Science Studied Orgasmic Meditation. I Was One of the Researchers.

Sara Szal MD

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.

Both the research and the felony convictions are true. Here’s the whole story.

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 has more than two million views. 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.

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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, Hriso, 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 mystical-type experiences as measured on the Mystical Experience Questionnaire, a validated instrument.

I include this study because I want to provide all the evidence in the service of the full picture, and phenomenology is part of the reason why OneTaste became a company instead of a protocol. A practice that reliably produces a mystical experience is a practice that they sold, and that’s probably part of what went wrong.

In summary: seven papers, five institutions, several hundred human subjects, and not one randomized controlled trial among them. Call it what it is: a thin but promising body of evidence.

Where the direct research is limited, the surrounding scientific evidence is not.

Mindfulness-based interventions for female sexual difficulty consistently improve subjective function, lower performance anxiety, and close the gap between what the body is doing physiologically and what a woman reports feeling. [12, 13] Most clinicians don’t track this important issue of arousal concordance. Women with arousal concordance problem may be aroused but do not feel fully present for it.

We know that arousal sustained without a performance outcome produces higher vagal tone. It gets a woman more time in the ventral vagal state, the one I described previously my Substack as the prerequisite for occupying your own body. [14]

Directed attention to genital sensation, held over time, increases interoceptive accuracy in that region. Put more simple, you improve your capacity to sense yourself from the inside. [15]

Say you have dissociated from your body as a survival strategy, as I have described here on Substack. Say your fawn response has left you absent from yourself while fully present for others. Interoceptive training is the mechanism. A nervous system can relearn that your body is a place you are allowed to live.

What still does not exist is the clinical trial: the practice in women with blunted interoception (perhaps with elevated cortisol or depleted cortisol or the fawn nervous system), measured against controls, randomized. I believe that trial should be done, and I hypothesize that the results would track what the imaging, mindfulness, and interoception literature already predict. Its absence represents an important research gap for women.

I want to be specific about what OneTaste did and how it caused harm.

If you have experience with OneTaste or orgasmic meditation, I would like to hear from you in the comments so that this post and others in the series on female pleasure are as accurate and objective as possible.

The company used the practice of orgasmic meditation as a recruitment instrument. Women arrived with relational trauma, sexual pain, marital difficulties, or a general sense that something was wrong, and they were told the root cause was insufficient turn on. They need more orgasmic meditation.

The solution offered was usually more; that is, more courses, more coaching, more money. The courses were expensive. Students were encouraged to borrow money, and in many cases, debt produced dependency, and dependency became a product. The Department of Justice’s language is that OneTaste made members “emotionally and psychologically dependent.

Sexual histories, trauma disclosures, and relationship vulnerabilities collected inside coaching relationships were then used to hold psychological control. Communal housing produced surveillance. Sleep deprivation contributed to compliance. Sexual coercion was dressed up as spiritual advancement.

OneTaste had the structure of a cult and a labor trafficking operation. The jury saw it and convictions and sentences reflect it.

OneTaste was funded and championed by Silicon Valley tech-world figures. Most of the practices had men doing the stroking while women were instructed to stay still and receptive. The company’s tactics, per the Department of Justice, were part of what manufactured the women’s dependence, not something inherent in the women themselves.

That leaves us with important implications for anyone approaching this practice now. The boundaries are clear. It should never be taught inside hierarchy, debt, surveillance, or spiritual authority.

It should never sit inside a coaching relationship that holds power over you. It should never be offered as evidence of anyone’s spiritual development or sexual evolution. It is a somatic practice, it costs nothing, and no one can certify that you are doing it correctly except your own nervous system.

Autonomy isn’t a feature of the practice, it is the practice. When you hand control of autonomy to someone else, it is no longer autonomy. It’s OneTaste, and the federal record shows us what that can become.

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I am an author on two of the seven papers mentioned above. Both came out of Thomas Jefferson University, where I am a clinical assistant professor. The imaging was performed at the Marcus Institute of Integrative Health, where I direct precision medicine and longevity.

I said yes to the research because I take care of women every day who are diagnosed with low libido, but the root cause often is that the sex they are offered is not what they want. I wrote a popular post about it. I see their flagging vagal tone, as documented in their low heart rate variability.

My own HRV in an unhappy marriage was low, dipping into the teens when measured in my 40s with a chest strap and a phone app. Low, the number you’d expect after twenty years of sympathetic drive.

During the practice, it climbed a little, to the 40s and sometimes the 50s. Now, post-divorce and with my current partner, it climbs into the 200s. Consumer apps differ in which variability metric they report, so it’s important to track the size of the shift, not the absolute numbers.

Nothing else I’ve tried has moved my autonomic state that far, including decades of conventional meditation of all varieties. It’s what put me on my bedroom floor with a timer set to 15 minutes, and eventually into a research protocol at Thomas Jefferson.

The research base exists because a community of practitioners volunteered to be scanned. Every subject came from the practitioner population. All of the findings are preliminary, and anyone who presents preliminary findings as settled is doing to you what the company did to those women in the federal record.

I still believe that non-goal-directed arousal, practiced with full autonomy and no corporate overlay, may be one of the most effective somatic interventions available for a woman.

I believe that failure to fund proper trials of female sexual response and arousal is one instance of a much larger failure to study female pleasure.

I believe criminal conviction of one founder has now made that trial harder to fund than it was before, and that women will pay for that in the currency they always pay, which is decades of not knowing what their bodies can do.

Let’s cover a few boundaries, because the absence of boundaries is what made the institutional harm of OneTaste possible in the first place.

First, I used “orgasmic meditation” in the title of this post because it is what the studies used and what the journals printed (unless they refused and a euphemism had to be substituted). I do not use it now as the name of what I recommend because OneTaste trademarked it and built a criminal enterprise around it.

Second, describing what was researched is not the same as carrying a brand forward, and when I describe non-goal-directed arousal as something you may want to consider for your own body, I call it what it is, even though it’s awkward and less catchy.

Third, we are not discussing partnered sex, though it can be done with a partner who holds the attentional container without redirecting it. A partner whose attention slides toward his own arousal has left the practice. It’s a breach of the protocol boundary.

Fourth, we are not discussing a spiritual practice, whatever the questionnaire data says about how it feels. It has spiritual antecedents, and some women experience it in those terms, which is theirs to have. The clinical mechanism does not require the framework, and embedding it in one is precisely how the authority problem starts. The mechanism is autonomic. The effects are physiological.

Fifth, the practice replaces nothing that already works for you. Directed masturbation remains a legitimate, evidence-based first-line intervention for orgasmic difficulty. [2] For many women, it is the right tool and the only tool they need. Mindfulness-based sex therapy with a trained therapist is legitimate too. For a woman with a trauma history, it is often the safer container than practicing alone.

Medical evaluation comes first, always. If you have pain, atrophy, a new medication, or a hormonal shift no clinician has worked up, no attentional practice substitutes for a diagnosis.

The completed arousal cycle I described in previous posts is real neurochemistry, and being precise about the female sexual response cycle is critical.

Nothing here is a requirement. You get to decide which path to take as part of your own sovereignty.

One more boundary, and it is the one I care most about. The trauma data is important. [10] If you have a sexual trauma history, I recommend that you work with a trauma-informed therapist that you trust. The correct order is stabilization first, trauma processing second, and any somatic sexual practice third, with a clinician who is trained in both trauma and sex therapy. It’s very important that you work only within your window of tolerance, no matter how narrow it might be. Structure and safety signals appear to help.

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If you are here because you want to understand what is happening for the women in your life, including partners, patients, daughters old enough for the conversation, the relevant information is that this practice is not about you. Take that as good news.

Non-goal-directed arousal is not a performance staged for your assessment and it’s not a warmup running on your timeline. It’s not an evaluation of your adequacy as a lover or partner. A woman practicing non-goal-directed arousal in your presence is doing something that requires your absence from the outcome.

If you can hold presences without demand and attention without an agenda, you are welcome. You are being handing the most intimate role available: witness to a nervous system coming home.

Prause et al. measured interpersonal closeness using the Inclusion of Other in the Self (IOS) scale in 125 pairs (250 subjects). Self-other overlap increased an average across all participants after orgasmic meditation, and it increased more in pairs with no romantic bond than in romantic partners. It was good for the stroker and the recipient. [9]

Her work suggests that the quality of attention produces the finding, not the relationship itself.

Most men are never taught this is possible, and most women are never offered a partner who understands the assignment.

Here is what I want you to take from a criminal case, seven journal articles, and a woman on a bedroom floor with a timer.

Your arousal is not a service that you provide, or a metric or a performance. It’s definitely not something that a coach, company, guru, or physician administers to you. It belongs to you the way your pulse belongs to you.

Deciding what to do with 15 minutes of your attention on your body is an act of sovereignty in your body, and it is the smallest version of a decision that you will make hundreds of times regarding your hormones, medications, surgeries, and care.

I spent several years of my professional life helping to measure what happens in the female brain during those 15 minutes. What I can tell you is that something important happens. It’s visible on a brain scan, it’s not what happens during ordinary vanilla sex, and it’s not what happens during ordinary meditation. We do not yet know enough about it.

What I can also tell you is that the reason we do not know enough has little to nothing to do with the biology and everything to do with who owned the practice.

If you have practiced orgasmic meditation or something similar, what did you notice? What worked, what did not, what happened to your nervous system when the outcomes were removed. I am collecting clinical data from a community that has been gathering it on their own bodies for years, maybe decades. I want to hear from you.

Hand a somatic practice to people chasing power and money instead of healing, and you get exactly what OneTaste became. The situation happened once and it will happen again.

I am asking for something different: give the practice back to the women it belonged to. Give them the whole picture. Protect their safety, integrity, and consent with the same rigor I would bring to any protocol in a medical office.

Comments are open. I read every one.

— Sara Szal, M.D.

Sara Szal, M.D., is a board-certified physician trained at Harvard, MIT, and UCSF, and the author of six books on women’s hormones, beginning with the New York Times bestseller The Hormone Cure. She is a co-author on two of the seven studies named above, research she performed as Director of Precision Medicine and Longevity at the Marcus Institute of Integrative Health at Thomas Jefferson University.

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Welcome to The Female Edge. A quick note on how this post was written: every idea here is mine, drawn from my own research, my clinical practice for 30 years, and my six published books. I use AI tools trained on my own writing to help me edit and publish more efficiently, the same way I’d use any other tool in my practice. The framework, conceptual model, critical thinking, clinical recommendations, personal experience, and the care behind it all are entirely my own.

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Notes

[1] Brown, Patricia Leigh, and Carol Pogash. “The Pleasure Principle.” The New York Times, March 15, 2009. https://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/15/fashion/15commune.html?eafs_enabled=false.

[2] LoPiccolo J, Lobitz WC. The Role of Masturbation in the Treatment of Orgasmic Dysfunction. Archives of Sexual Behavior. 1972;2(2):163–171. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01541865.

[3] Voigt H. Enriching the Sexual Experience of Couples: The Asian Traditions and Sexual Counseling. Journal of Sex and Marital Therapy. 1991;17(3):214–219. https://doi.org/10.1080/00926239108404345.

[4] Brotto LA, Goldmeier D. Mindfulness Interventions for Treating Sexual Dysfunctions: The Gentle Science of Finding Focus in a Multitask World. Journal of Sexual Medicine. 2015;12(8):1687–1689.

[5] Newberg AB, Wintering NA, Hriso C, Vedaei F, Stoner M, Ross R. Alterations in Functional Connectivity Measured by Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging and the Relationship With Heart Rate Variability in Subjects After Performing Orgasmic Meditation: An Exploratory Study. Frontiers in Psychology. 2021;12:708973. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.708973.

[6] Newberg AB, Wintering NA, Hriso C, Vedaei F, Mohamed FB, Gottfried (Szal) SE, Ross R. Alterations in Cerebral Glucose Metabolism Measured by FDG PET in Subjects Performing a Meditation Practice Based on Clitoral Stimulation. F1000Research. 2022;11:1015. https://doi.org/10.12688/f1000research.122351.1. Version 2 published 21 December 2023: https://doi.org/10.12688/f1000research.122351.2.

[7] Newberg AB, Wintering NA, Hriso C, Vedaei F, Gottfried (Szal) S, Ross R. Neuroimaging Evaluation of the Long Term Impact of a Novel Paired Meditation Practice on Brain Function. Frontiers in Neuroimaging. 2024;3:1368537. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnimg.2024.1368537.

[8] Siegle GJ, Prause N. Intense Positive Affect Without Arousal Is Possible: Subjective and Physiological Reactivity During a Partnered Sexual Meditative Experience. International Journal of Psychophysiology. 2022;178:99–107.

[9] Prause N, Siegle GJ, Coan J. Partner Intimate Touch Is Associated With Increased Interpersonal Closeness, Especially in Non-Romantic Partners. PLoS ONE. 2021;16(3):e0246065. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0246065.

[10] Prause N, Cohen H, Siegle GJ. Effects of Adverse Childhood Experiences on Partnered Sexual Arousal Appear Context Dependent. Sexual and Relationship Therapy. 2023;38(4):479–494. https://doi.org/10.1080/14681994.2021.1991907.

[11] Siegel V, Emmert-Aronson B. Both Partners Practicing Orgasmic Meditation Report Having a Mystical-Type Experience: Results Using the Mystical Experience Questionnaire. F1000Research. 2021;10:638. https://f1000research.com/articles/10-638

[12] Brotto LA, Basson R. Group Mindfulness-Based Therapy Significantly Improves Sexual Desire in Women. Behaviour Research and Therapy. 2014;57:43–54. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.brat.2014.04.001.

[13] Leavitt CE, Lefkowitz ES, Waterman EA. The Role of Sexual Mindfulness in Sexual Wellbeing, Relational Wellbeing, and Self-Esteem. Journal of Sex and Marital Therapy. 2019;45(6):497–509.

[14] Porges SW. The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological Foundations of Emotions, Attachment, Communication, and Self-Regulation. New York: Norton; 2011.

[15] Garfinkel SN, Seth AK, Barrett AB, Suzuki K, Critchley HD. Knowing Your Own Heart: Distinguishing Interoceptive Accuracy from Interoceptive Awareness. Biological Psychology. 2015;104:65–74.