Jennie Sheeks was concerned about the suffering of others from a young age.
“It pained me. I was never comfortable pursuing my own happiness in life, knowing that others were suffering,” Sheeks, now a 45-year-old communications director at a nonprofit, told The Epoch Times.
In high school in Philadelphia, she often bought an extra sandwich for a local homeless man named John. She said she couldn’t just walk past him as if he wasn’t there and go buy a sandwich for herself. However, she knew that a small act like that wasn’t truly fixing anything. She wanted to make a meaningful difference in others’ lives.
She said she remembers vividly one day when she was 17. “I was walking down a quiet sidewalk in my neighborhood in Philadelphia, and I stopped on the corner, looked up at the sky, and begged God to show me the path; how could I help? I promised that if He showed me the way, I would give my whole life to it.”
Raised in a Quaker family, spirituality and connection with the divine were always central in her life, she said.
She searched for ways to help others and studied the intersection of spirituality and activism. Her undergraduate degree is in social change, and she got increasingly involved in activism and participated in non-violent protests. Yet, she wasn’t convinced that she had found the solution. She suspected that simply changing structures or laws wasn’t the solution, but she kept seeking answers on the same path.
Eventually, she even studied the “little red book” of Chinese communist leader Mao Zedong with a former member of the Black Panther Party, a Marxist-Leninist and black power political organization. She listened to the case for a violent revolution.
Around the same time, she met her husband and got married in 2006. Though African American, he disagreed with that kind of militant point of view and believed that activism and protesting were meaningless.
In the early years of their marriage, they discussed many things. Sheeks became clear that activism and protesting weren’t effective at what really needed to happen, which was for people’s hearts to turn toward goodness.
By then, she knew what she was looking for but wasn’t sure how to find it. At the same time, she had all three children during her marriage’s first three years, so she was busy parenting and working a full-time job.
She said she tried letting go of her lifelong desire to make the world better. “I tried to believe that life was just about pursuing my own happiness and taking care of my family. But it left a big hole, and I felt farther from God than ever,” she added.
Finding the Answer to Her Question
She became very stressed, and it became apparent to her husband that she was unhappy. The situation got to its peak in the fall of 2011. So he gave her some spiritual books to read. Those books helped, she said, but she also needed something physical to help her deal with the stress in her body. She thought of qigong, physical exercises developed in ancient China as part of traditional Chinese medicine; a friend had shared a videotape of qigong exercises years ago.
Therefore, she searched for “qigong in Philadelphia” on the Internet. She found several classes offered for a price at various martial arts schools, but there was one—Falun Dafa or Falun Gong—which had a free practice site at a public park near the Liberty Bell every weekend morning.
She said she felt that if it was free, it would be people authentically practicing rather than someone trying to make money, so she just showed up at the Liberty Bell on a cold January morning in 2012.
The volunteers there taught her the exercises and told her where to find the books of Falun Dafa teachings online. She also learned that a doctor at Thomas Jefferson University was teaching a Falun Dafa class for free, so she went there once a week on her lunch break.
At home, she began to read “Zhuan Falun,” the main book of Falun Dafa’s teachings. “I felt that this was exactly what I was looking for—a practice of both mind and body where the spiritual teachings that helped me navigate life’s choices were complimented by a physical practice that helped harmonize my body,” she recalled.
Through studying the teachings, she said the answer to her question—what I should do to make the world a better place—became simple. “I had to start with myself. I had to look within and become a more truthful, compassionate, and tolerant person,” she added, referring to Falun Dafa’s three principles. “I began to understand that by focusing on improving myself, there was a ripple effect. It’s not like I’m just increasing truthfulness, compassion, and forbearance in my own life, but by example and how I treat others, I’m increasing the truthfulness, compassion, and forbearance in the world.”
“And most of all, my faith that the divine arranges our lives was restored. This brought a comfort that I can hardly describe. Even when bad things happen, I’m less bothered or worried because I know it’s all part of the plan and must be a good thing or for a good reason,” she shared. “Being able to accept whatever comes my way has been the biggest relief to the stress and overwhelm I once felt from life’s constant challenges.”
She said she used to worry a lot about parenting—her children’s well-being and whether she made the right choice for them—but not so much anymore. She had shared the teachings with her entire family. Although none became Falun Dafa practitioners, they embraced some of the teachings to guide their daily lives.
Her sons are 13 and 16, and her daughter is 15. She is proud that her daughter deleted TikTok, a popular short-video platform, once she told her about its ties to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The teenage girl also told her friends and teachers about the dangers of TikTok associated with the CCP’s disrespect for people’s privacy and dignity.
She also told them about the persecution of Falun Dafa practitioners that began in July 1999, and is still ongoing today. Within eight years of Falun Dafa’s introduction to the public in China, it had attracted 100 million adherents. The CCP launched nationwide persecution, including torture, psychiatric abuses, and the killing of practitioners for their organs, due to Falun Dafa’s popularity and beliefs being different from communism’s.
“It’s hard for her sometimes because she’s the odd one out, and people think it’s strange to care about what the CCP is doing. But she perseveres because she feels it would be wrong not to warn people and not to try at least to give them the information,” the proud mother shared. “I’ve even told her that she doesn’t have to worry about what other people do, but her compassion for others is unstoppable. I take it as an inspiration, and I try to be more courageous in sharing the truths I’m aware of, even if it may be unpopular sometimes.”
Raising the Flag
Sheeks also told others about the persecution in China. To her, it’s helping those who are suffering in China as well as a part of increasing truth, compassion, and forbearance in the world. In 2020, her representative, Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-Pa.), offered to fly a U.S. flag for World Falun Dafa Day—May 13—and a flag for Falun Dafa’s founder Mr. Li Hongzhi.
On one of the certificates of the flags, the congressman acknowledged Mr. Li for teaching the core principles of truthfulness, compassion, and forbearance. “Your legacy will continue to touch and instill confidence in our future generation of leaders around the world,” he added.
Before that, she hadn’t known that flying a flag over the U.S. Capitol was an option. She had thought it was a very nice symbolic action until she met a woman who had escaped the persecution of Falun Dafa in China and came to Philadelphia for asylum. To her surprise, the woman knew about the flag raising from her relatives outside China. “I could tell from her expression that the flag raising meant a great deal to her after the suffering she had undergone in Chinese prisons,” Sheeks said.
And in July 2020, the congressman attended her son’s barbeque birthday party and brought another U.S. flag for the boy as well.
To her, the American flag is a “symbol of American values and traditions, primarily freedom or liberty—freedom from tyranny as one of the meanings of liberty.” She said she was “really touched” by her congressman’s kind gesture to honor Pennsylvania’s legacy as a safe haven for people of various faiths persecuted in Europe at the time of the state’s founding.
So this year, she asked, and the congressman said he would again sponsor flying the flags over the U.S. Capitol.
A Spiritual Renaissance
This year, The Epoch Times published Mr. Li Hongzhi’s articles, teachings used to be reserved for the platforms in the Falun Dafa communities.
Mr. Li’s articles drew much feedback from Epoch Times readers. Many saw some commonalities between Falun Dafa’s teachings and their own beliefs. One of the common themes was that people liked the spiritual autonomy—guidance with the “why”—afforded to them so they could understand the fundamental drivers, make their decisions, and be accountable for their choices. The founder of Falun Gong explains without pressing others to convert, readers said.
Frank Cellucci, a self-described interfaith person, both spiritual and religious, is among those who read Mr. Li’s article “How Humankind Came To Be” earlier this year.
“Over the years, I began to see the spiritual and religious importance of Falun Dafa,” he told The Epoch Times, adding that he started seeing it as a type of physical exercise. He got to know Falun Dafa from a friend about ten years ago. Both were taking ballroom dancing lessons then.
“The way it appears—when I read articles on the internet and see things on YouTube—is that Falun Dafa has existed for a very, very long time,” said Cellucci, who spent 30-plus years pursuing spiritual self-development journeys. “Qigong is an extension of Falun Dafa. It’s a watered-down version with very little spirituality, if any. And when the communists took over China, they attempted to destroy and eliminate all types of religions, including Falun Dafa.”
He is aware that Falun Dafa was introduced to the public in 1992. However, “the impression I got is that Falun Dafa existed before that. Maybe it wasn’t called Falun Dafa, but there were different forms of it,” he said.
“Certain things that were special, certain things that were sacred to the Chinese culture merged together, and Falun Dafa evolved out of that.” He added that the spiritual practice is leading a fundamental cultural change and a spiritual renaissance of some sort that “came from within the Chinese people.”
“They wanted to get back to the original Chinese culture. They were just in dissolution with communism in general. They didn’t see how everyone could benefit from it.”
With his general construction and real estate business, he splits his time between Pennsylvania and California. Sometimes, he joins the Falun Dafa group exercises in Carmel, California, when he is in the Golden State.
He said Falun Dafa can spiritually help Americans. He foresees it becoming another religion in the United States.
As Falun Dafa enters its fourth decade of being available to the public, the outlook is bright despite the persecution, according to the spiritual practice’s spokesperson Zhang Erping.
“This is the 31st anniversary since Falun Dafa was introduced to the public in 1992, and it is also the 72nd birthday of the founder of Falun Dafa, Master Li Hongzhi. Despite the brutal persecution in mainland China, Falun Dafa has reached over 120 countries with hundreds of millions of practitioners around the world,” Zhang told The Epoch Times.
He added: “Its principles of ‘Truth, Compassion, Forbearance’ are widely recognized as universal values of humanity and have positively impacted the well-being of the followers and society. We trust that Falun Dafa will be celebrated one day in China, perhaps very soon, just like elsewhere in the world.”
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