(Clearwisdom.net) Recently, I frequently thought about the phrase "to take hardship as joy." Sometimes I could endure hardship, while other times I could not. Today, I suddenly realized that I have a huge attachment deeply buried in my heart. This is the fear of being harmed. As a result, when I encounter difficulties, I often evade them. As long as I can remember, I have been running away from difficulties.
So I asked myself whether I started to learn Falun Dafa in order to escape difficulty. Yes, I did. Yet I did not know at first what I wanted to escape from. Dafa requires practitioners to be tolerant, which became the biggest excuse I found to evade conflict. For example, when I was little, I was often bullied by others, so I learned to avoid associating with people. When I encountered a difficulty, I would evade it as much as possible. In fact, I was afraid of getting hurt through associating with other people. Meanwhile, I was not good at being with people either. When I started to learn Falun Dafa, I found that Dafa teaches practitioners to be tolerant, so I thought that my behavior of evasion was correct. Although it looked on the surface that I was always tolerant, in fact this became the biggest excuse for my unwillingness to remove the attachment of fear. However, I did not discover this shortcoming until today.
A practitioner should not act like an ordinary person. Practitioners should conduct themselves with a high standard according to Dafa. However, there is a difference between not acting like an ordinary person and being afraid to act like an ordinary person. A practitioner does not act like an ordinary person. When faced with a conflict, a practitioner will act like a cultivator and require of themselves the highest standard of tolerance. When a practitioner does not dare to associate with an ordinary person, that practitioner has the attachment of fear. However, for ten years, I have regarded my attachment of fear as being "tolerant;" therefore, I always avoided exchanging with others. Now I know that I have not been tolerant at all. In fact, I have not dared to say or do anything.
How can a practitioner possibly avoid conflict? How can a practitioner remove attachments without suffering hardships arranged by Teacher to remove our karma? For ten years, due to my avoidance of conflicts, I almost lost the chance for cultivation practice. Because I avoided conflicts at my workplace, I lost my job twice. As a result I did not have any income for about a year, which affected my daily life tremendously.
Although I found my attachment, it was not easy for me to overcome the mentality of fear. Even if the contradiction is very obvious, I must face the reality, which I did not dare to face before. Teacher said:
"If you want to return where you came from, you must have the following two factors. One is suffering. The other is enlightenment." (Lecture in Sydney, 1996)
In the past, I acted like an ordinary person because I escaped difficult environments. Now I know that I should not evade anything anymore; instead, I should face situations and kindly talk to people.
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