United Kingdom: Practitioners Take Part in the 'Peace Jam' at Bradford University

On a wet and dreary Sunday March 4th, four practitioners from Yorkshire were invited to participate in ‘Peace Jam’, an event held in Bradford University. Peace Jam is an international peace education programme that works with Nobel Peace Laureates to educate youngsters, aged between thirteen and seventeen years old in foundations of freedom, justice and peace in the world.

Luckily, the room was just large enough to cater for fifteen people: twelve students, and three mentors who had chosen to learn about Falun Gong from a list of options. The session was for one and half hours, which proved to be really quite a short time.

After a brief introductory talk on the origins of Falun Gong, the first two parts of a documentary DVD entitled ‘The Untold Story of Falun Dafa’ were shown. In the first part practitioners talk about the health benefits of Falun Gong and the second provided information on the persecution. All the students remained very quiet and attentive for the duration.

Then it was then their turn to participate and learn the Falun Gong exercises. The room was cleared and a space created to perform the movements. Exercise one was demonstrated by Master Li on VCD then talked through by a practitioner and performed slowly, while the participants followed the movements. By exercise two the participants were way ahead of the practitioner and copied the movements in line with Master Li. We just stood and watched. It was great to see the enthusiasm.

After doing exercises three and five the exercise demonstration was drawn to a close, leaving just enough time for questions and answers. Students asked, “Who is Master Li & how often do you exercise?” Before leaving, the students were eager to sign petition forms, collect leaflets, VCD’s and hand-folded paper lotus flowers.