(Clearwisdom.net) In 2008 my wife and I went to North America to visit our child. To our surprise, we found that Falun Gong, which is severely suppressed by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in China, had received many proclamations from various levels of governments and councils/congresses from many countries. We also saw Falun Gong practitioners, male and female, old and young, doing exercises in Chinatown. Moreover, many of the practitioners were Westerners!
We couldn't help wondering, with Falun Gong being demonized and brutally suppressed in China, practitioners openly appear in North America, a country with a sound legal system. Has the North American society, with its advanced technological and cultural development, lost its ability to tell right from wrong? Were those North Americans, most of whom have a higher education levels, stupid? In China, when “Falun Gong” is mentioned, many people will talk about the “Tiananmen Self-Immolation” (not realizing that it was a CCP-staged incident to defame Falun Gong). Why weren't there any self-immolators in North America? Not even a single case?
Thinking rationally, if a person wanted to burn himself to death, wouldn't he choose a place where no one was around to stop him? But those people picked a place full of people. Didn't they purposely create trouble for themselves? Did they really want to set themselves on fire or were they just acting? Usually, anyone who goes to Tiananmen Square to self-immolate must have been treated terribly, and is there to draw attention to his situation, and thereby with hope to change it. But why didn't any media ever report on their grievances? Seeing people in North America freely doing the exercises, those questions that had bothered us before popped up again. We then came to understand that the “Tiananmen Self-immolation” was just a low-level intelligence test question. Anyone with average intelligence, after giving it a little thought, would find many holes in it.
My wife and I had practiced Tai Chi exercises before. When the CCP started persecuting Falun Gong, they didn't allow people to practice other exercises in public either. Though my wife didn't have major illnesses, she felt back pain and arm pain from time to time. When we arrived in North America, her pain got worse day by day. Eventually, it was even difficult for her to get into bed or to get up. We practiced our exercises intensively. We performed Tai Chi again and again. We also tried Chinese cupping. But she still felt pain. We became desperate. She started to have such severe pain after we arrived here, how could we stay here for any length of time with her suffering so much?
We read local Chinese newspapers. We liked the Epoch Times the most. Since we had come to a democratic, free Western country, of course we thought that we should read something that we couldn't read in China. We were very tired of the stereotypical articles published in China. The articles in the Epoch Times that mentioned Falun Gong's effectiveness in healing illness made our eyes pop open. Shouldn't we give it a try?
The good thing was that in the West, the Internet isn't censored or filtered and we rarely got the message “the page can't be found.” It was easy for us to find a Falun Gong website and the Minghui website (Chinese version of Clearwisdom.net). We downloaded the video to learn the exercises and read the related sharing articles. Thus, my wife started following along to do the exercises.
After a few days, she told me, “This exercise is very good!” “How?” I asked. She said, “I used to feel like I was tied up and whatever part of my body I moved would hurt. But as I kept practicing Falun Gong, I felt that I became untied. It was quite comfortable.” I answered, “Since it's good, I'll try it!”
In this way, I followed my wife and also learned the exercises. From a veteran practitioners' experiences we understood that only doing the exercises is not enough. We should also repeatedly read Zhuan Falun, pay attention to cultivating our xinxing, strictly follow the requirements of Truthfulness-Compassion-Forbearance to be good persons, and look within, not outside ourselves, when we run into difficulties.
We had been doing the Falun Gong exercises for over a year when we returned to China. During that time, we were never sick, though we experienced flu symptoms from time to time. My wife's back pain and shoulder pain had disappeared. There were a few times when the symptoms reappeared, but we knew that it was for her to eliminate karma. Therefore we were not worried, nor did she need any medicine. Each time, she returned to normal in a short time. In the past, whenever we went on a long trip, we always brought along all kinds of Chinese medicines and Western medicines for common ailments experienced by older people. Now we don't take any medicine with us. We are quite confident about our bodies, and feel young again. Many people who know us envy our good health.
After returning to China, we played the exercise-teaching video and Master Li's Fa-lecture audio for our relatives and good friends. They also benefited from it. They all have a same thought, “It is such a good exercise that benefits both individuals and society, but the CCP doesn't allow people to access it. It is a good Buddha school teaching that originated in China, but we are forced to go to the West to obtain it.”