On a blustery, cold November morning, a group of seven people is huddled on the grass outside Collins Circle at SUNY Albany, listening to faint music from a portable stereo system.
While the wind may be icy, the practitioners remain immobile, breathing deeply, trying to achieve peace of mind.
These are practitioners of Falun Gong, a Chinese exercise and meditation method. Literally meaning, "the Practice of the Wheel of the Dharma," Falun Gong was originated in China by a former government clerk, Li Honghzi, who published his ideas in 1992.
Based on the teachings of Taoism, Buddhism and Honghzi's ideas of spiritual energy, the meditation practice spread like wildfire through Communist China.
By 1999, enough people were actively practicing Falun Gong to scare the Beijing government, which banned the practice, declaring it a cult and accusing its members of brainwashing others. News reports soon spread of practitioners being jailed, beaten and, sometimes, killed for their practices.
In Albany, Falun Gong's practitioners don't have to worry much about being roughed up by a disturbed government. Probably the most they have to fear is an unleashed dog sniffing them out on a Saturday morning at the University at Albany's campus.
But even that is a long shot.
Most people walking their dogs or jogging by on Saturday morning on the university campus probably wouldn't even notice the group sitting quietly in the center of Collins Circle.
Local members
Five of the seven regularly practicing members come from mainland China while two, Helena and Sam Cheng, come from Taiwan.
Only three speak English: the Chengs and Shirley Wu, a Chinese immigrant who joined the group in June this year after moving to Albany from Dallas, Texas.
Wu said the group itself is a year old, begun by the Chinese ex-patriates last November. By day Wu works as a post-doctoral physics fellow at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. She began practicing Falun Gong in China in 1993 after her mother sent her a book about the subject.
She took up the practice seriously in spring of 1994 when she moved to Dallas, Texas, to do graduate work in physics.
Since then Wu has become a devoted practitioner, meeting with her group Saturday mornings and practicing for two hours.
For such a controversial exercise, Falun Gong is remarkably quiet. In fact, almost nothing happens.
Doing it
The practitioners sit cross-legged, listening to tranquil pre-recorded Chinese music, similar to what you would hear in a Chinese restaurant, for the first hour of practice.
While listening to this music, they clear their minds and meditate for a full hour.
"When we do the meditation we try to clear our minds without thinking anything, without any mind intention - just try not to think of anything,"
Wu said.
After an hour of meditation the group rises and begins performing the basic five exercises of Falun Gong. The exercises are calm, slow, stretching positions and are based on ideas in Eastern religion and mysticism.
To novices, the exercises may resemble those done in the ancient practice of Tai Chi. However with only five movements, Falun Gong is much easier to learn. "Falun Gong is much simpler in the movements than Tai Chi itself," Wu said.
She added that the fundamental difference between Tai Chi and Falun Gong is that Falun Gong heavily advocates spirituality. "We emphasize [the] spiritual," she said.
Practitioners believe in connecting with a universal spirit, or cosmos through their practices. The exercises were developed along Hongzhi's theories that spiritual energy has its source in the abdomen. The slow, stretching exercises are developed to increase power and energy there.
The mystical belief of the founder, referred to as "Master Li" by his followers, is that cosmic, spiritual energy rotates circularly inside a person's stom- ach. Positions have names like "Buddha Showing a Thousand Heads," "Penetrating the Two Cosmic Extremes," and "The Great Heavenly Circuit." And if the exercises and studies of the practice are quiet and calm, it's because the three pillars of Falun Gong philosophy are "Compassion," "Truth", and "Forebearance".
These concepts are explored more fully in the group's Tuesday evening sessions where they read about Falun Gong and what is required of its practitioners, known as Falun Dafa.
While spirituality is a key focus in the Tuesday evening study sessions and Saturday morning exercises, Wu and her friends are political too.
In late October, the group hosted three Falun Dafa from Montreal Canada who were engaged in a protest march to New York City where they intended to hand a letter of protest about Falun Gong repression to U.N. Secretary General Kofi Anan.
"I was detained for 33 days [in China] just because I practiced Falun Gong in Canada," said Ying Zhu, one of the walkers, on a recent Saturday morning in Albany.
Zhu explained that she had gone back to China to visit relations when she was arrested. "This is state-sponsored terrorism," she added of her experience.
Part of the problem for the Chinese government and others who try to regulate the practice of Falun Gong is the difficulty of learning how many people are practitioners. Because it is an informal, easy-to-learn practice, there is no telling how many people are Falun Dafa in secret, in their living rooms. If the practice is a cult as the government believes, bent on brainwashing its members, it is a very secret one.
Wu said that even in the Capital Region it is difficult to say how many people are practicing the exercises. The group regularly gives well attended workshops at places like Albany's Kripalu Center.
Some show up to their Saturday morning meetings, others stay home and practice.
"There is no membership so we don't know exactly," she said of the number of practitioners in Albany.
However many people study Falun Gong, it's the warmth of exercise and the feeling of being part of a universal spirit that keeps Shirley Wu coming back every Saturday morning - no matter how cold the weather.
"During the meditation you can actually feel the energy rotating in your body," she said. "Even though it's very cold outside it's warm inside in your body."