For five days last month, hundreds of police officers in Mexico City gathered at a vacant high school early in the morning for a training session—in the art of meditation.
Over 600 members of the capital’s School Security Units were participating in the first event of its kind in the city: a one-hour session to learn the Chinese meditation practice of Falun Gong, also known as Falun Dafa.
Spread widely throughout China during the 1990s, Falun Gong is a qigong practice incorporating five slow-moving meditation exercises and moral discipline according to the principles of truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance.
Laura Martínez Coca, a police officer in charge of training, said that while it is typically difficult to carry out activities involving hundreds of officers, the morning exercises had made them calmer and more patient for the rest of the day, as recounted by one of the volunteers who led the meditation.
