Archive for 'Multi-media'
Centrefold, an Award-winning Animated Documentary on Labiaplasty
Posted on 17. Sep, 2012 by Staff Reporter.
When documentary filmmaker Ellie Land saw reports in the national press about an increasing trend in women undergoing labia surgery to neaten the appearance of their genitals, she set out to make a documentary exploring the subject.
Centrefold is an award-winning, animated documentary presenting the personal accounts of three women who have had a labiaplasty. Ellie Land uses animation and moving images to explore issues such as femininity, gender politics, education and identity. She is particularly interested in documenting difficult, culturally complex subjects, seeking to represent them in a way that is accessible to all audiences. Her film was officially launched at the Wellcome Trust on July 12, 2012 with a screening and lively debate chaired by Dr. Phil Hammond. Panel members included author and psychotherapist Susie Orbach and ‘Great Wall of Vagina‘ sculptor Jamie McCartney.
Watch the film, leave a comment and do get in contact if you require further information about the project to hello@thecentrefoldproject.org.
LINKS:
THE INDEPENDENT 2nd October 2012 Why have vaginas – which were once so worshipped – become taboo?
BBC NEWS (online) 24th July 2012 The rise in woman seeking the perfect vagina by Melissa Hogenboom
WELLCOME TRUST (online) 20th July 2012 New short film Centrefold tackles the ethics of labiaplasty by Meredith Thomas
RUDE MAGAZINE (online) 20th July 2012 Are more woman seeking a perfect vagina?
METRO RADIO 12th July 2012 New animation on plastic surgery
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INFOGRAPHIC: Scandalous Facts About Sex Toys
Posted on 05. Sep, 2012 by Staff Reporter.
Gone are the days when sex toys were a taboo topic predominantly associated with a shady porn industry.
Sex toys are set to match smartphone sales in the next ten years, and much of this is due to the increasing salaries and freedom of women in America over the past few generations.
Presented by Adam & Eve – Scandalous facts you didn’t know about sex toys.
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My Vagina Is 8 Miles Wide… Storm Large
Posted on 19. Nov, 2009 by Staff Reporter.
Thanks to Dr. Dagny Boch for sending this my way…
Award-winning actress and singer Storm Large on YouTube… youtube.com/user/stormlargeofficial
Storm blogs, ” Seriously, “8 Miles Wide” would still be just a big big idea (and the occasional outburst from friends and family members in the know) if it weren’t for the tireless creative megawatt team at Sockeye Creative. James Westby, Tom Grissom and Katie O’Grady, especially, kicked so much ass on this goofy little ditty born in my twisted brains.
Also important to thank – Wilf’s, Mary’s Club, Portland Parks and Rec., Mark Acito, Rick Emerson, Byron Beck, Kevin Morris, Laura Domela, Mary Urbanski, Brenda Casebeer and her trusty steed Brego, Kavita Jhaveri, James Beaton, Davey Nipples, Scott Weddle, The Jim Brunberg, Adam Lundeen, Steve Sharp and all the brilliant extras and personalities who so generously donated to the cause.
Last, but not least, thank you, Portland, Oregon. Your endless support of all things weird will always make you the coolest city on the planet. Bless your rainy and rosy wild heart.”
Check out the behind the scenes videos:
Part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ArNMGsigq4
Part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PCz8PwSRZoU
Part 3: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GanA1cnxIPE
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A Kinetic Kinsey Report… Top Twitter Hash Tags Today #beforesex #duringsex #aftersex
Posted on 24. Sep, 2009 by Stephen Kastner.
If only Dr. Alfred Kinsey were alive today… taking notes on Twitter
Alfred Charles Kinsey (June 23, 1894 – August 25, 1956)
I just glanced at my “Trends of Twitter” Google widget and noticed something new. Maybe I just never paid attention, but that seems hard to imagine. Nonetheless, today the top of the Twitterverse is dominated by the following sexual timeline hash tags: #beforesex, #duringsex and #aftersex.
In 1948 and 1953 the Kinsey Reports on male and female sexual behavior shocked the nation by talking frankly and for the first time about a subject that had been taboo up until they broke the ice. The greatest controversy surrounded the creation of the Kinsey Scale, that categorized sexual behavior from 0 to 6, with 0 being completely heterosexual and 6 completely homosexual.
Kinsey said, “Males do not represent two discrete populations, heterosexual and homosexual. The world is not to be divided into sheep and goats. It is a fundamental of taxonomy that nature rarely deals with discrete categories… The living world is a continuum in each and every one of its aspects.”
The findings revealed, “11.6% of white males aged 20–35 were given a rating of 3 (Equally heterosexual and homosexual – bisexual) for this period of their lives. 7% of single females aged 20–35 and 4% of previously married females aged 20–35 were given a rating of 3 for this period of their lives.”
Kinsey further inflamed debate with his findings that an estimated 50% of all married males had some extramarital experience at some time during their married lives and 26% of females had extramarital sex by their forties.
Despite the efforts by many different conservative family-values and religious groups to discredit the Reports, together they have sold more than three-quarters of a million copies and have been translated into thirteen languages. Many people consider them to be among the most successful and influential scientific books of the 20th century. Au contraire, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male has been on two conservative lists of the worst books of modern times. It was #3 on the conservative Intercollegiate Studies Institute’s 50 Worst Books of the Twentieth Century.
Much of the criticism has to do with the sampling methods and the groups that Kinsey utilized for his studies. If only he could see the sampling data available on Twitter…
Twitter on Viagra...
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Naked on LiveVideo
Posted on 27. Apr, 2009 by Staff Reporter.
This is a bit Chaplinesque, but delivers the message… in Candid Camera style. Did you know that Woody Allen got his start writing for that show back in the 1960s and performed in some scenarios? I bet he’d love to appear in this one:
As Amara says, “It’s fun and healthy to flirt!” …but what happened to subtle? She turns the tables on Woody in describing her encounter with a younger man in… Reverse Flirting; The Unlikely Tale of an ‘Older’ Woman.
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Come, To Know; a Chakra Story
Posted on 26. Apr, 2009 by Nola Erus.
“And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.” – Anaïs Nin
Kendra felt as if she would topple off the face of the planet, fall into oblivion without any other person giving her a second glance. Stress, discord, the novelty of each day, wore and bit, clawed at her and she imagined that she was alone on the planet, at least in her own unique state, facing an onslaught of adversity. Things had gotten so bad that sometimes Kendra found she could not even write anymore and even her love life suffered as she ached to reach climax that would surge through to purify her, only to find that each little tremor stopped nearly as soon as it started as if a door had been shut. Emotionally, Kendra was drained. Sensually, she was shut down. Mentally, she wasn’t even certain that she had the foggiest notion what love was.
In the grey light of this rainy afternoon, Kendra thought of boys she had known, men who had taught her about love and lust, women she had imagined kissing her, though she never would have admitted that to anyone. She wondered if she could conjure them through the magic of pencil to paper, discard the MacBook Pro for the day and weave the old spells she had learned so long ago, the sloping Palmer method across the misty backdrop of recycled papers, ancient texts renovated and restored, the flesh of sacrificial trees that would give and give until every last drop of essence, of life, had been sucked from them, pulp drained of purpose until their bodies eventually dry and are discarded.
It had been weeks since she had succumbed to the insistence of her physical body, taken anyone up on an offer to find bliss in another and these days, she knew that the lust she sought required greater fulfillment. In each union since the dissolution of her marriage, she had found herself coming only at the surface. Her moans sounded like empty peals, lies even as they echoed within her. But stories had taught her to explore her sensuality in new ways, to remember what first had seduced her and what she had at first sought. That memory spread through her like a kinetic explosion, then settled like a blissful smile over her nubile body, the blush of sex and lust and love and deliverance, finding pleasure in another, bestowing love and heat, finding that such pleasure rests within you, coiled like a snake ready to awaken and slither upward, wet, and fresh, and strong.
Kundalini. The word rested in her lap, and she contemplated stroking it even as she began to type. At her lips, the word took life, crawled through her cavern mouth, slipped out like a pretty pink tongue, became a whisper of seductive power. She envisioned herself now in the fetal position, new and curious, postured to open herself to life, her mind to that visual seduction – imagination.
MuladharaRed lust, trimmed in black, the petals of the lotus were like a beacon to Kendra. Four ladies in a ring, dancing angels, curled into and out of one another. They beckoned to her, pleaded that she play, but Kendra stood back, watching from the edges of a dream, each of them becoming pencil sketches on her tablet, one a bending cedar, another a span of water and the last two fallen branches, a bridge. Kendra longed to cross it, found herself taking tiny steps, her nude feet trailing against their soft backs, along thighs and shoulders, her toes twisted in the curls of their cascading hair. Need burned at her hollow core with every rushing sensation, hopes for their lips at her piqued nipples, her tongue passing through their petaled crevices, the stewing brew of their juices percolating beneath blood warmed flesh.
She could be obsessed with these, stop to play and chat, learn about their histories and their futures, dress them like characters in a story and make them into sexual playthings who would be loved or cheated or abused – always her characters ran from pleasure to pain, always they lost their path, always they returned grateful but weary from the journey, but these she protected, fought her desire to ravish them, corrupt them.
Kendra made these ladies only pretty stops along the path, scenery, landscape, backdrop to a greater story to tell. Sensually they spoke volumes to her, but for the audience they would be as incoherent as the wind through a cedar grove. Their only whispers, “Lam” to say “I have.” Kendra felt without, ached to know what they knew, laid herself across the floor, stretched her hands and then her feet, imagined herself a bridge of sorts and hoped those ladies would step across her to see the world as she does. Companionship would ease the pain.
SvadhisthanaPerhaps her ladies felt the plea that ran through her long, conjuring fingers because soon Kendra felt the crawl of life along her spine, the rise from loneliness to new found sensuality, the hope that came as tingle first then heated insistence at the pink lotus between her thighs, the emerging dew of some new spring there, as she hummed softly, “Vam” for “I feel.”
Orange sunset burst from the grey clouds that had hung above her all day, pushed itself between the thick drapes that hid Kendra from the rest of the world and she felt herself a part of something larger, a participant in an ancient unity, one of many. As the fourth lady stepped from the circle, leaving her sisters to join hands, each of these became a petal on the vibrant lotus.
“You… should be at the center,” the woman purred, her long, glossy, black locks radiating warmth and energy as she pulled gently at Kendra’s fingertips to guide her to the center of the women, elegant ladies now, she saw, each lovelier than those beside her, each more seductive than any man Kendra had ever met, and each more nurturing than her own mother had ever been. Guilt and shame and then, surprisingly, purest sensual desire rushed through her, as Kendra felt the Cobra in her lap begin to rise and sway, charmed by the pulsing rhythm of the sisters’ dance, poised to seduce and the hissing whisper through her lips was, “Come to me.”
But Kendra hid herself away from the seduction of the snake and found herself immersed in the affections of her family. Soft hands caressing softer curves, the subtle rise of body heat, manifesting in the must and musk of life, but Kendra held back, her tongue at the cusp, the gateway of one pretty red mouth, and folded her blooming lotus to cloister her taboo desires.
Manipura“Fear hinders you, My Love,” one lady whose eyes gleamed in variegating hues of amber gold spoke softly across the sepaled center of their budding lotus. A bow on her back reminded Kendra of Artemis, the goddess of the hunt, yet with an aura of peace emitting from her core.
Kendra was surprised to find herself so discovered, so exposed. She felt as nude as Eve in the Garden, a woman so blacklisted for her earliest experiential understandings of femininity. Imagining herself uncloaked, an epiphany of shame, Kendra ducked deep into the dewy center of the lotus, ached to disappear, retreat from the dreamy evolution of her own story, but a hand reached to her, took her into it, soft and sweet and fragrant.
“You must find yourself in the cycle, the lotus. Stretch your hands out, open your thighs, allow the world to come through you. Create and live and be.”
Taking her place, moving from focal point to truest unity, a sense of belonging, Kendra felt power course through her arms and legs, up her spine, at her navel. And her arms became vibrant petals as she and her sisters danced in the singing breeze, as “Ram” became a virile hum to insist “We can,” and lust and sensual affection became manifestations of love.
Belonging is a precarious state – a danger to those willing to lose themselves to another. Some place in the back of Kendra’s mind this warning loomed, but she felt no danger as the chant grew to an insistent cry of “Yam.” Instinctively, Kendra knew this cry to declare “I love,” and the sentiment became a declaration of how she hoped to live. Her love for these women grew, boundless, unwavering, without condition, and she felt peace grow within her, too, imagined herself pregnant with life as if another grew in her, a product of conception of Self, as if she could recreate and renew strictly through the force of love that flowed like a river through her.
Orange sunset melting like a moist twilight of greens and pinks, Kendra detected a new fragrance on the air – wafts of sultry lavender and jasmine fell on her. She arched her back, imagined herself a dromedary for the thirsting earth. The power of the New Moon welled, swelled in her, and she felt herself overwhelmed, pleased, subdued with compassion that spilled out of her, each tear a drop of life for the evolving lotus, each dewdrop sustenance to increase the petals, unfold the bloom, beckon and increase life, release desire, heighten knowledge.
Spinning as if to dance, Kendra found herself and her sisters multiplied, increase of heart begetting new life and the lotus bloomed to reveal twelve petals, each strong and lusty, each tender and new, each like the pink flesh of a young girl, ready to give herself to life, to allow love to pass through her.
Pressure at her throat, momentary uncertainty, forced Kendra to make a choice for love and lust. Slipping fingers to the snake coiled in her lap, she stretched each one across skin of silky scales, slid each along that curving spine, whispered with wet seduction all her own,
“Ham, I speak, and for this you exist, to rise through me, to be my strength, my defense, my nimble spirit, my charming comrade.” And the snake moved up through her, made his body rigid, thrusting, slid within to find passage along his mistress’s welcome subtle body, each stop as prana to a weary traveler.
And Kendra imagined herself a fish, swallowing, accepting the snake into herself, diving and swimming, seeking satisfaction through life, finding life and renewal in the consumption of flesh and then rebirth. In his force through her, the Cobra delivered life, and her body became a sea prime for creative force, brimming with thoughts to share, each cell of her being as potential for new growth, understanding.
AjnaThe awakening at Kendra’s heart and core, her sensual center, grew to an illuminating light that transcended all the states of understanding she had yet known. It was if the bright moon above shown only for her, found her third eye once blind and forced it open and she felt herself ready, open to love, to feel again that which she had lost, to know it better, more deeply, to make of life what love had taught her, what she had found within herself. A voice rose within Kendra, like the cry of a new baby and she discerned it like the roar of the waves of consciousness, “Om. Omm. Ommm.” No hollow peals this rising moan, and Kendra cried ecstatically to know, to see. “I see,” she proclaimed to the ladies of her lotus, and it felt significant, synonymous with “I come,” but now there were only two, Kendra rising to new found revelation looking back at another so familiar, yet so distant, one she had been who had stood in the dark, alone, before she had recognized her place in the world, her power to ascend, to be something more.
Seated, peaceful, as calm as a lotus itself, Kendra raised two petal arms to the skies in jubilation of arrival.
SahasraraAnd the hush she felt rather than heard, became a hymn of peace as her subtle being grew to a subtler understanding and her mind became a field of awareness and information, as if the world had dawned on her with the rise of the star anise. “I know” her pulsing heart poured forth.
The crowning of her lotus heart and soul and mind brimmed with colorful petals. At their center a violet sepal rose like a scepter. In peace and enlightenment, Kendra rested her head, and bliss grew in her soul. Peace from the journey, ecstasy in the arrival, coming to consciousness far surpassing the coming of her body.
Nola Erus, reared in a deeply sensual family which taught her to observe the evolving world around her in its most minute glory, comes to her love of language and communication naturally. An education in International/Intercultural studies, diverse languages and English composition and literature informs her insatiable quest for better understanding of her universe and her fellow humans> her desire is to
convey that understanding via storytelling. Through her stories she hopes to discover more about herself and to share a reverence for the erotic with the world community.
She blogs at sexysecrets.eroticachallenge.com.
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Audacia Ray’s “Speak Up! Media Training for the Empowered Sex Worker” NYC, Apr 18
Posted on 13. Apr, 2009 by Staff Reporter.
Audacia sends the following…
Audacia Ray
I am easily wooed into the gimme gimme now now world of Web 2.0. As such, my usual internet haunts include my blog Waking Vixen (which celebrates its 5th birthday in 2009); Twitter, where naturally I am @audaciaray; and the loathesome Facebook.
I’ve been busy and will give you a run down in just a sec – first though, a few events that if you’re in NYC you’ll be excited about but might be mad about if you don’t live nearby.
First up, a panel I’m part of on Tuesday, April 14 at Brooklyn Law School entitled, Porn, the 1st Amendment and the State of Obscenity Law in an Online Society.
The Internet has changed the face of pornography by allowing for unprecedented participation in the creation of explicit media. In addition, the internet has provided means for Web proprietors to promote sex-oriented services that have enabled people with HIV, minorities, and others to connect and explore their sexuality in a way that was once impossible. Within this framework, speakers will explore the current obscenity law, and its chilling effects on this new discourse.
And the details:
Brooklyn Law School
250 Joralemon Street
Student Lounge
Brooklyn, New York 11201
From 6:00 – 8:00 pm
Speaker(s): Featuring Prof. Derek Bambauer (BLS), Prof. Elizabeth Glazer (Hofstra) and activist and former sex worker Audacia Ray.
This weekend I’m teaching a full day workshop called Speak Up! Media Training for the Empowered Sex Worker to a small group of sex workers here in New York. The workshop is being planned by Sex Work Awareness, the small non-profit that I co-founded last year. Speak up is made possible by a fundraiser we did last fall – the NYC Sex Blogger Calendar: http://sexbloggercalendar.wordpress.com. I’m pretty proud of the work we’ve done to make this media training happen, and we’ll be turning out 10 women thoroughly prepared to do activist battle, media-assault style. To celebrate, we’re having a bit of a cocktail hour after the conclusion of the workshop – and though the workshop is open to participants only, the cocktail hour is open to all. Come gawk at super-smart hookers, strippers, dommes, and porn stars – or just buy us drinks. We’ll be at XES, 157 West 24th Street between 6th and 7th Avenues, starting at 5.30 pm on Saturday, April 18.
In other news, I’ll be attending Sex 2.0 for the second year – this time around it will be in DC on Saturday, May 9. I’m leading two sessions, “Revisiting Naked on the Internet” (my book is turning 2!) and the other is “Sex Work 2.0 in the Time of Obama” More info here: http://www.wakingvixen.com/blog/2009/04/09/sex-20-in-dc-may-9th/
Other big changes in my life:
I’m working in the non-profit world as an online strategist at the International Women’s Health Coalition, where among other things I’m running a blog called Akimbo at http://blog.iwhc.org, plus making videos about sexual health and rights: http://youtube.com/intlwomenshealth. I’ll also be doing my third semester as an Adjunct Professor of Human Sexuality at Rutgers University this summer (see, I told you I’d gone legit).
I’ve got lots of other stuff up my sleeves, which hopefully I’ll remember to tell you about. Feel free to look me up around these here Internets in the meantime!
xo
Dacia
Audacia Ray
Waking Vixen, Personal Projects and Blog: http://wakingvixen.com
International Women’s Health Coalition: http://iwhc.org
IWHC Blog, Akimbo: http://blog.iwhc.org
Sex Work 101: http://sexwork101.com
Speak Up! media training: http://speakup.sexworkawareness.org
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Amara, Shyena and the City of Ten Thousand Buddhas
Posted on 09. Apr, 2009 by Stephen Kastner.
A little more than a hundred miles north of San Francisco in Mendocino County, there is a very unique community located within the town of Talmage, California. In 1974 the Dharma Realm Buddhist Association purchased the grounds and buildings of the former Mendocino State Hospital founded in 1889. The facilities included more than seventy large buildings, three gymnasiums, a fire station, a swimming pool and almost everything else required by a typical small municipality like fire hydrants, an underground water and electrical grid and a central heating and air conditioning plant.
Under the leadership and guidance of the Venerable Master Hsuan Hua, an international Buddhist community and monastery was established on the 488 acre site. The City of Ten Thousand Buddhas as it is known today, is one of the first Chinese Zen Buddhist temples in the United States, and one of the largest Buddhist communities in the Western Hemisphere.
Into this pious realm, steps our heroes… Amara and Shyena, two westerners, lifelong students of eastern philosophy and yet advocates of the sensual life – ready to undertake a 7-day retreat, meditating and celebrating Guan Shi Yin, the Goddess/God who helps us cultivate compassion.
“I never imagined I would visit a Buddhist monastery, and to tell the truth, I often felt something too complex or grand in all of it for me,” Amara explains. “It took hearing Guan Yin’s name to lure me into the Dharma Realm, and the City of Ten Thousand Buddhas, after which, perhaps, nothing will ever be quite the same.”
Read all about her life-changing adventure in “How Lucky We Are… About the Guan Yin Retreat.”
Monks at the City of Ten Thousand Buddhas
It turns out that Amara has more secrets to reveal and what better place than at a Buddhist Monastery that was once an insane asylum to come back to one’s senses.
“Returning to our room after an entire day of recitation I am dying for a cigarette,” she reveals. “Of course there is no smoking permitted within the place, so I must go outside to sneak one. This is day one of seven. I’m thinking, God, this is awful. Ridiculous! I can’t do this here.”
Find out how she beat back the Nicotine Demons and rekindled her love of film making while you enjoy her latest online video production, a glimpse within the walls of the City of Ten Thousand Buddhas in “Two Confessions… on the making of this video.”
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Every Birth Should be an Orgasmic Birth!
Posted on 03. Mar, 2009 by Staff Reporter.
Orgasmic Birth, a new documentary film by first time filmmaker Debra Pascali-Bonaro, is generating tremendous attention and quite a bit of controversy. It was originally featured on a special presentation of “20/20” Friday, January 2, 2009. Previously only seen at film festivals and educational screenings, this highly rated ABC program kicked off an hour-long special on what has been titled “Extreme Motherhood.” The segment on Orgasmic Birth and ecstatic births should be required viewing IMHO. It features Ms. Pascali-Bonaro along with OB/GYN Dr. Christiane Northrup, and several women whose births are featured in the film.
The film is shattering traditional impressions of labor and delivery by showing that the natural birth process can actually be a euphoric experience!
“With 4.3 million babies born in the U.S. each year it’s time to reexamine what we’ve been told and look to what is possible,” says director Debra Pascali-Bonaro, an internationally renowned childbirth educator and doula who witnessed so many ecstatic births she was inspired to begin filming them. “If you don’t know all your options then you don’t have any. Orgasmic Birth will strip away your fears and reveal how to create a powerful and transformative experience. It is time to reclaim this sacred event.”
Five years in the making, Orgasmic Birth has had an international impact on the film festival circuit and was screened this year at the prestigious Rio de Janeiro International Film Festival, Baltimore Women’s Film Festival, Usti Film Festival in the Czech Republic, and Festival Caminhos in Portugal, to name a few. It won the Audience Choice Award at the 2008 MotherBaby International Film Festival in Bermuda.
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Leap! “The world is an illusion…“
Posted on 05. Dec, 2008 by Staff Reporter.
Leap! is a film that compels you to consider this ageless theory that “The world is an illusion“. This idea may challenge your current beliefs and ideals. but then again Einstein did say “Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.”
Leap! explores ancient and modern philosophies and philosophers who support the illusion theory. To Leap! beyond the illusion is to let go and live from inspiration… To Leap! beyond the constraints of your current perceived reality and what you think you know… The purpose of Leap! is to invite each of us to live beyond the illusion. This movie is not about denying our physical experience. Ultimately it is about Leaping beyond limitations and restrictions which this illusion appears to impose.
Order The Leap! Movie ($25).
Here’s what the film’s creators say:
“After 2 years of following our inspiration, Leap! launches tonight. Chad and I began this guided journey over two years ago and this evening, we’ll see the fruits of our nature. Leap! is not another “woo woo, we’re all one” production.This movie is non duality for the Pepsi Generation. Throughout history, interpretations have needed to be updated as new generations arrived. Leap! is not a movie about a lost secret or hidden tool. It’s a contemporary look at the oldest idea in the human consciousness. Leap! takes you back to the origin of your true nature and creates a gateway for you to begin the longest journey back to a place you never left.
“If you’re “Waking Up From The Dream” and would like to converse with us and others, we’ve set up a
free online forum for people at: http://www.leapmovie.com/forum/ .”
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