of Pentacles is the essence of earth energy—the queen of the physical and material world. She represents the experience of being a spiritual being in human form. She knows the joy of embodiment. She revels in both the dark and the light aspects of our human experience, because she’s surrounded by nature and the natural world holds both without shame or preference. Of all the Queens in the deck, she’d definitely be the one most likely to OM! In the context of this interview, it says to me that I’m right where I’m supposed to be. 
For those of you in Boulder and/or with Boulder peeps, Kelly’s next Intro to OM Workshop is Saturday, November 12th from 9:30-5:30. Click here for details.
Website: www.KellyNotaras.com
Twitter: @kellynotaras