Episode 47 - THE BELOVED BETRAYAL with Chip August

Transcript

Francesca Gentille:  Welcome to Sex Tantra & Kama Sutra, bringing you the soul of sex.  With me today is Chip August.

Chip August:  Most of us have a romantic notion that's fed by the movies and books and, you know, popular culture, that somehow, sort of, the love is inevitable.  And you find the one you're meant to be with, and love overwhelms you.  The very term you "fall in love," I don't think that's so healthy.  I think we fall in infatuation.  I think we fall in sexual chemistry.  But I think we rise in love.  And I think we have to really get that love is a choice, that people I love do things that I don't like, and I have to decide: "Does that mean I don't love them anymore?  Does that mean I'm going to choose not to love them anymore?"

Chip August:  I would fall in love.  I would marry someone.  And from that moment on, they own my behavior.  All right?  If I wanted to have sex, they were the only store in town, thank you.  If I was getting aroused by other people, <gasp> "Oh, shame on me, that I would allow myself to be aroused by other people!"

They owned those genitals.  I didn't own those genitals!

If I was kissing someone that they didn't want me to be kissing—how dare I?!  I was betraying them.  I had basically given away ownership of me to someone else.

Chip August:  I have never met a human being that actually managed to get through a life without occasionally feeling betrayed.  I wanna say that we fail sometimes, every one of us.  I don't care how pure our intent is.  I don't care how pure our heart is.  I don't care how close to saintliness we are.  Every one of us is, sometimes, is less than the best we could be.  Or, we do something that we regret or showed a lack of integrity or a lack of caring about someone else.

Sometimes it's conscious, sometimes it's really unconscious.  Sometimes it's a kind of acting out.  Sometimes it just happens.  There's lots of different ways.  But every human being goes through life experiencing sometimes being a betrayer and sometimes being betrayed.  That just comes with the turf.

Francesca Gentille:  Chip is a long-time facilitator of the Love, Intimacy and Sexuality workshops for the Human Awareness Institute.  He also teaches his own workshop in sexuality, couples communication and healing anger.  Chip is also a personal growth coach, and counselor, and, also a <pause> sex god.  <Laughter>  I had to add that.  And he has a private practice in Menlo Park, CA.  Welcome, Chip.

Chip August:  <Laughter>  Well, I'm so rarely recognized for that last one, being a sex god, but thank you.  Thanks for noticing!

Francesca Gentille:  You know, sometimes you just need to speak the truth.

Chip August:  Absolutely.

Francesca Gentille:  And be authentic.  And that's what we're really going to be bringing in with today's show is another sense of that authenticity, how we bring it to our relationships, and especially in some of the challenging times.  I'll tell our listening audience that Chip and I were talking before we got on the air with you, and we were mentioning that how, a lot of the stirring in our lives in the last, you know, year or so…things that can make it challenging for us in the world probably make it very challenging for people trying to relate to us.

Chip August:  Yeah.

Francesca Gentille:  Yeah.  My, in the grieving with my mother and reaching out for support, I ended up having a little make-out session with a friend of mine which called my relationship with my fiancé into question, and we're still seeing one another but he actually asked to end the engagement.  And, we opened the relationship, and we're both seeing other people, we're, understandably, feel very confusing.  We're trying to figure out how to trust, how to be centered, when I'm not actually feeling very centered.

Francesca Gentille:  And I'm guessing that I'm not alone in this, that many people listening, at any given time, we lose jobs, people die, illnesses happen, sometimes, you know, breaks in our consciousness or our agreements with one another happen, where we end up doing or saying something that ends up creating some break of trust in the relationship.  How do we maneuver all through that?  What are some things?

Chip August:  You know, you say, but it's really, let's just start with the reality you just described, 'cause I actually think the absolute, most courageous thing that people do is to love a second time.  Not the first time, 'cause the first time we don't really know how painful breakup can be.  We don't know how painful betrayal may be.  We don't know how it feels to, sort of, give your soul over to someone, and then feel like, perhaps, that soul wasn't really respected. The first time we're ignorant.  Usually, we're young, and usually, we don't really know what we're risking.  But every time thereafter, we have a really clear idea of what we're risking, and yet we risk it again and again and again.

I always just want to start with that.  I just want to start with the wonder and bravery of us.  You know, there's a lot of things in life, you try it once or twice and if you don't get the result you wanted, you just don't do it anymore.  There's people who went skiing once or twice, but they didn't like it, so they just don't go skiing anymore.  There's people who tried reading historical fiction, you know, but they didn't like it, so they didn't read another one, you know?

But with love, our hunger, our need to feel that connection, to feel that that oneness with another human being actually creates an immense amount of courage.  So, I just always want to start from that place 'cause we're kind of stupid, you know?  We forget.  We forget how, how hard it may be, you know? 

And then I want to say, anybody who's lived on this planet for more than a year or two knows that everything human is impermanent.  Everything human is impermanent.  Nothing lasts forever.  Nothing.  We all die.  Nobody gets out alive.  Relationships end.  Sometimes because the relationship's over, sometimes because a person dies.  Sometimes because both die, but relationships end.  You know, I know we like to think maybe this love will be eternal, but I don't know.  I don't know what comes next.  I don't really know, you know?  I just know that, here, on this planet, everything human is impermanent.

Francesca Gentille:  On the face of that, you know, this love that I have…I like to actually say that love is eternal but, sometimes, the form changes.  So.  My mother's dead, merely the form of the love I have for her is changed.  I'm loving a spirit, not a person I can hug.  And sometimes, you know, I've been married before.  And, I would say that I still love my ex-husbands, okay, there's the two. And at the same time, maybe, I can't live with them.  But I still love them.  So.  Love in a sense, if it's real love, it's eternal, but the form changes.  Forms are constantly changing in our life, and so the permanence of form, form is going to change   And in a sense, spirit, or love, certain ideas even, are eternal.  But with that impermanence—I think you and I agree there's that impermanence—there's a beauty and a wonder in the face of that impermanence, in the face of the statistics that say the form is going to change, that we love again and again, and yet, even for myself, I can feel like I hold back, like I put up walls, whether it's with a current relationship, where there's my beloved fiancé where there's been a challenge or a test or whether it's in a new relationship where the person hasn't done anything and yet I'm, in my mind, I'm testing them.

How?  What do I do?  What do we do when we have, when we're putting up walls, right next to our call to love?

Chip August:  So my, I've been divorced twice.  I'm on my third, and hopefully last, marriage.  This is the one.

Francesca Gentille:  Three's the charm.

Chip August:  My wife, also, has been divorced twice, and this is her third marriage.  We were together a really long time, with a real commitment that we would spend our lives together but never get married again because we were just both so convinced we were such bad judges of character, obviously.  Twice we'd picked the love of our life, and then it wasn't the love of our life.  Why would we think we'd been any smarter the third time?  So we'd kinda given up the whole story about marriage and given up the whole romantic fantasy.

And we began to talk.  So, what is it that we want with each other?  What is it really?  What is it really that we want?

And, of course you start with "I want someone who chooses to love me, even in the times when I'm having trouble choosing to love me, even in the times when I'm making choices that are hard for my partner.  I want my partner to consciously choose to love me, and I want to consciously choose to love her."

Chip August:  And that's a, we gotta start from that place because that's a really powerful and profound thought.  Most of us have a romantic notion that's fed by the movies and books and, you know, popular culture, that somehow, sort of, the love is inevitable.  You know, you find the one you're meant to be with, and love overwhelms you.  The very term you "fall in love," I don't think that's so healthy.  I think we fall in infatuation.  I think we fall in sexual chemistry.  But I think we rise in love.  And I think we have to really get that love is a choice, that people I love do things that I don't like, and I have to decide: "Does that mean I don't love them anymore?  Does that mean I'm going to choose not to love them anymore?"

Chip August:  Being a parent has helped a lot of this.  I have two children, and, you know, I sometimes don't like what my kids say or do, you know, but I don't ever stop loving them.  Well, why not?  Well, 'cause I've made a real, conscious choice to choose to love my children, no matter what.  And I "got," that the place for I and my partner to start, what a place for you to start.  Choose to love your partner.  Notice what happens when, instead of it being a condition that "just happens" to you, it's a choice that you're being asked to make.  And you're being asked to make that choice with no pressure.  There is no penalty in choosing "not."  If you choose not to love this person, there will be other people you can choose to love. There will.  It's a complete, free choice.

Francesca Gentille:  I am very much enjoying the freedom when you say "rise and love,"  It's…I feel my heart open.  When we talk about being able to choose and that there's no penalty when I choose.  I'm not wrong when I don't choose, and something becomes possible when I do.

Chip August:  Right.

Francesca Gentille:  I also have a child which I feel has been my training ground for how to love, that I never really knew what love was until I had a child.

Chip August:  Yeah, me, too.

Francesca Gentille:  And I want to talk more about how we rise in love and how we really sail through some of the rough seas in a relationship, after a break and a word from our fabulous sponsors.

<Commercial Break>

Francesca Gentille:  Welcome back to Sex Tantra & Kama Sutra, bringing you the soul of sex, with Chip August, long-time facilitator of the Love, Intimacy and Sexuality workshop, who's a personal growth coach and counselor, and, a sex god.  <Laughter>  And we're talking about relationships, love, how to, you know, surf those high waves and sail those stormy seas and actually, to be trained in love.  Children as our trainers, how do they train us, or, what's next in the development of really loving as an adult?

Chip August:  Well, here's the thing.  As a parent, my parents seemed to have the attitude that they owned me, that I went where they told me to go, and I ate what they told me to eat, and I did what they told me to do.  And what it bred in me was a really strong resentment of my parents.  I really resented being their chattel, being their slave, you know, and a lot of kids feel that way.  A lot of kids get to be adolescents/young adults, and they really feel that they are youth-slaves to their parents, and so the thing that I really got when I was now choosing love as an adult-love relationship was I did not want my choosing love to make me, now, an indentured servant of the person I chose to love. 

And I noticed that's what I would do.  I would, I would fall in love.  I would marry someone.  And from that moment on, they owned my body.  They owned my genitals.  They owned my behavior, right?  If I wanted to have sex, they were the only store in town, thank you.  If I was getting aroused by other people, <gasp> "Oh, shame on me, that I would allow myself to be aroused by other people!"

They owned those genitals.  I didn't own those genitals!

Chip August:  If I was, if I was kissing someone that they didn't want me to be kissing—how dare I?!  I was betraying them.  I had basically given away ownership of me to someone else.  And my experience, just like when I was a kid, was that, as soon as it really felt like somebody owned me, I resented it.  I resisted.  I rebelled. 

I love my parents, but I will never be under their influence again.  You know, it didn't make me not love them.  I still love them.  But I certainly didn't want to live with them.  I  certainly didn't want to confide in them.  I didn't want to…and that's what I found in my marriages.  That, increasingly, I would have, sort of two lives:  the life that I told my wife about, and then the life that only lived inside my mind.

So the next "rule," if you want to make a rule, the next guideline, the next tip, the next step here is:  how do I choose to love you, and have you choose to love me while still acknowledging you own your genitals.  You own your body.  You own your sexuality.  You own your behavior, your thoughts.  I own mine.  You're not going to try to take ownership of mine.  I'm not going to try to take ownership of yours.

Francesca Gentille:  Well, yeah.

Chip August:  Yeah. 

Francesca Gentille:  How do we do that?  Because, I just want to be aware for our listeners that that idea that when we love someone, we own them, and they own us, and, you know, there's a wall, that ivory tower, that high tower, that chastity belt that gets put around one another, and we're the only ones that have the key is just really a sacred cow in our culture.  It's like, that's the way it "has" to be.

You fall in love, and you're not conscious of that process—you're not conscious of when you fall out of love, either, and you have no choice, and then you must own the person that you're with, and if you don't own them, why bother?  You know?

Chip August:  But can't you see that that's the exact path to the situation we're in now where 50% of marriages end in divorce?  What we, what that path leads you to is being a slave, and isn't love supposed to be freeing?  Isn't the love, the eternal love that you were talking about at the beginning of the show, isn't the eternal love that you long for a love which liberates you?  It's a love that makes you feel bigger, better, more, more lovable, more beautiful, more desirable.  And how can you be that when you're someone's slave?

Francesca Gentille:  You know, it's kind of an [?] here, Chip.

Chip August:  It is.

Francesca Gentille:  The part of me that loves being chosen, you know, I want to know that my "beloved" could go anywhere, do anything, and out of all of his choices, he would still choose me, perfectly imperfect that I am.  He would still choose me and desire me.  There's part of me that wants that, and then there's a very young, little self inside that's like, "No!" 

Chip August:  Right.

Francesca Gentille:  "No, I don't want that.  I don't want that.  I just wanna, I want to lock you up in my little treehouse, like a doll on the shelf, and I just want you there when I want you, and when I don't want you, I still want you to be locked on the shelf, here, getting dusty.

Chip August:  Let's talk to that little girl for a moment, because, think about what that little girl wants.  When that little girl says that, the answer that little girl wants to hear is, "You know, I will always love you."

Francesca Gentille:  You'll <indecipherable>

Chip August:  That's all you wanna hear.  And the minute you hear that:  "Oh, well then, I don't need to lock you up on the shelf.  But as long as you…as long as you're promising…"  So  that's the piece I want you to get.  That when I say choose love, I don't mean choose love and then tomorrow if you wake up and think, "Oh, well, this is hard.  I don't really wanna…" 

I'm really inviting you.  See what it would take to choose love every day.  What would it really take to make it your life's work to choose love.

Francesca Gentille:  Ooh, that's so scary.  I must carry a lot of fears.  It's so scary, because a part of me thinks, "Oh, what if I choose love, and I'm wrong?"

Chip August:  You will be.  You will be.

Francesca Gentille:  So, I chose it, and now this person is mean to me, yeah.

Chip August:  Let's look at that for a minute.  What if you choose love, and it's wrong? 

Francesca Gentille:  Yeah.

Chip August:  Okay.  So now, let me see if I get the two choices:  I can live in the pain of not feeling loved and not having my love received.  Or, I can have a period of time where I feel love, and I have my love received, and then it goes away. 

Oooh, I don't think I want to live in the life of starvation.  I think I'd rather live in the life of feasting, even knowing that the feasting might stop someday.

Also, the things I practice, those are the things I get really good at.  I don't understand why we humans kind of miss this.  We really get it about stuff that doesn't matter very much, and we really miss it about the stuff that does matter very much.

In every walk of your life, think about it.  What you practice is what you get good at.  If you want to be good at skiing, you ski more.  If you want to be good at, I don't know, pick a thing:  learning a musical instrument, speaking a foreign language.

If you want to get good at something, you practice it.  And the more you practice, the better you get.  Okay, so let me see if I'm going to get this right:  "I'm going to get really good a loving by practicing not loving?  By practicing only loving you?  So all the rest of the time, I shouldn't be practicing loving?"

So, what will I be practicing?  Well, I'll be practicing not loving!

I'll be practicing, "Well, well, Francesca, I'm married to my sweetie.  We've met.  I know you.  You're a very beautiful woman.  And every time I see you, I'm going to practice really hard not loving you.  I'm just going to close my heart to you, Francesca, because I love my wife, you know?  And so I'm going to practice…and I'm going to go to work, and all those attractive people, who're doing really cool things at work…you know what? I'm going to practice not loving them, too!  And you know, while I'm driving on the freeway, I'm gonna practice not loving all those other drivers, and while…"….Can you get the insanity of this?

Francesca Gentille:  <laughs>  You know, there is insanity in that, and I want to talk about the capacity for the heart to love is infinite.  The capacity for the genitals to be inspired, also infinite.  And time is finite, and we want to keep the people that we care about emotionally safe and sexually safe and physically safe, and how do we do that if we're opening to love, this new paradigm of loving and practicing love, how do we do that in a way that really nourishes a sense of safety for one another and keeps our agreements.  When we come back from a break, and a word from our sponsors.

<Commercial Break>

Francesca Gentille:  Welcome back to Sex Tantra & Kama Sutra, bringing you the soul of sex, with Chip August, who is leader of his own workshop in sexuality, couples communication, healing anger, and he is so much more.  And we were talking about the capacity for the heart to love:  infinite.  The capacity for the genitals to be inspire:  infinite.  Time being finite, and wanting to be sure that we're keeping in agreements that we make while practicing loving.

So how do we do that?

Chip August:  So, I want to acknowledge that there's a collapsing that some people do.  I walk around, me personally, I aspire to walking around, feeling turned on, every waking moment.  'Cause I like how it feels to feel turned on.  I like being, that aliveness, I like that.  There's just a real spiciness to life when you're feeling turned on.  I do not actually have sex with any, have sex in the sense of what most people mean by sex, with anybody but my wife.  We do not have an open relationship.  We don't practice…we're not in foursomes, eightsomes, tensomes.  We're not swingers.  We're not whatever.  I don't have anything opposed to any of those things.  I think those are all interesting lifestyle choices.  They're just not my choice.  They're not the choice that we make. 

So I want to make a distinction between what I feel and how I behave.  And the thing that I've learned is, there's a delight…you know, when you and I specifically, Francesca, you and I are flirting, there's a real sweetness to that.  We both feel alive.  We feel appreciated.  We feel attractive.  We don't actually need to do anything more than that.  That's the benefit of that.  That's as far as that needs to go.  There's no, there's no value for me or for you in turning that into something that it isn't, something that either of us isn't really choosing.

Chip August:  So the thing I'm saying is that loving another person is a kind of a mature choice.  We have to be mature enough to get the difference between what's something I like a taste of because it's a pleasant taste.  What's something that I want a constant diet of?  And we have to recognize there will be prices to pay, you know?  There will be consequences to every choice we make. 

If I choose to have sex with every woman that I meet, there are some really powerful, some really beautiful things that will happen from that, and some things I'm gonna miss from life. 

And if choose to bring all of my sexuality to my sweetie, and create a really ecstatic sex life with her, you know there's gonna be some really amazing things that come with that, and some things that I'm going to have to choose to give up on.  Some things I'm gonna miss. 

Francesca Gentille:  It comes back to that choice again.

Chip August:  Yeah.

Francesca Gentille:  What am I choosing?  What am I conscious of choosing?  And I totally agree with you that every single thing has a price, whether we're conscious of that or not.   That when we choose "X," we're not choosing "Y." 

Chip August:  Exactly.

Francesca Gentille:  When I'm choosing to garden, I'm not choosing to take a walk around the block.  If I choose to have a child, I'm choosing certain levels of my freedom and time that I'm not going to have the same way.  And I'm getting something, but there's also a price that I pay for it.

Chip August:  I like to think of it as consequences.  By the way, it doesn't always show up as a price, but there's always some kind of consequence.

Francesca Gentille:  Yes.

Chip August:  Now we gotta get back to that betrayal thing.  Okay.  So, great, we say all this.  And then…you choose/I choose…to make kissy-face with somebody that my wife would really rather that I hadn't made kissy-face with. 

And in that moment, my wife feels like, "Wait.  That did not feel like what we agreed to.  You know, when we talked about what loving each other would look like, you never mentioned, Chip, you never mentioned that you were gonna go play kissy-face with other people.  And I'm feeling like, without that conversation, without us in agreement that, and you just acting unilaterally…now, I don't know how else you might act unilaterally.  I'm feeling betrayed."

Right?

And I just want to say, first, that I have never met a human being that managed to get through life without occasionally feeling betrayed.  I wanna say that we fail sometimes, every one of us.  I don't care how pure our intent is.  I don't care how pure our heart is.  I don't care how close to saintliness we are.  We fail.  Every one of us, sometimes, is less than the best we could be.  Or, we do something that we regret or showed a lack of integrity or a lack of caring about someone else.

Sometimes it's conscious, sometimes it's really unconscious.  Sometimes it's a kind of acting out.  Sometimes it just happens.  There's lots of different ways.  But no human being goes through life experiencing sometimes being the betrayer and sometimes being betrayed.  That just comes with the turf.

And I want to say to anybody who's listening to this saying, "I've never betrayed anybody."

I really believe that's a kind of myopia.  I think if you'll look really hard, you'll find, or if you'll just ask everyone in your life, someone will tell you that a thing that you don't think you betrayed them on, they felt betrayed about.

Francesca Gentille:  I think an interesting one with that is, in a loving partnership, sometimes one partner will make a mistake.  One partner will have the overt betrayal.  And the partner that never forgives has the covert betrayal, the hidden betrayal.  They feel very righteous.  You know, "I don't need to forgive.  I'm not going to forgive.  I'm never going to trust this person again."  And they feel righteous in doing that.  In another way, you could say, that that inability to forgive, that not choosing to forgive is still a betrayal of the relationship.

Chip August:  Exactly.  So.  What we're left with is, if I make an agreement, where I choose love with my partner, and if—and this is true for Leslie and I, my partner, that is, when we started this whole thing with each other—we really, consciously said that we want to be in love, that we want to live in love.  We want to make our lives about feeling that we are living in love.  That's what our goal is.

And we're choosing to love each other.  And now I've screwed up.  All right.  In that moment:  a) I have to be able to be really sensitive to the pain of my partner, I really have to be willing to hear that my behavior has really hurt my partner's heart, and instead of trying to fix it, I need to embrace it.  I need to, first, just embrace that this is so.  This is the first thing we don't do.  We, we, usually we start making excuses.  "It wasn't my fault.  It was no big deal.  You shouldn't feel this way."  Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa!  Let's just embrace how painful this was for my partner. 

Francesca Gentille:  That is so hard.  It sounds so easy, but it is so hard.  I've just been through this.

Chip August:  Yeah?

Francesca Gentille:  I want to fight it with every piece of my existence.  Because it's so hard for me to face that I hurt somebody that I love.  In any given moment, I made a choice at some moment to go for what I wanted, and, maybe not consciously, but I hurt somebody that I deeply cared about.  And it's hard to sit in that.

Chip August:  It is hard!

Francesca Gentille:  And to just have the courage that I've hurt someone I loved.

Chip August:  It is hard.  Nobody promised that this loving thing would be easy. 

Francesca Gentille:  I hate that.  I hate that!

Chip August:  I do, too!  It's not fair.  I don’t' want it to be so hard, but you know what?  It is hard.  And this is part of what I notice, is that some people are willing to do the hard work, and when you talk to couples that have been together 50, 60, 70 years, that's what you hear!  What you hear is not that in that 50, 60, 70 years they never were betrayed.  You hear that their commitment, to living together in love, turned out to be stronger than the transitory pain of a, of a, of a betrayal.

That it turned out it might take a year to get past a betrayal—I don't know how long it takes.  Sometimes you get past these things in moments, sometimes these things take a long time for all the feelings to come out.

But these couples that stayed together found their way past betrayal and back into love, and mostly, when you find out what that way was, that way was you really, really, really empathetically "get" how this works for your partner.  And, at some point, your partner empathetically "gets" how it is for you. 

Chip August:  Because, I want to suggest that that momentary betrayal, has more information in it.  That there's something going on inside the "betrayer" that also needs to be looked at, examined, needs to be seen.  It's that moment when you needed some reassurance about your sexuality.  It's that moment when you didn't feel free anymore and you just wanted to feel free for this moment.  It's that moment when you wanted some spice, something that just wasn't there, and all of that, to me, needs to be talked about.

Chip August:  So one of the things I've noticed with my partner and I, we really, really, really have a standing commitment to, that we say the thing to the other person that we're afraid to say.  I don’t' find myself having too many slips, because, you know what?  I've already told my partner who I think I'm attracted to.  I've already told my partner the moments I think I'm bored. I've already told my partner the things I'm afraid of.  I've already told my partner the things I think, "If she knew this about me, then she'd leave me."

She's already told me all those things, too. 

Francesca Gentille:  That's gorgeous.  That's really gorgeous.

Chip August:  But that's the path.  Once we know that we're really gonna tell one another the truth, the betrayals are really small.

Francesca Gentille:  Yeah.  Yeah, that gets back to that, "Are we having one life or a double-life?

Chip August:  Right.

Francesca Gentille:  If I'm big enough to hold space for you to say, whatever it is.  That, "Honey, I'm not attracted to you right now."  "Honey, there's part of me that wants to leave this relationship right now."  If I can hold space for it as a truth, just a momentary truth to be held, the chances are, you'll be able to express it.  You'll be able to grow deeper because of it.  And if I resist that momentary truth, then I'm resisting you.  I'm resisting my beloved in that moment.

Chip August:  Yup.

Francesca Gentille:  And they're gonna take their truth, they're gonna take that authenticity somewhere else.

Chip August:  Here's the bumper sticker:  What we resist persists.  What we embrace transforms.  Yeah.  It's that simple.  But it's not easy, just simple.  <Laugh> 

Chip August:  The truth about it is, well, people say to me, "How hard is it?"  Well, it's the work of a lifetime.  And what a way, what a wonderful life's work to have!  You know, it is the work of my lifetime to learn how to love my partner deeper and deeper and deeper without feeling like I lose me, to learn how to embrace the moments when I really just want to run away, you know?  To learn how to feel betrayal and then find my way back into love.

It is the work of this lifetime, and what a wonderful way to spend, you know, that's so much better work than IT Management or project management, or auto mechanic…

Francesca Gentille: Although, that's wonderful, too.  You might be doing it.

Chip August:  No, there's nothing wrong with those jobs, but, is that really what you want on your tombstone?  You know…

Francesca Gentille:  Do we want to be a great IT Manager, or do we want on our tombstone that "He/she learned how to love"? 

Chip August:  "Loved with all his heart his whole life, was a master of love"

Francesca Gentille:  "A magnificent lover."

Chip August:  Yeah.

Francesca Gentille:  I think that's what we want.  And, it's to be that magnificent contribution of love in our lifetime, in this planet.  I think that's not only what we want, it's what the planet is calling for, you know, that paradigm shift from fear into love.  That's really what we've been talking about.  And I just want to thank you so much, Chip, for joining us today, with your, for giving us your experience, strength and hope, your words of wisdom from your life, from your private practice, but really from your life.

Chip August:  It's my pleasure. 

Francesca Gentille: And if you all want to get the transcript, why don't you give us our URL, as well, right now?

Chip August:  Two different things.  One is, that you can reach me, you can find out about my different workshops and learn more about some of my philosophies by just going to my website which is www.ChipAugust.com.  There's a link for upcoming workshops, there's a link for all kinds of different articles I've written.  You can learn more about me.

Chip August:  And then, if you want to learn more about my podcast, and, also, if you want to get transcripts of this podcast, you can go to www.PersonalLifeMedia.com.  And you can either, you can search for Francesca, you can search for Chip August, you can search for the show that you're listening to, you can search for my show, "Sex, Love, and Intimacy."  There's lots of good information there.

Francesca Gentille:  Thank you so much, Chip.  And thank you to our listening audience for being with us today on "Sex Tantra & Kama Sutra," bringing you the soul of sex. 

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