[Music]
it's an early sunday morning
in veterans park otisville upstate new
york
at a time of year when the trees are
still green but the mornings are
starting to have a slight chill in the
air
people of various ages ethnicities and
backgrounds
slowly begin to fill up the otherwise
empty park
they move quietly into a circle with
their eyes closed perform graceful slow
movements
following meditation music from a loud
speaker placed in the middle
i think in the us a lot of people think
it's
basically strictly a chinese thing but
it involves meditation
probably some persecuted group
and maybe you have to wear a yellow
t-shirt to do it
for the last 20 years you've heard
journalists talking about them on the tv
and radio
you've seen them holding rallies and
peace protests around the world
they are practitioners of falun gong
in the 90s falun gong grew rapidly and
was celebrated throughout china
by 1999 100 million chinese practiced
but for the past 21 years the chinese
communist party
or ccp has tried everything in its power
to eliminate it
the regime has spent billions and
billions year after year
trying to keep the lid on the falun gong
issue
only now recently with the pandemic have
people seen the mask come off
media in the west have done little to
expose these crimes against humanity
so falun gong practitioners inside and
outside of china
have mobilized to tell the world the
truth
[Music]
who are these people what motivates them
and how might their struggle to expose
the ccp
have far-reaching implications for all
of us
one day when i was in the bookstore in
the chinese history section i came
across the book falun gong which had
been kind of
mis categorized and put in the wrong
place
so when i when i picked up the book and
i started looking through it i was like
wow
this is this looks like what i'm looking
for actually
it's that energy related
practice rather than martial arts so i
i took it home and that night i just
read it cover to cover is
it was mind-blowing it all started to
come into focus that i had actually seen
practitioners on my campus at college
exercising
and i was like oh that's what they're
doing over there
so then the next day i went out and met
up with them and they taught me the
exercises
um i was doing the the third exercise
where you bring your hands past your
eyes
and my eyes were closed but when i did
this there's like a really bright light
every time my hands went past my eyes
and i was like
i was shocked i was like my heart
started pounding really quick i was like
this is real like the the energy is
actually real i mean i had done a lot of
meditation in my life
but after this i never felt lighter in
my entire life i
the experience is it's almost hard to
describe but i felt like i was floating
and i remember walking away from the
park back to i was living in new york
city at the time back to the
subway and i just the whole time i just
felt like my feet were barely touching
the ground i just was floating
and i said i need you i need to learn
more i want to know everything about
this
in china it was very mainstream
and this kind of practice has been part
of their culture for a very
long time there's a physical element
like kind of like you might find in yoga
and then there's a spiritual element and
this is an
ancient kind of practice you would find
in china and throughout asia for
thousands of years
it wasn't the specifics of what i was
reading
that drew me to it it was
it was the perspective he was coming
from that felt
so complete and compassionate
and strong and authoritative you can
only be that strong when you know
something
that well and and as i read i was only
being reaffirmed
more and more why there was so much
confidence behind the words i was
reading
i had been spending a lot of money
traveling to all these different courses
and studying all these different things
from iridology to acupuncture
other forms of qigong and i was spending
a lot of money and i thought for sure
tomorrow they were going to start
charging for this so i started printing
everything off that i
i could and took it home and read it i
remember when i first practiced
i went to the park and a practitioner
told me how to do the exercise
after that he didn't ask me about my
name or my contact information
all the all the practitioners at the
spot just smile at each other
and they pick up their back and they
left and i was
like because i was a little nervous i
was how refreshing
because it's not like everybody try to
get your contact information as to when
you're gonna come next time
the way i was in life before picking up
the practice is that when i was very
diplomatic and i don't mean that
necessarily
in a good way i'd walk into a room and i
would kind of
change my personality what i was
advocating for or not
depending on who's in the room i don't
want to ruffle any feathers this kind of
thing and it
it always bothered me one of the things
i noticed in myself
after studying the principles of falun
gong is
that changed i could walk into a room
and be very comfortable first
starting from a principal standpoint
what do i think is right here what do i
think is wrong and even if everybody in
the room is sort of against it or
i look up to them and i don't want to
you know perhaps offend them
i was much more natural it wasn't
something i had to force
it was very sort of natural to say folks
here's where i think we stand and that's
it sounds like a simple thing but it's
tremendously liberating
about six months after i started
practicing i went to texas because
john zamen the former leader of the
communist party went to texas to meet
with
president bush at the time and
so a lot of practitioners went there to
to basically protest and show banners
telling the leader to stop persecuting
falun gong
so again i was very new in the practice
but when i went there
it was like being in a sea of just
incredibly nice
friendly people they were there truly to
peacefully
demonstrate and call for help really
and there's you know over the years like
the term protest takes on different
meanings right
many years ago my husband and i had a
few people come over to our house
to work on an advocacy project and these
were all people who practiced while
indafa
so we were there to talk about what we
were going to do for the project
well after everyone went home
we found on our answering machine a
recording of
us speaking in our living room
now you might think oh it was a hip dial
no it wasn't
because that same evening other people
who were at the meeting
called us and they said you'll never
guess what happened there's a recording
of our meeting
on my voicemail at home so this happened
to several people's landlines actually
when they got home
um so we realized it was probably an
intimidation attempt of some kind so we
reported it to the fbi um
the fbi gave us a meeting so my husband
and i went and met with them
and we talked about what happened and
they asked us one question they said
do you guys have children and we said no
and they said
good because you're up against a giant
so that sentence has stayed with me
for a long time you know they've been
persecuted for 21 years in china
and they're still peaceful they're still
trying to think of creative ways to stop
the persecution without
hurting people you know and it's just a
remarkable
group of people uh everybody's nice and
everybody's nice when their self
interest isn't involved when they're
dealing with you
but i think what sets practitioners
apart is that
practitioners require of themselves to
be
better people and they require
themselves to
consider others before themselves and i
think if we were to put
somebody as nice i think that's
genuinely nice and that's not
nice when it's convenient for them to be
nice and not nice when
their interests are at stake one time i
was working with a practitioner
uh when i was in college and i thought
this
moment was very defining uh in terms of
being a practitioner
i woke up late in an activity that we
were doing together
and i was supposed to deliver some audio
equipment for
the practitioner and
when i woke up i already saw i was maybe
30 40 minutes
past the time that we were supposed to
meet and i felt
really bad about it and so i ran it took
me maybe 10 minutes to get to the
location we were supposed to meet
and he was just patiently waiting there
uh didn't say a word had a smile on his
face and i kept him waiting for so long
and it was because i was careless but
he didn't say a single thing i
apologized and he said oh it's nothing
don't worry but i knew he had work
that day and he had to get back to his
job and i was just uh
i thought that moment really
encapsulated what being a practitioner
is
they didn't bear any grudges they
weren't upset
and very patient and he just said don't
worry about it it's okay
[Music]
what matters is now we're able to do
this now it's okay
[Music]
from our perspective the falun gong
community
one of the principles we believe in is
karma everything you do
comes back to you you do something
horrible something horrible is going to
come back to you you do something
good something good comes back to you
what think about what it takes to
have a prison guard he's a father he's
got kids he's got a wife at home
and because of the propaganda because
the state is insisting that he
persecute falun gong practitioners and
forced them to give up their belief
this otherwise perhaps decent man is now
the implement of persecution perhaps
even a torturer
what does it do to that man's life what
does it do to his family
his community that's very much in our
minds
if you think about the persecution it's
really a mechanism
for a whole lot of people to do horrible
things
and that's all going to come back to all
of us and so it's not just about
ourselves it is about that but it's not
just about that
it's also everybody who's been caught up
in this
helping them break free from this entire
system that is
a persecution system set out by the ccp
free the falun gong practitioners so
they're no longer victims
free the persecutioners so they're no
longer implements of that persecution
everybody's being victimized by this in
one way or another
and that's the real motivation you know
there were 70 to 100 million people
chinese people
practicing falun gong they had to
justify this persecution
they had to get people to act the
persecution out to
actually do the torturing the arresting
and the turning in of practitioners
because practitioners became good
neighbors good people like it changed
people right good workers good employees
all of that
and so they had to figure out how to
make this persecution actually happen
and so they used their state-run media
to defame
the reputation of falun gong
practitioners and so they
created a lot of propaganda against
falun gong
that people had to listen to through the
radios through the tvs through
everything all
you know on the subway on on the trains
day in
and day out day in and day out so that
they could justify
arresting and taking in busloads
busloads of people
every single day in major cities in
front of everybody the practitioners
for years they were trying to reach the
media but because the first thing that
came out of china in 1999
was the propaganda and it came out in
force like the regime
is a skilled tactician in propaganda and
controlling people's minds essentially
so as soon as the persecution started
they just
unleashed this onslaught of propaganda
and the media
just took that and published it as fact
they didn't do any research they didn't
ask
any practitioners united states and of
course the access that they'd be given
in china would be very
tailored and you know carefully crafted
so they didn't have any truth they
repeated the propaganda and that's kind
of what stuck
so because they couldn't get a fair
shake in the media
they had to go this grassroots method
handing out flyers having parades
you know having different events on
their own and then
you know in times where it's like people
don't quite get it
they'll just look at the group from afar
and be like oh there's a bunch of people
wearing gold and yellow
what are they doing over there or like
you know a lot of them are from china
they don't speak english
so they're having these rallies in
chinese so it's hard for people to
connect and relate to those things
so a lot of times the first impression
is kind of what sticks with you i'm very
lucky because
i speak chinese fluently so
i have many opportunities to
come across people from china at work
and i always
try to clarify the truth to them about
falun dafa
because i found that almost always
a lot of chinese people had
misunderstandings about falun gong the
fact that
we're a bunch of grassroots people and
we're up against
a communist foreign state using pretty
much every tool in its apparatus to
attack us
meant that it's been very difficult uh
these 20 years
to get people to be clear first of all
on what falun gong is
and second of all to be clear what's
happening in them in china
because obviously the communist party
doesn't let people into china they're
not going to let people sort of
there's no transparency into their
prison system or their there's a
judicial system or the police
and so what they're doing is very very
veiled and so it's been
up to us and it's also very heroically
been up to the practitioners inside
china who have been the ones who are
literally going door to door in every
single town
village and city across china to explain
to people what's really happening to
falun gong
practitioners continued commitment to
non-violence
and to love their persecutors is
incredible i mean what everyone has been
through
the amount of torture people i know have
been through
it's a tremendous risk inside china when
when falun gong practitioners go out and
try and explain what's happening to them
but
i think the the the point of view is
that
that's the most effective and really the
only thing they can do
the chinese communist party controls
completely the media
the government the judicial system the
police
but if enough people come to realize
what falun gong is really about
and what the persecution is really about
at some point
they'd stop doing it and that's exactly
what's been happening this is i think
one of the real sort of small miracles
that's inside china is that
you're starting to see in the last
several years there are little villages
or towns
where the policeman in charge is like
you know what i'm not doing this anymore
because for the last decade he's been
having practitioners that are in his
town
come up and explain to him hey this is
what falun gong is about
hey do you know what they're doing in
the prison down the street do you know
who's torturing this person
you know this person lost her son this
person lost their whole family
at some point that reaches the human
heart as we know communism was kind of
an import
into china it's not part of chinese
culture but unfortunately
that's the ruling party right now
and they don't allow faith you know in
many respects but
traditional chinese culture involved a
lot of faith elements
so it's helpful you know not to view
chinese people or china
negatively and to remember that it was
once a
very glorious culture and civilization
and on some level a lot of people still
have that in them somewhere
um but because of the regime that they
have been under and
they've been through a lot you know it's
helpful to be compassionate toward them
as well
because they've been through a
tremendous amount falun gong is
tremendously good for the world for a
number of reasons one is
if everybody tries to become a better
person
your community gets better your society
gets better it's just
it has this huge domino effect where
everything improves together
i believe it's important for people to
know the truth of fault and alpha
because the free world
is at stake i think
if you look at what practitioners are
going through
as a microcosm of what the entire world
is experiencing right now
then it's critically important for
people to
understand what practitioners went
through in the persecution
of the last 20-something years and what
the whole world would face
if they're not careful and if they don't
learn from the
experiences that practitioners went
through in the last 20 something years
[Applause]
[Music]
please
[Music]
you