My father-in-law doesn’t like how often I use the “L word”.  When he listens to me say “I love you” to my wife and kids, or when he receives cards, letters and email signed “Love, c”; he frowns, scowls, and often complains to me that, by using “love” so often, I’m contributing to a societal trend that seems to be robbing the word of all meaning.  As he has often explained, conversational “love” is becoming as meaningless as “Have a good day.”

When I think about my childhood, I can’t remember my own parents using the L-word very much, if at all.  I’m certain that I was loved, as were my 4 siblings, I just don’t remember it being talked about or mentioned.  And I don’t recall ever hearing my Dad tell my Mom “I love you” (nor my Mom telling my Dad).  Again, I’m certain they loved each other, I just don’t remember it being spoken.

I am the middle child of 5 kids and the product of of a substance abuse environment - Dad was a drunk (calling him an alcoholic seems to imply some attempt at recovery and, as far as I can tell, there was practically none).  I have a lot of the symptoms of “middle child syndrome“: craving attention, feeling that I’ll always be ignored, feeling that there is not enough love for me, feeling that life will always have me trying to catch up to my older brother (I want to be #1 and rarely feel I am).

I think my frequent use of “I love you” and all the other ways I try to use the L-word stem from a feeling that, in my early life, I didn’t hear it enough, and I feel some sort of internal deficit.  I give what I hope to get.  Also, as a Dad, I tell my kids as often as I can, in some measure to avoid being like my Dad, and because I adore my kids and want to be sure they know it.

What triggered this post is a terrifically written rant -“I Just Called to Say I Love You” by Jonathan Franzen - about his discomfort with, among other things, rude cell phone users and their all too frequent, too public, too loud I-love-yous.

My father-in-law and I have an uneasy truce about all this: he suffers hearing it, and occasionally reciprocates; I courteously listen to his complaint about it.  Meanwhile, I freely offer verbal love messages as often as I can.  And I encourage others to do the same.

OMG Thanksgiving is here already! Where did the year go? Here’s a short list of what I’m thankful for.

I’m thankful for:

• My beautiful and loving partner.
• My gorgeous, wise, brilliant daughter.
• My handsome, smart, funny, sensitive step-son.
• My beautiful, happy home.
• My Mom and our sweet relationship.
• My generous, loving in-laws.
• The opportunity to love people for my career.
• My friends and the sweet love they rain down on me.
• My great podcast guests, who teach me something new each week.
• Tim & Susan Bratton, founders of Personal Life Media, for their endless loving support.
• All my podcast and blog audience.
• My sponsors.
• My fellow Human Awareness Institute (HAI) facilitators - friends and colleagues and so much more.
• Janet Dale, COO of (HAI), holder of the light, the rock on which HAI stands.
• Stan Dale, my friend, mentor, teacher, surrogate father, who helped me open my heart, helped me dream my dream, then taught me how to have my dreams come true (I miss you every day).
• My country, land of opportunity.
• Every single day, every hour, every minute, every second…because every second I get a second chance to choose love.

Happy Thanksgiving to you and yours.

love

c

Recently I’ve been thinking about “men” and “men’s work”.  I had a great interview with Ken Solin about his book – The Key to the Men’s Room:  What Men Talk About When Women Aren’t Around.  Ken and I talked about men’s pride and pain, hopes and fears, failures and triumphs, in the service of learning how to be better men.

As I thought about Ken’s ideas on how men can support each other, I noticed how different my closeness to men is compared to my relationships with women.  When I have the rare crisis in my life the three top-of-my-list people I’m most likely to call are all women.  I have a half-a-dozen or more men that I consider close friends, but the conversations with them happen after I’ve talked it out with my “best” friends.

I think a lot of men are like me in this. What with our “father wound” and our “be-a-man training”, a lot of us guys have a life-long history of superficial associations with each other.   Maybe we played on teams together or were Boy Scouts together, but by the time adulthood arrives, a lot of men have learned to bring their deepest feelings to women.  It’s as if we men think that women can teach us to be better men – which is probably true, and also not really possible.  (I wonder how different it is for gay men?  And I can’t help but notice that even my gay friends often have closer friendships with women.)

Thinking about all this has me reaching out to my men friends a bit more, looking for some joyful male bonding.  And I’m appreciating the women in my life who help me be a better man and I’m appreciating the men in my life who help me be a better man.

1. Choose love.  Be love.  See love.
2. Forgive.
3. Free your heart from hatred.

4. Free your mind from worry.

5. Ask for what you want.

6. Love what you get.

7. Give freely.

8. Expect nothing.

9. Tell the truth.

10. Repeat steps 1 through 10 as desired.

I was a one-year-old in 1954 when the Supreme Court ruled against segregation in public schools in Brown vs The Board of Education.  When I was 2 years old, in December of 1955 Rosa Parks, a seamstress in Montgomery, Alabama, refused to give up her seat to a white passenger on a city bus. The bus driver had her arrested.  After a 381 day boycott of public transportation, the US Supreme Court ruled that segregation of public transportation was unconstitutional.

Just after my 4th birthday the “Little Rock Nine” required federal troops to escort them to high school.  I was almost 7 when four black students from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College begin a sit-in at a segregated Woolworth’s lunch counter.  The following year was the time of the “freedom riders“, student volunteers harassed and beaten for taking bus trips through the South to test out new laws that prohibited segregation in interstate travel facilities.

When I was ten, in 1963, Martin Luther King, Jr. was jailed in Birmingham, Mississippi’s NAACP field secretary, 37-year-old Medgar Evers, was murdered outside his home, Martin Luther King delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech, Four young girls (Denise McNair, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson, and Addie Mae Collins) attending Sunday school were killed when a bomb explodes at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, a popular location for civil rights meetings, and JFK was gunned down in Dallas Texas.
I was twelve in 1965 when Malcolm X was murdered.  That was the year that we watched on television when Blacks begin a march to Montgomery in support of voting rights and were stopped at the Pettus Bridge by a police blockade. Fifty marchers were hospitalized after police used tear gas, whips, and clubs against them.

In 1968, when I was almost 15 years old, Martin Luther King, Jr. was murdered in Memphis Tennessee and Bobby Kennedy was murdered in LA.  I grew up in a violent, racist, frightened nation, when Black Americans were routinely treated as less-than human.

Last night I cried listening to Barrack Hussein Obama’s acceptance speech.  While I know Obama’s election does not automatically end racism and bigotry in the US.  As Winston Churchill said in another context, “…this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”  I am filled with hope.

The elections are upon us.

According to those who have chosen their candidate - the other guy is too old, too young, to radical, too conservative, too black, too white, too new, too entrenched in the old, too urban, too rural, too Northern, too Southern, too Country & Western, too Rock & Roll…too wrong.  Anyone who believes the b.s. that the other guy is spouting is not to be listened to. And anyone who can’t see that my guy is the only honest person in the race is just deluded.

Sound familiar?  Sex, love and intimacy can often be the casualty of politics, particularly in an election year.  As the election nears it gets more and more challenging to maintain our loving, intimate connections with loved ones who do not agree with our political decisions.  It’s fine to say “we’ll agree to disagree,” but frequently those disagreements challenge our ability to listen with empathy and acceptance.

The single best “listening tool” I’ve ever learned is “Active Listening“.  Listening to someone with genuine curiosity and with the “agenda” that the person speaking has the experience of being heard.  Active listening has been a respected parenting tool for decades, introduced to most Americans by Dr. Thomas Gordon and his book “P.E.T.: Parent Effectiveness Training”
Dr. Gordon’s work continues through the Gordon Training Institute (GTI), which just posted a great article titled  “Just Because You’re Hearing Doesn’t Mean You’re Listening” helping people communicate respectfully at work or school.

I was trained as a Parent Educator at GTI and use PET everyday - with my children, my partner, my co-workers, my neighbors, my parents, even with people I’m just meeting.  The skill to listen well may be the best intimacy tool I’ll ever learn.  On my site you’ll find a great article titled “Help is as Easy as Listening.”

Please vote.

I have a new sponsor - Adam and Eve (Sex toys and movies for men, women and couples).  So I went poking around their site, looking to get something for my sweetie and me.

Wow!  What a garden of earthly delights.  At first I was quite overwhelmed.  So many products and categories.  Do I want to give her a new vibrator?  Nipple jewelry?  Maybe some non-threatening BDSM supplies? Lingerie?  Or maybe something we can share, like an anal toy?  Oils, lotions and potions?  Some video?  Ah, so many things that might titillate, tantalize and turn on my sweetie.

I just met Deborah Sundahl at the Lotus Conference and Workshop.  She’s one of the foremost experts on the G-spot (or, as she likes to call it, the female prostate) and female ejaculation.  I really liked getting to know her and she taught me a lot about female anatomy and orgasm.  That’s probably why I drifted to the “G-Spot Vibrators” section of AdamAndEve.com.

I knew when I saw it - the Wild G-Spot Vibrator.  According to the info on the website:

• The special Triple-Pronged Stimulators are designed to tickle and tease your clitoris and the sensitive surrounding nerves as well to further enhance your pleasure and deliver stronger orgasms.
• The Spinning Metal Beads massage your G Spot, labia and other erogenous zones – feeling just like tongue rings exploring your body!
• The Curved G Spot Tip spins and wiggles in a circular motion to provide you with a more life-like experience while also stimulating your entire vagina.

I’ve often wondered whether these complex vibrators actually work any better than her trusty old Magic Wand.  We gave it a thorough (and delightful) test drive last night, and I can safely report that my sweetie was definitely titillated, tantalized and turned on!  I don’t think she’s going to replace the wand (or me) with the Wild G, but I know we’re going to using it again and again and again…

As a gift to you, fans of “Sex Love & Intimacy”, when you shop at Adam and Eve you’ll get 50% off on just about any item.  All you need to do is type my name - CHIP - for the offer code at checkout.  And if you spend $17 or more Adam and Eve will send you a FREE gift.

Join me at the 2008 - Reuniting Spirituality & Sexuality Conference

“One should rather die than be betrayed. There is no deceit in death. It delivers precisely what it has promised.  Betrayal, though … betrayal is the willful slaughter of hope.” -  Steven Deitz (American Playwright).

Sooner or later - no matter your good your intentions, no matter your commitment to love and honor, no matter your ethical code, belief system, religion or spiritual path - if you choose to love and be loved you will one day be betrayed (and at least once be the betrayer).  And I’m a pretty cheerful guy who thinks of himself as an optimist-by-choice.

I like to think that these betrayals are rare and either unavoidable or unintended.  (I’m aware that some people really think nothing of betraying themselves and others.  Thankfully, these people are relatively few in the world that I inhabit.  I hope that they are the exception in your world, too.)

Today I’m meditating on the choices we face after feeling betrayed.  For the longest time I thought the only sensible response to betrayal was to cease trusting the betrayer, closing my heart and dropping the betrayer from my life.  After all, how can someone prove they are trustworthy after they have clearly demonstrated they are not trustworthy?   In my mind, any alternative to closing my heart would involve inviting a known betrayer into my life, again.  “Fool me once - shame on you.  Fool me twice - shame on me” as the saying goes.

As I’ve gotten older, and hopefully a bit wiser, I begin to see the flaws in that approach.  I pose a question to myself:  Who owns my heart?  I ‘m pretty sure I own my heart, but if I buy into the I-can-never-trust-you argument, then apparently I’m forced to expel you from my heart.  In a way, I have stopped being in charge of my heart.  Perhaps this is the “willful slaughter of hope” that Deitz is talking about?

With my children, I notice that nothing they can ever do or say will have me stop loving them.  I choose to love them.  End of sentence.  I begin to see betrayal as another of those opportunities for growth - perhaps a fucking opportunity rather than a gorgeous opportunity - but an opportunity nonetheless.

I choose love.  Usually that choice brings me joy.  Sometimes it brings me confusion. uncertainty.  Sometimes choosing love is painful.  Sometimes it seems downright self-destructive.  And, I choose love.

I spent 30 years of my life chasing after an orgasm like the ones I saw and read about in books and movies.  You know the orgasm I mean - when the earth moves, when you are transported into an alternate reality, when you laugh and cry, when you feel “at one” with the universe.  I looked for that orgasm in choosing partners.  I looked for it in trying to act like I already had found it.  I looked for the “how-to” book that would explain it step by step.

And I gave up looking for it.  I decided it was a lie, that no one really had orgasms like that.  So I stopped looking and nursed my disappointment.

And then, in my forties, I participated in an extraordinary weekend workshop produced by the Human Awareness Institute and lead by Stan Dale, its founder.  Stan didn’t teach sexual technique.  Stan didn’t talk about orgasm.  The workshop was an experiential exploration of love, intimacy and sexuality.

And somewhere in that weekend I began to discover that the goal of my search, that elusive earth-shaking orgasm was, in fact, something about integrating spirituality with sexuality. I found myself looking into my heart and soul, nurturing and honoring my deep need to feel connected.  I opened to the reality that I had been searching in all the wrong places.  And I began to discover and explore the wonders of my loving heart.

For 18 years I have followed this path inward.  I have been an ardent student and a humble teacher.  And this month I have the unique opportunity to join 7 other teachers in the 2008 Lotus Conference and Workshop: Reuniting Sexuality and Spirituality, October 17, 18 & 19, in the suburbs of Minneapolis, Minnesota.

What a wonderful weekend awaits you in the form of a conference Reuniting Spirituality and Sexuality. The experience that we as couples and individuals have been awaiting, now in Minneapolis for the very first time. Women, be the best and incredibly empowered being. Raise your awareness of self and be  confident in both mind and body, with the help of therapists and teachers,  who guide you gently and well within your comfort zone. Men, there is a way to communicate with women and have the best possible relationship. For singles and couples, this conference is a must.

Eight experts in relationship, sexuality, and sacred sexuality will be revealing the tips, practices, and secrets of intimate relating from ancient cultures, and modern science.
Including - Deborah Sundahl, Mary Zalmanek, Chip August, Francesca Gentille,
Ina Mlekush, Harold Taitt, Ann Maxwell and Deborah Adele.

I hope I see you there.