Relationship Guides, Tantra Teachers, and Authors
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Pala and Al
We are Pala Copeland and Al Link. Sacred Loving is what we do full time, both in our living together and in our working together. We are following our bliss. Everything we teach is what we actually do in our own marriage to keep it fun, hot, emotionally rich and spiritually evolving. We have been practicing forms of sacred sexuality (Tantra and Taoist) since 1987 and working as relationship coaches and Tantra teachers since 1997.
We teach what really works for us and what has also worked for the hundreds of couples we have had the privilege to work with. We offer a toolbox of knowledge and skill from which to pick and choose what suits you and your style of loving. We encourage you to risk and dare, to learn new things and experiment with them to create the love you want and deserve.
Couples have come to our workshops from all over the world. We have had couples travel to our sessions from as far away as Hong Kong, New Zealand, Egypt, Israel, Norway, Holland, Belgium, France, Great Britain and Mexico. Of course people attend from all over North America, most states in the US and provinces in Canada. We have been privileged to work with Supreme Court justices, CEOs, artists, students, medical doctors, engineers, trades people, athletes, genome scientists, naturopaths, inventors, multi-millionaires, teachers, lawyers and computer programmers. People ranging in age from their 20s to the 70s attend our retreats.
Relationship as a Spiritual Practice
Pala was born in 1950, Al in 1945. Our relationship is one of the most essential elements of our lives, in fact we have consciously chosen to make our relationship the most important thing, our relationship is our spiritual practice. Using sacred sex (Tantric and Taoist) as the primary method of our spiritual practice, we engage fully in keeping our love alive, constantly growing, changing and deepening. We have been rewarded richly with regular experiences of union, transcendence and ecstasy, where the boundaries between us disappear and we wonder “whose orgasm is it anyway?”
While nothing lasts forever, we intend to grow old together and to stay as young as possible along the way. No one gets out of life alive, so we don’t want to live forever, but we do want life to be full of, well – life. Sex is a big part of how we love each other. We started out erotically charged and passionate in the 1980s and our monogamy is as hot today as it was then. Keeping the flames of passion burning indefinitely-the eternal flame-is not magic, it takes effort and attention.
We’re devoted to each other and to our 6 children and 7 grandchildren. Our preference is monogamy. Commitment in relationship offers a secure platform from which we can continue our spiritual work of healing, opening our hearts and welcoming God into our lives. Your relationship preference may be multiple partners, serial monogamy, polyamory or another fascinating variation. We have tried many ways of loving and found that for us monogamy works best, but the techniques we teach are applicable for all types of relationship.
Falling in Love vs Creating Love
We call falling in love, “falling” because it just happens to you. You don’t do it, you don’t make it happen, even though you participate in the happening. Most people over the age of 16 have fallen in love at least once. So in a sense, they know how to do it. They know how to fall in love, but most don’t know how to stay in love. They haven’t done it and they probably haven’t seen anyone else do it either. If you have even one role model of an enduring love-a stable and passionate romance-you are fortunate indeed.
Like most falls, falling out of love doesn’t feel very good when you finally hit bottom. Unless you have learned and practiced the skills of Sacred Loving – Spiritual Sex, it is difficult to graduate from falling in love over and over again, to creating a love that satisfies through and through and lasts forever with one partner. It lasts forever because it isn’t something that just happens to you, rather it is something that you have learned to create.
Once you learn to create love, you can continue to create more love, because love is by its nature abundant. The more you give, the more you can give and the more you will receive. Love is a lot like smiling, only much better. It is hard not to smile back at someone, and to feel a little bit better inside because of it. With love, some people seem to act as if they have a finite supply that they carry around in a little sack. They dispense just a bit of it from time to time, always fearful it will run out if they use it up. And sure enough, their experience convinces them that what is actually a grave error of judgment is reality. They create what they fear and live in a world of emotional scarcity. But they are like thirsty people walking in a rainstorm holding an umbrella over their head, unable to drink. In a sad way they create their own reality.
The real tragedy is not to have had a broken heart, but to have had only one. For some, the first broken heart is the last broken heart. People who stay young and alive, at any age, constantly learn new things. Since you are only as old as you feel, you can feel young at any age if you keep on learning new things. If you are honest about it, you will admit that learning involves failure, often repeated failure. In fact, many successful people fail frequently on their way to accomplishment and mastery. The problem is that when it comes to learning how to create love, failure can hurt really, really badly. For some, it hurts so bad they have made an internal decision never to allow themselves to feel that pain again. They shut themselves off from love to avoid pain. Unfortunately they may not only stop feeling pain, they usually stop feeling anything at all. No wonder life becomes boring! So-love and love some more, never counting the cost. Your rewards will be more than you’ve ever imagined.