Episode 17 - “Summer of Love: Still Crazy After all These Years?” with Expert and Workshop leader Chip August

Alissa interviews Intimacy Expert and Workshop leader Chip August on “Summer of Love: Still Crazy After all These Years?”

This program is brought to you by personallifemedia.com. 

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Alissa Kriteman:  Welcome to Just for Women:  Dating, Relationships and Sex.  I'm your host Alissa Kriteman.  This show is dedicated to bringing you the most insightful and useful information available today to help you achieve all your love, sex, intimacy, romance and relationship desires.

This interview is a part of my Summer of Love Anniversary series where we will explore how dating, relationships and sex have changed over the past 40 years.  Today on the show, I'm happy to welcome Chip August, internationally acclaimed workshop leader and relationship coach in the areas of love, intimacy and sexuality.

On today's show, we will discuss men, how men have grown, who they are now and what they want from their relationships with women.  We're going to talk about sex, how the past 40 years have expanded our ideas about what sex is and can be.  We're also going to talk about relationships, relation robots [laughs] and loverships - a new term we're hearing more and more about.  We're going to hear fresh ideas about bridging the gap between dating and creating successful life partnerships.

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Chip August:  What happened in the Summer of Love in that usually end up to it, is kind of this breakout where suddenly all beautiful segments of society said "You know, we don't want to play by the rules.   What happened at some level was women got told you can have sex when you want to have sex.  You don't have to be a virgin when you get married or pretend to be a virgin.  You do not need to be engaged to someone or planning to marry someone to have sexual pleasure with them and coupling ought to include women's sexual pleasure.

Now you look at the last 10 years.  What do you see in the last 10 years?  We see a Supreme Court which is taking away Roe v Wade.   We see Janet Jackson showing her nipple for one half of one second on the Super Bowl and the network being fined millions of dollars.  Millions of dollars - why?  Because we saw her nipple.  Because we saw a part of woman that's designed to feed human beings and call that obscene? 

They come to my workshops and what they hear in my workshop, what they hear at HAI, at Human Awareness Institute is, you know, the most important thing is to learn to love each other, communicate with each other, that we trust and treat each other with dignity and respect.

What a real man is a guy who uses a certain amount of illegal substances because that's really cool, likes psychedelic rock and roll because that's really cool and somehow rather is a sexual machine.  We feel like what we men are doing are we're trying to find our balls.  We're trying to find our way to really be in our manliness without having to oppress others.  That's a pretty new concept.

Alissa:  So welcome, Chip August.  It's so great to have you on the show.

Chip:  Well, thank you very much.  It's really good to be here.

Alissa:  For those of you who don't know Chip August, he is one of the international leaders of courses at the Human Awareness Institute.  He has his undergraduate degree in Philosophy from Ithaca College.  He's an NLP practitioner, a certified hypnotherapist, minister and  a happily married father of two.

Chip talks to thousands of people a year about sex, love and intimacy.  I love Chip because he is the most insightful, soft, loving, kind, solid, brilliant man to talk about all these kinds of things.  He's perfect for our Summer of Love series because he can talk, speak directly about what it was like 40 years ago and how it has changed now.

So, Chip, let's start off with our favorite topic:  men.  [laughs]  Since you are one, what was it like being a guy way back in the Summer of Love?

Chip:  Now, a little disclaimer here.  I am ancient but I'm not quite so ancient; I'm 54 years old this summer.  The Summer of Love was in 1957, I think I was 14 years old.  I could tell you what it was to boy...

Alissa:  [laughs]

Chip:  ...and I can tell you from working with clients and from  reading and from studying what I think it was like but I just want to own that I was just 14 years old.

Alissa:  A budding man.

Chip:  A budding man.  Absolutely.  The thing that I miss about the Summer of Love, the thing that somehow got lost...there was a time, '65, '66, '67, maybe even '68 when it seemed like love was being uncoupled from all kinds of habits and patterns that men and women  have fallen into the '30s, '40s and '50s in United States.

Habits that have women be treated in some ways as if they were less than human.  They were paid less for the same work to be assumed that a woman can only be a nurse or a secretary whereas a man could be an executive or a doctor.  It was really a hard time for women and what happened in the summer of love in that usually end up to it - there's kind of this breakout when suddenly all beautiful segments of society said "You know, we don't want to play by the rules anymore.  We don't want to make war.  We don't want to have war between the sexes.  We want to elevate love and community over greed and acquisition of wealth.  We want to create a society based on love." 

I had to say at 14 years, it was probably the most formative psychology; it was the most formative philosophy in my young time.  You know, at 14, you're leaving your parents' ideology and creating your own?  It really is the foundation of my ideology.
It's like the foundation of my belief system is that we can live together and love each other.

Alissa:  So what did you notice in particular?  I know you were young but say, as you got into your 20s and 30s, how were things changing, how were women really being held as more equal?

Chip:  You know, it's funny, the Summer of Love... mostly were focused mostly on the “free love” movement.  What really happened at some level was women got told "You can have sex when you want to have sex.  You don't have to be a virgin when you get married or pretend to be a virgin.  You do not need to be engaged to someone or planning to marry someone to have sexual pleasure with them.  And coupling ought to include women's sexual pleasure."

These were radical.  I know these seem really simple today but you have to get that 40 years ago, these were radical ideas!  Women were still being told by their mothers that sex was their duty.  That the guy was just going to want this, lie back and pretend that you enjoy it.  There were all kinds of training courses for women on how to pretend to like sex so your husband wouldn't be upset.

This whole “free love” idea was a huge idea and the message to men was -- you are sexual beings.  It's OK.  You don't have to pretend not to be, you don’t have to conform your sexuality to some societal image of what it should look like.  Go!  Fly!  In a way, it's just sort of the “flower children” - why we called ourselves “flower children,” a flower child - not a flower adult because there was a kind of innocence.  Let's reclaim the innocence, beauty and joy of sexuality which is not fettered by societal morals, by rules.

Here's the problem - this unfettered sexuality means more diseases, that means unwanted pregnancies, so that the failure of the experiment was that there were a lot of women I know who  in ‘60s and ‘70s felt now when they look back - they were having sex because that was then the rule.  They were supposed to have sex instead of not to have sex.  There were a lot of men and women who had sex with people they really didn't want to or felt like they had sex because they were supposed to.  I don't want to paint them an overly healthy and an overly pretty picture of it; there were definitely abuses and excesses.

The philosophy extended well into the '70s was - own your body.  Own your sexuality.  Men, women own your sexuality; don't let somebody else tell you what to do; own it yourself.

Alissa:  It's so interesting because we're still dealing with these issues today, which is why I'm so excited to talk you.  You have such a depth of understanding of what's been happening.

So, first it was "Don't have sex.  Pretend to have sex if you're a woman.  Deny that you even like having sex and really produce this experience for your husband because it's a good thing to do."

Then we move into "OK.  We're sexual beings let's just have fun and explore.  Of course, the backlash of that was that abortion wasn’t even legal.  I've even heard some really scary stories about women performing abortions on each other in college!  These are still major issues today that we're dealing with.  People are still dealing with their rightness about being sexual beings.  So what are we dealing with today that maybe was going on then?  How have we progressed?

Chip:  Well, you know I'm not sure we have progressed.  That's some of my sadness about it.  In some ways we progressed.  There's a conversation today where there was a never conversation spoken aloud 40 years ago.  Today, we do talk about reproductive health. Today, we do recognize that we need to teach our children about the biology of sex education and also immunology, diseases, and also help protect your self.  There's a conversation about women's rights and women's opportunities in the world, and also a conversation about harassment.

I have to say in 1967, 1968, the term "date rape" didn't exist, a coinage that is not happening.  We didn't even have a term for it.   There was an assumption that if you were a woman and you wore a mini skirt and no bra, and you were hanging around young men, if you got raped; it was because you deserved it.  You were dressed wrong and you were in the wrong place.  The whole concept of a woman's right to her body in that no one ever deserved to be raped.  This is all stuff that came out in the '60s and '70s.

Sadly, there's also a kind of backlash.  What I see is in the mid 60s to late '60s, there was this idea of love without limits -- Of love, just unfettered love - that we could all love each other.  I think for a lot of people who have a much more conservative viewpoint.  I think for a lot of people who think we need rules or society would descend into chaos, it was scary.  I think for a lot of people it passed them by, they looked around and watched the "hippies".

The "hippies" were a bad thing to a lot of America.  These were people who were slackers who didn't want to go to work, who were defying norms and conventionality.  I believe that the people who were angered by that waited until they were in their '30s and '40s and in positions of power to begin to impose the backlash.  It feels like in the last 10 years, America has gone to war against the last vestiges of what we started in the Summer of Love.

For some, if you take that period from 1967 when the Summer of Love happened until maybe 1977, what you watch is Roe v Wade got passed, women having the right to abortion, the birth of women's lib and the rise of all kinds of court rulings - protection of religious rights and protection against harassment and protection against sexual harassment.  You see the growth of adultization of American movies.  Suddenly it becomes OK to have adult themes and adult stories. 

Rock Hudson and Doris Day gave way and you started seeing movies like "The Graduate".  You started seeing movies like "Mash", that's a very different flavor, you know.  You see these beautiful growing... these wonderful flowers.  Look at the last 10 years.  What do you see in the last 10 years?

We see the Supreme Court which is taking away Roe v Wade, we see Janet Jackson showing a nipple for one half of one second on the Super Bowl and the network being fined millions of dollars.  Millions of dollars?  Why?  Because we saw her nipple.  Wait a minute, we saw a part of a woman that's designed to feed human beings and call that obscene?  Whew!  That's a big pendulum swing.  That's a very big pendulum swing and that's what I say.

Alissa:  Why do you think this is happening?  And at the same time, as a lot of this is being unraveled on a sort of a governmental level, you see especially in this Bay area, a different kind of proliferation of sexual expression.   I know it's not going on everywhere, but it's definitely going on here and I see it spreading. 

It's almost like, you said about this war on love - it seems like a battle.  A battle for people to express themselves and not be again.. I mean these things keep happening.  So what do you say about that?  You live here in the big Bay area, too.  You teach courses on this all the time.  Your courses are all about love.

Could you talk a little bit about that?

Chip:  You know it's funny.  I think this battle has been going on for a really, really long time.  I don't think it's unique to the last 40 years.  I think each generation frames it differently and we do have progress.  What I see happening is, in United States is, an increasing polarization between those who believe that our American society should incorporate fundamentalist Judeo-Christian beliefs and controls and those who believe that our society really should be left kind of Laissez-faire - less government is better.  It's a battle between social conservativism, not so much liberalism as libertarianism; just kind of leave us alone.

What I see happening is I see more, more and more government regulation, more and more government interference.  The US government suddenly tells schools that they should teach abstinence, tells schools that they can not teach sex education that actually involves sexuality.  They can teach biology but not sexuality.

At the same time, just as you said, not just in the Bay area but all around the world, I see this repressiveness created backlash - created all those who don’t necessarily follow the rule that says "my government should determine my morality." need a place to go.  I lead a workshop in love, intimacy and sexuality.  My workshop is really about choices.  It's about tolerance; it's about inviting people to be real.

I think human beings have vast arrays of ways to express their sexuality and we create an environment, Human Awareness Institute, that's www.hai.org.  We create workshops about choice, tolerance, about embracing all our differences.  And so who do is see?  I see people with very traditional morality and very traditional sexuality.  I also noticed that who shows up are people who don't necessarily fit the mold - people who are trying on multiple partners or who wants sexuality that's bigger than just a man or a woman or people that are gay or bisexual or transgender or intersexed.

People whose own sexuality doesn't fit in some narrowly defined norm that somebody tell that it should fit - they come to my workshops.  What they hear in my workshop, what they hear at HAI, at Human Awareness Institute is - the most important thing is that we learn to love each other, to learn to communicate with each other, that we trust, that we treat each other with dignity and respect, that we embrace our diversity because our diversity doesn't threaten each other.  How you lead your sex life doesn't threaten how I lead my sex life.

If we learned nothing else in the '60s, we certainly learned that sexual freedom doesn't bring down the government.  We still have the government.  It's funny we have our new Vietnam – it’s now Iraq.  In my opinion, it's a similar situation, right?  Here we are again trying to make the world safe for democracy.  I don't get it - that sexual freedom brought down the government.  I don't think it ever will.

Alissa:  Yeah, it's interesting and one of the reasons why I wanted to go there with the government and talk about these cycles and the repression because it is happening again.  There is a backlash; we live here in America and if people don't go out and travel around the world and see what's happening out there, and see that even...

Look at South America, there are all kinds of loving going on.  There are all kinds of openness and one of the things I like to bring to the forefront of this show for women is that there are choices.  There are options.  There are thins you can do.  There are ways and vehicles to express your self and to really know that even though our options, our choices on a governmental kind of level might be taken away; we have to really fight for those. 

We have to fight if we really want to know how to maintain love over time - how to do that and where to go to find things like that.  With the whole Summer of Love anniversary, it's such a perfect time to go back and look.  Guess what, that was going on then?  It's going on now.  They're the same issues, so what are we going to do.  The cycles keep happening.  We have to choose for ourselves - who we are, how we want to share ourselves, what kinds of relationships we want to have  - and at the same time know that there are many, many options especially with shows like mine and yours

Chip also has a show called Sex, Love and Intimacy on this network.  That's what we're doing; we're bringing this awareness to people.  Love is still important and it will always be because it resides inside of us - deep down somewhere.  We've got to undo this kind of societal norms about how we should be and really just follow our heart.

So I'm going to get off my pedestal and we're going to take a break.  We'll come back right.  This is Alissa Kriteman your host of Just for Women and Dating Relationships and Sex.  I'm with Chip August and we'll be right back.

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Alissa:  Welcome back to Just for Women:  Dating, Relationships and Sex.  I'm your host Alissa Kritemann.  We're here with the amazing Chip August, talking all about what happened during the Summer of Love. We talked a little bit on our first segment what happened with women and all the changes that have happened.  Now we're going to talk a little bit about what happened to men during the Sexual Revolution and what's going on now with men?  Chip?

Chip:  It was funny.  Again I was 14; I was trying to figure out what a guy is supposed to be, what a man is supposed to be.   It seems like the message in the mid-'60s to the late '60s was something about - we, men, we're supposed to be in touch with our sexuality and wanting to be sexual all the time, open to sexual experimentation, open to sexual playing.  There was a whole counterculture message which was "sex, love and dope." 

But what a real man is, is a guy who uses a certain amount of illegal substances because that's really cool, likes psychedelic rock and roll because that's really cool, and somehow rather is a sexual machine.  At the same time, there were our sisters, girlfriends, the women in our lives saying "Yes, and we want to be liberated also and we want to be treated as partners and we want to be treated as equals in this."

What I noticed happened is a few things.  One, for a lot of men, the whole thing just got really confusing.  It's as if a whole set of rules about how men are supposed to be with women.  You open doors for them.  You buy flowers for them.  You pay for the dates.  You treat the woman like she's some fragile flower.  Those rules all got thrown out and nobody really articulated what the new rules are.

For a while, there were no rules.  For a while I felt like...

Alissa:  [laughs]

Chip:  I just felt like everybody fucked everybody.

Alissa:  [laughs]

Chip:  I'm sorry but that's what I felt like.  Nobody was thinking very much about the rules.  We all wore...

Alissa:  Wore condoms.

Chip:  Wore condoms or health or a lot things.  Then an interesting thing happened, guys of my generation and guys of the next generation and maybe the guys of the next generation after that found themselves with an interesting dilemma:  how do I approach a woman for sexuality without demeaning her?  Because the women's lib, for a while, got pretty angry.  You had Gloria Steinem saying things like "A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle."  You had serious well thought of women's libbers saying that any act of sexuality between a man and a woman was rape because there was a power imbalance.  Man had the power and women didn't have the power, therefore any act of sexuality between a man and a woman was rape.

It's not like a few women were saying this.  This was a pretty loud message.  Go back and read Marilyn French's book "The Women's Room".  Oh my goodness gracious, it's so angry.

Alissa:  So women sort of gave up their right to even be sexual beings and if they were approached for some sexual exchange - it was really... Talk more about that.

Chip:  It was a pretty confusing message.  What we were told was:  women were your equal, be honest; be open.  Women want sex as much as men do.  At the same time we were told, if you're pursuing a woman for sex, some part of you is a rapist.  For a lot of men, that mixed message became intolerable.  A lot of different things came out of this.  All of the sudden, I think most of the new social conservativism moved away from women's rights.  The move away from this free sex era comes out of that confusion.

All of a sudden it became safer for a lot of man to just go to a conservative environment where the rules were the rules.  Men were supposed to ask; women were supposed to be nice about it.  Men were supposed to leave the dance floor; women were supposed to follow.  The natural order of things was that men should love women and none of this experimentation stuff.  I think that was where the backlash was from.

Men just could not figure out the rules.  The flipside of it was that a lot of men really just got left behind.  I meet them all the time.  They don't really know how to feel strong and secure in their manhood in any place outside of work.

Alissa:  Even today.

Chip:  Especially today.  What I meet are a whole group of men, many are them married and divorced, many of them with children, who really don't know how to be a man.  They don't feel comfortable being a man and this has been the rise of the men's movement.

This is why you see Robert Bly, Damon Parry, the new warrior movement - Justin Sterling and his work with teaching men on how to approach women and how to be with women.  There's a vast array of programs to try to teach man how to get back in touch with their manhood.  I think as a direct result of this mixed message which left men just feeling like the only places you could be a man, what was really clear was on the athletic field or in business. 

In the athletic field and business, all rules seem like "Oh, yeah.  I understand how those rules work."  Whew!  In dating, it was really challenging.  In sex, it was really challenging.  What I hear is that I lot of people's sexuality suffered from it because the men sort of wanted to lead but didn't know how to lead.  The women wanted the men to lead but didn't want to be bossed.  It has been a really interesting confusion that I'm watching people work out even today.

Alissa:  Interesting.  So this men's movement started happening when?  '80s?  '90s?  Because I know it's definitely alive and well today.  I can see there are even terms for man like "snag", this Sensitive New Age guy that seems to repulse women and then the metrosexual.  It's just amazing to me. There are all the terms for women, the "cougar", "kitten" and all these animal names that we give each other but definitely there's coinage for men as well.

I can see now that men are starting to group together to finally understand women - how to have relationships work.  So tell me a little bit more about this.  What this men's movement is about and how we as women can understand and pay attention to what are men need from us?

Chip:  I don't think there's one man's movement and it's my experience that the rise of the men's movement really happened starting... starting who knows when?  There had been men's workshops for as long as there had been men.  I think it's gotten a lot of publicity in the press starting in the late '70s and well into the '90s - that was the heyday of the men's movement.  But I've noticed the men's movements are going strong today. 

There are a lot of workshops out there for men to do.  What's the heart of it?  The heart of it is, at some point in all of these sexual identity confusion, in some point in all of these Sensitive New Age Guy, but also still be attractive to women and attractive to men, they'll be able to perform out there in the world and still how to be happy - men started to turn to other men and say "I don't know how to do this.  You don't know how to do this.  Let's support each other in figuring out this together."

When you caricature it, it's all these guys who go out in the woods and put on face paint on and scream and yell and beat up the trees.  You've seen enough caricatures of it in the movies and what not.  This isn't just a caricature.  These are real.  At the heart of it, we men are struggling for an identity which neither oppresses women nor oppresses other men and yet isn't so sensitive as New Age that there's no manliness in it.

I feel like what we men are doing is that we're trying to find our balls.  We're trying to find the way to be in our manliness without having to oppress others.  That's a pretty new concept.  A lot of men are in a lot of resentment about it.  "I'm accused of being the oppressor.  I'm accused of being in charge but I don't feel like in charge.  I feel just as oppressed as anybody else.  It's that dance that I'm watching happen where we're all trying to step out of the role of the oppressed or oppressor.

We're trying to step into a role of being powerful without confusing powerfulness with forcefulness.  Forceful is I'm just stronger than you; I can beat you up.  Is that powerful?  I don't know.  I think Gandhi was powerful.  I think Marianne Williamson was powerful.  But I don't think those are powerful who beat anybody up.  I think power is the ability to empower ourselves and empower others.

I don't think it really involves forcefulness.  I think we men and women are on our separate journeys, on our parallel journeys, to figure out how to be potent and powerful without being forceful, violent or oppressive.  That's a pretty fun thing to watch as we discover because what I do see is a lot of men finding a path between such a "snag" - a Sensitive New Age Guy - that they really can't get any of their desires met; find a path that's not bad but that's also not a pig, not a male chauvinist - "I'm in charge and everybody is going to.."   Find the path between those two things.  There's quite some joy in it.

Alissa:  I really love this because you are helping us understand as women, the spot that men are really in which I don't think we necessarily have known but we're starting to understand more and more.  We only know what we've been taught and trained.  We're conditioned to know about men, which is not that they have big hearts so much or that they're in this spot of understanding how to be a powerful man and not oppress people.  It's really sweet and beautiful if you look at it.  Wow!  Guys are just as clueless as we are sometimes.  It really takes this partnership, this dance of having compassion for this spot that we women have been in with all the ways we've been oppressed - not having any rights and inequality.

We can see as we're growing and maturing, to actually step outside and understand what guys are going through - similar but different.  At the same time, if women want to be empowered, we have to understand who men are and what they need.  So what are the couple of things you want to leave with women as to who men are, that you think women might not know?

Chip:  I'm a big one on noticing how we're similar rather than how we're different.  I noticed in the wake of a really clever title by John Gray that "Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus" - there's been this proliferation of the idea that men and women - we're from different planets, that we communicate differently.  We're so different.

I want to start from a point of view that we're not, that we're actually mostly the same. We're mostly searching for the same things.  When I survey, you know I lead workshops around the world and one of the questions I often ask in my workshop, I just ask people to say out the first thing that comes out of their mind when I ask them this question:  “Women, what do men want?”

Alissa:  Sex.  [laughs] 

Chip:  Exactly!

Alissa:  But that's OK.   Because we want it, too.

Chip:  That's exactly what women say.  Maybe not all the women but it's always the loudest voice in the room.  Then I ask the men:  OK, men.  What do women want?

Alissa:  Wait a minute.  Hold on.  This is great because I think we've been conditioned to think that.

Chip:  Don’t steal my punch line.

Alissa:  Oh!  Sorry!  [laughs]

Chip:  So, men, what do women want?  There'll be this pause and they'll look around a little bit and you're hear this group murmur "Money.  House.  Security."
I think deep in our culture this cliche that it's the men who want sex and the women want security.  I understand where it comes from.  But you know, when I ask people to look a little deeper and ask the same question again, it's the thing you were just alluding to.

It's not that women don't want sex.  It's not that men don't want security.  It's actually not about sex or security but as it turns out, what everybody wants is to feel loved and appreciated.  Everybody wants to receive.  Everybody wants to feel like their love matters and it doesn't have to be expressed in a different way- like however they expressed it, it gets received.

At some level, the sex we want isn't necessarily just a piece of skin with a little pop.  No, it isn't.  It isn't about procreation.  I turns out that maybe the sex that we want - my friend Stan Dale who was my mentor just passed away last month - he used to say that sex was an acronym and that he really thought that what sex was - spiritual energy exchange, sensual energy exchange, sometimes sexual energy exchange.  Sex is this profound meeting where love, intimacy, sexuality all meet together where our souls join, where communication happens at a pretty profound and deep level that it's so much more than just a piece of skin and a piece of skin with a little pop.

That's procreation.  That's the biology of sex.  But sex is so much more than that and what men and women really want, what we all really want - we want to feel loved and honored and received.  We want to feel that we're able to receive pleasure and give pleasure to those that we really care about.  We want joy.  We want to feel like our love matters.  Those are the things.  Men often look for love with their penises.  We want to be held.  The metaphor is that "Well, if i can have sex; then I'll get held." 

I understand that society has pushed us into that corner - that it’s a wimpy thing as a guy to go up to a woman to say "What I really want to do is just hold you."  It doesn't feel masculine but I really believe that probably 75 to 85 percent of the sex that happens, happens because some guy really wants the softness in the light of the partner, to be holding him and to be gentle with him and also to be honoring the sexual feelings that come up.

I think women want the same thing.  Women want to be held.  When I asked men and women, "How many of you had ever had sex when you really didn't want to?"  It's the same percentage of hands that go up, whether it's men or women. 

Alissa:  Wow!

Chip:  It's the same percentage of hands because again, we don't know what to do.  So we have intercourse because we don't know how to have the thing we really want and we hope that the intercourse will lead to it.

I think the heart of what I learned from the Summer of Love that is still true today, that I wish people could embrace, would be that all human behavior could be seen as acts of love or cries for love.  If you just chose to see all behavior either as act of love or cry for love and respond to it either being grateful for the act of love or offering love for the cry for love; magic happens.

Alissa: What a beautiful way to tie end our conversation about how love has changed over the past 40 years, and what we've gone through as men and women in this quest for love - and I love that.   Maybe one of the things we can take a way is really a little bit deeper sense of compassion, having gratitude for the love that does come into our life in the moment and really just stopping and noticing anything that's not love - what it is- a cry for love and maybe we can offer that instead of having a reaction or perpetuating some kind of drama that might happen.  I really, really love that.

Chip, thank you so much.  Tell us a little bit about where we can find you.  I know as we said before you also have a really incredible show on the Personal Life Media network called Sex, Love and Intimacy.  Listeners, you can find Chip at chipaugust.com. 

He's got an incredible website with all kinds of information about sex, love, intimacy, emotion, anger.  You can find him for private coaching, learning more about his workshops.  He also has a show on the Personal Life Media network as well.  It's called Sex, Love and Intimacy.  He and I actually had a conversation recently, so check out that show.  We talked all about what I've been learning as a host of Just for Women.

Yeah, check out chipaugust.com and also if you'd like to email me, please do.  I'd love to hear your comments, ideas for any future shows you can email me at alissa a-l-i-s-s-a @ personallifemedia.com.  Where else can I find you, Chip?

Chip:  You can email me also at [email protected], all one word.  Please do listen to my blog.  Just come to the personallifemedia.com website, come listen to all our shows because I think you'll find a lot of loving things.  If you're interested in the workshops that I lead, come to h-a-i dot o-r-g -- hai.org.  You can learn more about the love, intimacy and sexuality workshops.

Alissa:  I love it.  Chip August, thank you so much for your deep insight and experience and really beautiful place that you come from - with love and really wanting people to understand and expand their ability to relate and know how to have a relationship that is founded in love. 

I'd love to have you back and talk more about this.  Thank you for being a part of this Summer of Love anniversary series.  This is Alissa Kriteman; your host of Just for Women:  Dating, Relationships and Sex.  We'll see you next time.

Announcer: Find more great shows like this on personallifemedia.com.