Thousands of Falun Gong Practitioners March in Prague to Showcase Hope and Resilience

Robert Lovlien and his family traveled 700 miles to join a parade in Prague on Sept. 19. It’s like a pilgrimage, but also a family holiday—one he is happy to make by flying over from Norway.

Lovlien came across Falun Dafa 10 years ago, while exploring spiritual disciplines during a difficult period.

“I was struggling with drug addiction and problematic behaviors, and I was searching for something deeper. When I was exploring Eastern spiritual disciplines—Taoism and Buddhism—someone gave me information about [Falun] Dafa,” he told The Epoch Times.

Through practicing the slow-moving meditative exercises and reading its main book, Zhuang Falun, Lovlien noticed he overcame these bad habits.

“It changed my life in many ways. I became a good person, a good citizen, a good family member, and eventually a good husband and father,” Lovlien said.

Like Lovlien, Reymond Venga traveled from Paris to join the march in the Czech capital.

“All these Falun Dafa practitioners have come here today to showcase the beauty of this … practice from China,” Venga told The Epoch Times.

“We want to introduce this method to others because it is highly beneficial for health, body, and mind.”

Falun Dafa, also known as Falun Gong, is a discipline rooted in ancient Chinese traditions that involve moral improvement leading to spiritual enlightenment.

The practice is composed of meditative exercises and a set of moral teachings centered on the principles of truthfulness, compassion, and forbearance.

Pawel Dumanowski, a participant from Poland, said he considers Falun Dafa a way of life. He shared a similar journey of quitting bad habits through his faith a decade ago.

“It has changed me a lot,” he told The Epoch Times.

“I think I’m a somewhat better person now. For instance, I’m the father of a little boy who’s like a ‘little hurricane,’ and Dafa helps me be more patient and handle this hurricane,” he said with a laugh.

More than 2,000 people across Europe joined the parade in the heart of the Czech Republic, the organizers told The Epoch Times.

It also called for an end to the long-running persecution of Falun Gong in China, which has extended beyond its borders.

Such efforts were welcomed by Prague resident Milan Walter, who watched from the sidewalk as the practitioners walked by.

“Anything independent, resisting the communist regime, is important. Of course, we support you,” Walter told The Epoch Times.

Speaking of the parade itself, Walter said, “I feel happy to see. And I’m surprised how many people [are] here. It’s unbelievable.”

Out of fear that Falun Gong’s increasing popularity would threaten the Chinese communist regime’s power, the regime in China ordered a brutal suppression of the practice in 1999, resulting in an estimated 100 million practitioners being targets of detention, torture, and forced organ harvesting.

In 2019, an independent tribunal concluded that the regime has killed prisoners of conscience for their organs to supply the transplant market “on a significant scale” for years, with no evidence that the practice has stopped.

The main victims, the tribunal said, are detained Falun Gong practitioners.

Ondřej Horecký and Li Haoyue contributed to this report.