Report in Finnish Newspaper: Peaceful Mind with Falun Gong

The following article was published in the Finnish newspaper Lounais-Lappi on September 26th, 2005. It was written by Janica Karasti.

Instead of morning coffee, the Pekkarinen family in Oulu begin their day with meditation. Without it, the Falun Gong practitioners, Anja and Veijo Pekkarinen don’t feel properly awakened. "The exercise makes you wake up, it cleans the mind and make you alert", says Anja. The Pekkarinen family learned it four years ago.

"Since then I didn’t need to take any painkillers or suffer from insomnia. Before I also had heart problems, but now I don’t need any pills. The practice does lot of good things", says Anja. When Anja's husband discovered positive changes in her, he also got interested to try. "Something just fell into place, - even if we have been interested in these types of things before", says Veijo.

Effective practice

The best of all is that you are not tied up to anything. You can belong to any religion and still practise Falun Gong. It doesn’t cost anything, everything is unselfish. And nobody is dragged in. The couple say they do the exercises every day from 30 minutes until 1 hour.

You become warm and calm after the energy begins to move. Veijo add that in one practice you even can get sweaty, even if the movements are slow. So there must be some effect after all. During the practice the eyes are kept closed and the movements are done as correctly as possible.

At the same time you should be aware of your surrounding environment, and you should not get into a trance. During the summer the practitioners in Oulu gather once a week to do the practice in Linnasaari Park. Passers-by wonder about the group of people doing the peaceful practice so synchronised.

"People are interested in what we are doing and they tell us that when watching us doing the exercises they also calm down. Children can even sit next to us and watch," Anja exclaimed.

Because practitioners strive to reach a clean mind as possible and to consider other people, the Pekkarinens’ marriage has also improved.

"We don’t any more have disputes about small trivial things. We try to find solution together, not a guilty one. We are also able to look within and ask for forgiveness. When you don’t think of your own advance other conflict can also get quickly resolved", Veijo thinks.

"To think of others seems to have become a strange phenomena," Anja fills in. Pekkarinen reminds her that nothing of course happens in the blink of an eye: "You need to practise and study in order to be able to change yourself."

Persecution also in Finland

Last spring Falun Gong became a hot subject when Finnish practitioners were terrorised by phone.

"I got phone calls. An advanced recorded information run in English and Chinese, it said Falun Gong was bad. In the background music was played, to scare even more," Anja says seriously.

The interference is small compared what Falun Gong practitioners in China have to go through. There practitioners have to endure torture, because the Chinese regime has completely banned this practice.

If the practitioner moves out from China, their family members can be persecuted and be tortured. At Internet homepages there are many torture “stories” and you read them with wet eyes.

Recently Anja was harassed by the Chinese embassy.

"We have a Falun Gong photo exhibition travelling around to different libraries in the Northern part of Finland. A Chinese man called me from the embassy and asked me to end the exhibition. I know that we do nothing wrong so any threat doesn’t scare me."

The photo exhibition arrives to Tornio’s main library on the 15ht of October 2005. Thereafter they plan to have Falun Gong introductions, and they hope that Tornio will soon have its own practice group.