Journey to Enlightenment
“Falun Gong encourages me to become a better person with each passing day. I’ve become healthier and far happier in my life, my work, and my relationships with others.”
Nick E, from Sydney [pictured above], doing the fifth exercise of Falun Gong: “Strengthening Divine Powers.”
Cultivating mind & body
The ancients believed that through disciplined spiritual practice, a human being is capable of transcending ordinary existence. They sought a higher state of being, free from the suffering and illusions of the ordinary world.
Attaining this state required moral rectitude, letting go of earthly desires, and the use of meditation and other techniques to improve mind and body.
Numerous schools of upright cultivation practice arose, each offering a principled path to spiritual growth.
These traditions were quietly passed down over the ages from masters to disciples.
Falun Gong is one such practice, and is now available to everyone.
The Five Exercises of Falun Gong
Qigong is a science of the human body that is not commonly explored or well understood in the West yet. Many practices of the East, on the other hand, including Chinese medicine, have acknowledged and studied life-energy, and its circulation through energy channels of the body for thousands of years. Understanding of the energy channels and how they can be unblocked, opened, and widened for health benefits, is the foundation of traditional healing systems of the East.
Similarly, qigong practices teach how to work with the life-energy of the body, how to improve its circulation inside the body, and at advanced levels, it even talks about transforming the life-energy of the body into more potent energy, called gong.
Qigong exercises are often very slow-moving, sometimes even completely motionless. The practice of Falun Gong offers four standing exercises that include stretching movements, holding still positions, and slow movements that lead the energy through the body. It also includes sitting meditation.
Falun Gong’s Health Benefits
Several health studies (conducted in China, the United States, Russia, & Australia), including clinically controlled, peer-reviewed research at leading medical facilities, have begun to explore and confirm the positive, and sometimes dramatic, health benefits that so many persons attribute to the practice.
Typical benefits that people describe include increased amounts of energy and reduced fatigue; greater resistance to disease; better sleep; emotional balance; a sense of calm; a positive outlook; improved relationships; greater self-awareness; a deeper sense of meaning; and spiritual growth.