I wasn’t sure how start this blog going so I guess the best way would be to introduce myself and explain how I came to be a Falun Gong practitioner.

I am now 32, living in London and run my own business in the creative marketing sector. I was raised in the Scottish highlands and left home when I was 17 for a short stint in India before coming to London to study graphics. I lived in London for 7 years and towards the end of that period I was in a long-term relationship with an English girl. In December 1998 I was invited to a holy Native American ceremony in the US with my father. This ceremony marked significantly the closing of a period in both my fathers and my life. During this ceremony I was to have my first genuine spiritual experience and afterwards my father would find the answer to a vital question he had asked during the ceremony - both of these experiences would lead us to Falun Gong.

Immediately after the ceremony I knew that my relationship was over, never had my intuition been so strong and within in a week I was proven correct. It was not a case of a self-fulfilling prophecy; the relationship came to an end somewhat abruptly and painfully. I was so hurt; in order to take my mind off things I left the UK to go snowboarding in New Zealand. I liked the place so much I decided to stay. During my time there I drowned my sorrows in alcohol and developed a terrible habit that nearly destroyed me as I tried to obliterate the memories of my break-up.

About a year and a half later I returned to the UK for what was supposed to be a short visit. Almost immediately on my return I was struck by how much Dad had changed. He had put on a healthy amount of weight (he lost a lot when my mum died), he was no longer smoking or drinking and seemed to have a sense of calm in him that had never existed before. It was impossible not to notice the change and I asked him what was the cause of this. He casually mentioned that he was practicing qi-gong and didn’t make much more of it than that. About a week later he said he was off to Scotland for a couple of weeks and he left a copy of Zhuan Falun (the main text) behind.

I picked it up and couldn’t put it down. It was everything I had been looking for my whole life. At this point I should explain that as a family we have all been searching for a form of spirituality for as long as I can remember. It seemed as though until this point everyone had found his or her own way apart from myself. I had tried Christianity in my early teens, Buddhism in my late teens and I narrowly escaped the clutches of Scientology in my early twenties. None of them had struck a chord; they seemed lacking, irrelevant and empty. But this book Zhuan Falun just blew a lot of my previous notions and conceptions out of the water; in other ways it confirmed a lot of what I already believed. I found it challenging but only in the most positive sense.

When my father arrived back from Scotland I asked him to show me the exercises. After 2 weeks of that he mentioned the persecution in China. I was horrified at what was happening and wanted to do something as soon as possible. A week later we were outside the Chinese Embassy 24/7 for 10 days straight. This garnered little media attention, so we decided that more needed to be done. So we went there to do the exercises every weekday at 7:45am before going to work. 7 years on and the protest outside the Chinese Embassy still goes on 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

So what was supposed to be a short 6-week visit to the UK turned into 9 months and it had completely changed me as a person. I will say at this point that until I became a Falun Gong practitioner I had suffered from one form of drug addiction or another. I was a highly aggressive and deeply selfish person who found it hard to interact in a socially acceptable manner. I was regularly depressed, suffering from nightmares and hallucinations and had tried to commit suicide 3 times. I find it hard to describe how easy I found it to leave all of this behind without treating the whole thing frivolously. I gave up drinking nearly overnight – I was disappointed at the lack of drama involved, it was really no big deal I just decided I wasn’t going to drink anymore and that was that, done!