Mike Brown reflects on the recent weekend conference held at Armagh – ‘Life-Work: examining life’s fundamental struggle through problems in everyday life’ -hosted by Ren-Jou Liu and his wife Grace.
Forty years ago Ren-Jou Liu came to Armagh, the IofC Australia Pacific centre in Melbourne, to find out what made such an impact on the woman he had married. His wife, Grace, had spent three years in Australia volunteering with (then) MRA.
In mid-February they were back, with a team of 13 Chinese from Taiwan, China, Hong Kong and Malaysia plus one Korean and one Japanese, to facilitate a weekend conference on ‘Life-Work: examining life’s fundamental struggle through problems in everyday life.’ It was held on the invitation of a Chinese couple living in Melbourne and, delivered in Mandarin, for 65 participants, the majority Chinese.
Ren-Jou and Grace’s first visit was for an Effective Living Course based over several months in Armagh. Through that course Ren-Jou, then a young teacher, found many life-changes. ‘IofC taught me (that).. if you follow the inner voice, day by day, it will guide you not to be pushed by fear but to do something useful in the world… Listening brings to different quality to life… to know your purpose in life’.
Returning to Taiwan, Ren-Jou and Grace initiated a series of Asia Pacific Youth Conferences, feeling that ‘youth were the future’. They ran annually under IofC ‘s auspices in different countries for many years. Ren-Jou also launched a national ‘Clean Election Campaign’ to enlist voters’ resistance to electoral corruption. Then in 2001 he inspired a series of five ‘Action for Life’ programs to ‘mobilise a new generation of change-makers’, based in India and growing IofC teams in Asian countries. That led to ‘Chinese in Action’ which enabled Ren-Jou’s passion to take the inner listening message to Chinese communities.
With their two children growing into teenage years, Ren-Jou shifted his focus from just youth to family life – mental stresses, relationship problems, resentments – ‘the difficulties in life through which you can understand your deeper purpose’. This non-political, non-religious approach enables him and his fellow listeners to support people and communities in mainland China. It is the basis of what they describe as ‘Life-Work’.
Image: Ren-Jou Liu giving the keynote. Photo credit: Mike Brown
The weekend conference in Melbourne was just a taster of their approach, using a variety of tools like constructing one’s ‘family genome’ to get in touch with attitudes passed between generations, and drafting personal letters of understanding and love to relatives. More than theory, what spoke were the short, positive testimonies of the ‘Life-Work’ team, each focused on some inter-personal problem in family life – depression, teenagers stuck in internet addictions, a mother’s desperate concern for a non-responsive son, a father possessed by perfectionism, an adult son finding breakthrough communication with a silent father…
The resonance of the Chinese-speaking audience was evident from their faces. ‘Today I was deeply healed,’ confessed one woman. Two workshops scheduled in the next week were booked out overnight.
Towards the end of two days the focus expanded to relations between nations, with a British admission of historical injustices. Touching on Japan’s history with China, Megumi Kanematsu humbly told how she has ‘learned history not as information but by hearing what people went through.’
The presenters gave us a glimpse of the remarkable spread of their work in parts of Asia: Victor Kung who leads the EQ office benefitting over 10,000 people in Taiwan since he had his initial ‘life-change’ experience in Armagh; Fung Ming Chan, who also was with IofC in Australia, is now ‘paying it forward to the Hong Kong community’; Nandor Lim and Weny Yu, through their Akasha Centre in Malaysia running multiple workshops and weekly support groups for over 300 people, with outreach programs in Indonesia, Vietnam, Philippines and north-east India.
Photo credit: Mike Brown