(Clearwisdom.net) I am a young Dafa disciple. I have been attached to food and I enjoy eating delicious and spicy food. Since cultivating, I have been trying to control my eating habits. When I feel eager to eat such food, I recite the poem:

"Eating, but caring not to taste--

The palate's attachments severed."("Abiding in the Dao" from Hong Yin),

But sometimes I still cannot help eating these foods. A few days ago, after studying the Fa diligently, I arrived at a new solution for breaking my attachment to "eating."

On that day after having dinner, I was not hungry and my stomach was still full, but I suddenly had a thought, "I should go out and buy some barbecue to eat!" As I thought about it I said to myself, "I am not hungry, why would I want to do that? Oh, this cannot be the real me." When I arrived at this realization, my attachment became a bit weaker. However, it came out again after awhile and I had another thought, "I should go out! Let me go out and buy some food, even just a little bit." It seemed that I could not stop these thoughts. I suddenly exclaimed in realization, "I don't want to eat! I just don't need to eat!" When the thoughts of "Why don't you want to eat? You should go out and buy yourself some food and eat it! Don't you want to eat all the time? Then you should go out and get some" emerged, I countered with, "I am not going!"

This time, the "eating" thoughts became very weak. When they appeared again, I was able to completely control them. After a while, these thoughts no longer surfaced.

When I share with fellow practitioners, they all say that since I have distinguished these thoughts from my own, then they will naturally die. In fact, in another dimension, these thoughts are spirits, and they can hear everything we say in this dimension. Actually, this phenomenon is not limited just to eating. On many other occasions when we do not clearly realize that these thoughts are not our own, we have followed them without controlling them. In a previous experience sharing, one practitioner suggested that in another dimension these thoughts grow like human beings. At first the thoughts are small, but if they are not controlled, then we actually give them energy and they "grow" and become bigger and bigger. The bigger they are, the harder they are to extinguish. Therefore, once they get the energy to grow, we need to clearly realize right away that these thoughts are not our own and in this way we may be able to remove them more quickly.

The above understanding is limited by my own level. Please kindly point it out if there is anything inappropriate.

Written on November 16, 2008