I am what Master Li calls "old", that is I am just over 55 years. By western standards when you are over 70 years, then you are old. In China, people must be able to retire from work at an early age. That, I would like, but have another 10 years to go to get to 65 years which is the normal retirement age in the West. I have read, that when people get over the age of 50 years, it is very difficult to start a new practice. It does not matter whether it is a career change, family change or exercise regime. Laziness is a big problem, all one’s younger life seems to catch up with you and the body starts to protest when subjected to a new regime. That was not the reason why I wanted to find a method for keeping fit. There was more. I must have spent hundreds of dollars buying Chi Kung books and videos: Trying them out for a week or two and then ending up dissatisfied. Certainly some of the Chi Kung forms made me feel good, but most actually caused tension in my body while I carried throughout the day. I already have a high stress job and this just made things much worse. Moreover, I have a spiritual aspect to a number if things in life and have not found that established religions have the message that makes a lot of sense to me. They all are rituals and peoples’ ideas of what God is all about. There is probably a grain of basic truth in all of them, but not deep enough for me. I was always told that I should believe in this or believe in that. The last 30 years I have looked into all the Western and Eastern religions and finally ended up really confused and disillusioned to the point where I became very cynical. People were telling me that "this is the way you should behave if you believe this religion" and they were not a very good example of it. I am a firm believer in the Western saying that "A healthy body houses a healthy mind". Therefore any serious practice that I should now undertake, after all, how many years do I have left to do this, should work on both my body and my mind. It should be "holistic". So in desperation, one day I was "surfing the net" looking for the latest Chi Kung book to make sure that it was written by a genuine master and had a mind/body aspect to it. Why do I say, genuine master. Well, when Hindu yoga was first introduced to the West in the 1960’s some genuine Indian Yogis came from the east with their practices and I was one who was impressed with these "real" people who spent many, many years learning their art and were truly masters who could train disciples. The only problem was, that a lot of fake masters came out within two to three years calling themselves gurus and taking disciples and charging a large amount of fees. These old masters have since died but these new ‘masters’ are still out there making fortunes. Now yoga is not too popular, Chi Kung is, and once again, in the West there are all kinds of masters who will train you for a fat fee for this course and that course who have only spent a year with someone in China and now call themselves masters. As Master Li says, they take a bit of knowledge from this method and from that method and set up business as Chi Kung masters. So when looking around the internet, anyone who had a western name, I would ignore. Anyone who had a Chinese name I would look at very closely. By accident, I came across the Falun Gong web page and the more I examined it the more interesting it looked. Not only did the web page talk about exercise, which is not complicated to do, but also talked about morality, ZHAN, SHEN, REN. I the first thing I did was print off ZHUAN FALUN and took it home a read it. The topic was very difficult to understand at first because of the translated Chinese idiom. However after reading the material a few times I began to understand the basic tenets and liked what I saw. The next thing to do was find a practice site. The nearest was in a park in Columbia, Maryland who started at 6.00am in the morning. This, I did for a while but had to stop going because I have to start work at 7.00am and I could not stay for the whole program.

To cut a long story short, I have had to compromise. I have to fit these things into my work schedule which is totally unpredictable. I dropped doing Falun Gong for a while but my mind kept nagging me, excuses to myself did not work. There are always reasons why things should be put off until tomorrow and it is amazing how creative the mind can become when the body gets lazy. But guess what ? Unknown to me some very goods friends in Falun Dafa in Franconia went to an awful lot of trouble to make me tape copies of Master Li’s seminars, all nine of them and the exercise tape. These I have been using regularly. The most important thing for me is Master Li’s tapes. Each time I play them I obtain a greater understanding of the Fa. At first I found that the topic was not very relevant to the West because there are not many Chi Kung healers here. The talks about Karma and De were the most revealing thing I have ever heard and I totally believe in what the Master says. It is true, after all these years, I have found the real method. Sometimes I don’t feel that I deserve this because I am not a good student. My body complains with pain in a very short time of holding the wheel and at times I don’t think that I will ever master it. This is even more noticeable when I see Chinese people who are a lot older than I am holding the forms for a long while. I suppose that my easy Western way of life has made me soft and will have to work harder.

Thank you very much for allowing me to share my experience with you. The Fa is going to take more than one lifetime to learn and experience and I thank Master Li for unselfishly and other helpers who volunteer their time to bring this to Westerners. In what little way I can, I would like to help to propagate Falun Gong although I don’t quite know where to start, and am not a really good example of practicing the Fa. We all have to begin somewhere.