[Falun Dafa] Valerie Avore – If not now, when? Standing up to CCP’s Persecution of Falun Gong

Afterwards I felt that was one of the hardest things I've ever done, but I think I've never felt so good as I did after that. My name is Valerie Avor. I'm originally from Massachusetts, and I've been practicing since October of 2000. What drew me to the practice initially was searching, just searching for something that would make life better. I was almost 55 years old by then, and my children were getting older, and I just wasn't feeling well. I was just searching for something. We saw a Chinese person meditating at a Mind-Body-Spirit festival. When you just walked by, you thought, there's something different about that, that's real. From then on, he said, it's free at the park, come to the park. So going to the park afterwards, he was very diligent. He taught me like I wasn't a new person. So he expected me to really know what I was doing, and so I did feel like I knew what I was doing. So afterwards I felt that was one of the hardest things I've ever done, but I think I've never felt so good as I did after that. 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, Zhenshan 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. Now after, you know, 25 years, the benefits keep changing. So I finally got it a few years ago that, oh, I'm just going to keep getting better and better. And so I could see that happening in my beliefs and in the way I treated people. Most recently, I'd like to share, I'm older, things change, and my husband also getting older. We've been married well over 50 years, and a few years ago, his health started to decline. And during that time, I felt all of the resentments from being together for that many times. There's good times, but there are resenting times, too. And everything kind of comes up. So I didn't know whether I was capable or wanted to take care of him as his health declined. And I just kept practicing. Practitioners helped me to understand traditional Chinese life or traditional life. Like generally, generations took care of each other. Husbands and wives are together for a lifetime, and it seemed impossible. But just over the last two years, I went from that resentment until the other day when I went in to help him. I truly felt I wanted to, and I truly felt this is what compassion is. When I first started practicing, of course, the persecution had just begun at that time. We wanted the government to understand what was happening because the material they were getting, of course, from Jiang Zemin at that time was all just propaganda, but yet that was the first thing that they were hearing. And so we wanted to, as practitioners, to go and talk to them face-to-face and say that's not true. You know, this is what's true. We're just ordinary people. You know, we're all the way from farmers to intellectuals, you know, to government officials. We're just like a microcosm of society, and we just want to lead a good life and make things better for people. And so after practicing only just a couple of years, I felt my heart drew me to Washington. And so from that time until probably like 2017 or 2018, every year I found myself in Washington, D.C., and every year hearing the wonderful rallies and the wonderful leaders, you know, American leaders for every aspect of American life, you know, whether it be government, whether it be NGOs, whether it be the head of corporations, or whether it be someone like my neighbor next door who gets very touched by what's happening and wants to send in some information or send in a letter of support. So that brings us to the current transnational repression, which, you know, kind of it shouldn't have, but it came as a shock to me to hear our American newspapers, to hear my neighbors and starting to question, you know, and it's because I believe that the impact has been so implosive from the inside and it's coming from everywhere that it's been a shock to me because that's not where you're used to in American society. We don't agree with each other, certainly everybody in American society, but we do allow for each other. We don't agree and maybe, you know, passions become aroused, but we allow for it. But to try to just eradicate a group or an individual, which I feel that's what's happening, you know, the attempt is to eradicate my beliefs and, you know, the beliefs of, you know, I don't know, there must be a hundred million people practicing at this point. The playbook of the Chinese Communist Party is being played out most intensely here in the United States, because my understanding is the Communist Party believes that the United States is their most serious and capable enemy. We can see their impact. And and I think that we as Americans should care because if it's very, if they can do it to Falun Gong, they know that they can do it to any one of us, to any group at any time. So anyone who knows anything about the Communist Party, especially about the CCP, they will know that someone has to be being hurt, persecuted, tortured at any point. So, you know, there's an old saying that if you're quiet and you don't advocate for those who are suffering, who's going to be left to advocate for you when it's your turn? Because it will be your turn if the communists get there. 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. Call the senator, go to the website. It's very easy to just put in your name, your address and prove that you're one of his constituents and then you express yourself. And there are people that read that and if they see enough going in the right direction, they will bring that to the attention of the senator.