Stretching and Opening Up

A practitioner stretches skyward as she performs the first exercise of Falun Gong, “Buddha showing a thousand hands.”

For thousands of years, Chinese civilization has been imbued with a belief that a human being can, through spiritual practice, transcend this ordinary existence. A higher state of being is envisioned, one having its own privileged joys and knowledge. It is a state attained through disciplined moral cultivation and the pursuit of altruism, and it is the central goal of the practice of Falun Gong.