[Falun Dafa] Marianne Marti – Freedom Under Threat

My name is Marianne Marti and I've been practicing Falun Gong since April of 2000. Well, some good friends of ours who got interested in Falun Gong and hosted a nine-day seminar in our small town in rural Missouri and out of interest and curiosity I attended the nine-day seminar and slowly after that started the practice over probably over a period of one to two years before I really knew that this was the cultivation method for me. Falun Gong, also called Falun Dafa, is an ancient spiritual practice in the Buddhist tradition. Falun Gong combines meditation and gentle exercises similar to yoga or tai chi with a moral philosophy centered on the tenets of truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance or in Chinese, Zhen Shan Ren. Falun Gong practitioners aspire to live by these principles in their daily lives. In traditional Chinese culture, the process of perfecting and refining the mind and body is called cultivation. Our modern language uses the word Qigong to describe this. What differentiates Falun Gong from other forms of Qigong is its emphasis on one's morality, character, and the cultivation of virtue. What keeps me practicing Falun Gong is the whole concept of personal cultivation, cultivating your heart and your mind, your body. Falun Gong gives you the framework to do that. The teachings of Falun Gong are based on the principles of truthfulness, compassion, and forbearance and that's what people who practice Falun Gong try to live by. So it's a wonderful way to monitor every aspect of your life and try to embody those principles. The persecution in China has gone on for 26 years and it's not just limited to China. Many people in this country and overseas, people of Chinese origin, have family members back home who are practicing Falun Gong and who are being persecuted. They risk being arrested, having their organs harvested if they're incarcerated. It's just a terrible persecution for a whole group of people to have to live with and even their non-practitioner relatives are affected very badly and the CCP has been trying to push this persecution overseas. The CCP has long engaged in transnational repression targeting Falun Gong and a global censorship campaign to silence Shen Yun Performing Arts, an American classical Chinese dance company founded by Falun Gong practitioners. However, the aggressiveness, frequency, and violent nature of incidents has increased dramatically over the past year, especially in the United States. This shift is not accidental. In June 2024, internal party sources leaked details and instructions from Xi Jinping and other top CCP officials that outlined tactics that the regime plans to deploy. These are now manifesting in real world events. Doing a spiritual practice that's peaceful, doesn't affect anybody else, makes people better citizens. To start to demonize that group of people is just incredibly dark and evil and really needs to be stopped. Although Congress has adopted multiple resolutions condemning these abuses, the Falun Gong Protection Act, S. 817, if enacted, will mark the first binding U.S. legislation to hold perpetrators accountable. This bill requires the president to impose visa and property blocking sanctions on foreign persons that have knowingly and directly engaged in or facilitated the involuntary harvesting of organs in China.