(Minghui.org) I have been practicing Falun Dafa for more than 20 years, but a recent episode of sickness karma jolted me and helped me improve in my cultivation.
A few weeks ago, my left ear started to feel more and more blocked, and began to hurt. I thought I hadn’t cleaned out my ears in a while and decided to do so.
To my surprise, what came out was dried blood. Even though it wasn’t too painful, every day my left ear would slowly clog again. I had to clean it out, sometimes more than once a day, and it was always dried blood. The pain soon increased.
One day my left ear started bleeding profusely, and this jolted me awake. I realized I was seriously lacking in cultivation. I decided to stop everything I was doing and look inside. I realized I had several shortcomings. I also realized it was not coincidental that it affected one of my ears, since I was having a hard time listening to feedback and suggestions for improvement. I found a number of issues.
I felt that as long as I did the three things, I was “safe.” I equated cultivation with work, thinking that even if I had problems, doing the three things would solve them. I used this as an excuse to push away looking inward and truly cultivating. I realized that I was using Dafa, Fa study, and exercises as a shield; instead of looking within and improving, I thought spending more time on all of these would help my body recover and I failed to make use of opportunities to look within.
I thought the projects I was working on were important. I felt a grand sense of mission and purpose and that anything that caused trouble was interference. This caused me to overlook many opportunities to look inside. One day, my uncle asked my wife, “Why is he so arrogant? Why does he think he’s so important?” Even though I didn’t get angry on the surface, I was upset, thinking that my uncle just didn’t understand how important the things I was working on were. I failed to let go of my self-importance, which was another big attachment.
My wife and mother-in-law are practitioners, but I always felt they were not diligent and interfered with me. They gave me several cultivation opportunities, but I always brushed them aside and regarded the situations as interference instead of looking within.
Most of my extended family members are non-practitioners, and I looked down on them for their behavior because they were non-practitioners. I tried to spend as little time with them as I could. Sometimes when I visited them, they would argue over trivial things. I couldn’t help myself and I got pulled in. Sometimes I even lost my temper over trivial everyday things.
I used to have a lot of resentment towards some practitioners I worked with in the past. Even though I gradually let go of the resentment over the years, I noticed some pockets of hidden resentment were still there and flared up from time to time.
I decided that I really needed to let go of each and every one of these attachments. I realized that if I did not improve in my cultivation, my health would not improve, and just simply doing the three things mechanically and as routine tasks wasn’t going to help me improve. I decided that every time these attachments surfaced, I would negate them and focus on looking inside and improving myself, rather than complaining about others or fellow practitioners or thinking too highly of myself.
That day, a miracle happened. My left ear, which had been bleeding on and off for weeks, stopped bleeding completely. The pain and the blockage also quickly subsided, and completely disappeared two days later.
I am truly grateful to Master, not only for helping me overcome this tribulation so quickly, but also helping me enlighten to my problems. I have done poorly in the past and did not look inward. I am determined to improve in this aspect and truly look inside and cultivate going forward.
Thank you, Master, for everything!