(Minghui.org) Greetings, respected Master! Greetings, fellow practitioners!
I began cultivating Falun Dafa in 1997. I would like to share my cultivation experiences in promoting Shen Yun.
Truly Cultivating Amid Conflicts, Removing Negative Notions About Fellow Practitioners
While I was involved in promoting Shen Yun, I had a phone conversation with a local coordinator. She was very forceful, and what she said was hard to accept. I stayed polite and did not argue back, but inwardly I felt extremely impatient. I gave a few perfunctory replies and quickly hung up. As soon as the call ended, my ear swelled up. I realized that Master was reminding me to let go of my attachment to hearing pleasant words. I apologized to Master in my mind and sent forth righteous thoughts to clear my negative view of that practitioner.
As we worked together on the project, a part that she was responsible for was holding up the overall progress, and everyone hoped that part could be improved. I had done that part before, and a practitioner suggested that I take it over. I did not agree straightaway, because I did not want the trouble. I eventually realized that I should not be afraid of trouble, that I should take the initiative to make up for what was lacking so that the Shen Yun project would not be held up.
I told the coordinator that I could help her improve her work. But she did not accept my offer or give me the materials she was holding. I focused on cultivating my own heart and not letting negative thoughts about her affect how we worked together. I also sent forth righteous thoughts to clear away every factor interfering with our cooperation on the project.
Master saw my heart and gave me wisdom: I thought of another way to solve the problem of having no materials to work from. I did not sleep that night—I worked through until morning to improve that part of the work. The next day I showed her the improved results and offered to take on that part of the work from then on. Perhaps because I was genuinely considerate, she sensed my goodwill. In our later work together on the project, I listened humbly to her suggestions and improved on the things she raised.
A practitioner shared something with me about a country in Europe. For a period of time, practitioners there did a great deal to promote Shen Yun, but few tickets sold. The local coordinator later took some advice: At Shen Yun meetings, practitioners should be encouraged to share only about how their xinxing had improved through the process and not to bring up anything unrelated to xinxing improvement. As a result, the Shen Yun performances that year were a great success. This inspired me to focus on improving my own xinxing while working with other practitioners on a project, rather than focusing only on the outcome.
Master said:
“Tempering the will is the key to truly raising your level. If one could improve just by working the body, I would say that Chinese peasants suffer the most. Shouldn’t they all become qigong masters, then?” (Lecture Four, Zhuan Falun)
I came to realize that, having done so much work to promote Shen Yun, we must not be like farmers plowing a field—all labor and no gong. In promoting Shen Yun, we should focus on cultivating our xinxing. Just as Shen Yun’s performers need a pure heart on stage, promoting Shen Yun also requires us to keep improving ourselves and to promote it with an ever purer heart. When we work with other practitioners and speak face-to-face with people, things that touch the heart sometimes happen, and all of them are helping us improve our xinxing. We should validate the Fa with an ever purer heart.
Looking Inward, Things Took a Turn for the Better
Earlier this year, while I was away promoting Shen Yun, I received a message from a practitioner telling me that everything I had stored in his home had to be moved out, because he was about to leave for another country. I had to find a way to clear out everything I had left in his storeroom. I was living away from home to promote Shen Yun, and most of my belongings, which I could not take with me, were in that storeroom.
There were only a few people helping to promote Shen Yun where I was, and shopping center promotions were running for several weeks. So going back would have held up the promotion of Shen Yun. I did not want that to happen, so I asked a practitioner back home to help me deal with the furniture. But that practitioner had his own things to sort out and had no way to handle mine.
I felt a great deal of pressure at the time, and the matter stayed on my mind. While studying the Fa, I realized that this was a form of interference with my promoting Shen Yun, that it was a test. I sent forth righteous thoughts to clear away this interference and looked inward, asking myself why I had run into it. I realized that I should be able to “let go” and not be attached to the things I have accumulated. Apart from what I genuinely needed, I should be able to let go of everything I had no use for.
The main reason I felt so much pressure was that I was unwilling to give up what I had built up over the years, and behind that lay an attachment to personal gain, a reluctance to have to spend money buying it all again in the future. In fact, I had no use for much of it at the moment. It occurred to me that I could donate the furniture I did not need, so that these things could actually be put to good use.
A charity came to the house and took away most of the furniture I had no use for, but one table was left. I tried all sorts of ways to get rid of it, but nothing worked out. Time was short, and in the end all I could do was to ask another practitioner to take it away and keep it for the time being. She agreed at first, but the day before she suddenly told me she could not help after all, because she would not have the time.
All at once the pressure on me became enormous, and negative thoughts began to surface. I happened to be on the phone with my mother, who is also a practitioner. Hearing me sighing, she asked what was wrong. After I told her, she reminded me from the Fa to look inward, to see whether I had an attachment to personal gain in this matter, a heart that blamed others, a passive attitude, and so on. Her words woke me up. I quieted down and went over the whole thing, looking at the attachments this matter had exposed in me.
From the bottom of my heart I sent out a thought: “I do not want these attachments, none of them accord with Truthfulness, Compassion, Forbearance.” And as I was looking inward, a miracle happened. The advertisement I had put online earlier had not drawn a single inquiry, yet while I was quietly looking inward, someone contacted me and took the table away that same day. Through all this, I felt deeply how extraordinary this treasure “looking inward” truly is. In looking inward, I not only found a deeply hidden attachment, but the difficulty was also resolved in a way I could never have imagined.
Firm Righteous Thoughts in the Fa, Negating All Interference and Persecution
From the Fa I came to understand that interference and persecution are evil factors exploiting the loopholes in our thinking. Such a loophole might be a human attachment a Dafa disciple has not cultivated away, or a principle we are not clear about, or something we have not done righteously, or somewhere we have not cooperated well, and so on.
Over these past few years of promoting Shen Yun, I have noticed that in every country there are many practitioners going through tests of illness karma, unable for years to promote Shen Yun or take part in Dafa projects. There are also many practitioners who, though not facing illness karma, run into a great deal of trouble and many tribulations in their families and in their work in society, so the time they can free up to validate the Fa is very limited. At the very time when Dafa projects most urgently need people, many practitioners are caught up in their personal lives or are in tribulations of one or another. It is hard enough for them to keep up their personal cultivation, let alone throw themselves wholeheartedly into validating the Fa.
In recent years, in the course of promoting Shen Yun, I have met with all kinds of tests: interference from my own thought karma, my attachment to comfort and various notions, tests coming from “fame, gain, and sentiment,” and the pressure of conflicts in working with other practitioners. When human attachments surfaced, I felt I could barely take a step forward.
I knew it was because I was holding on to my attachments and being driven by a false self made up of postnatal notions, taking those notions to be a part of me. I did not want my human attachments to become an obstacle to the project saving people, so I treated every conflict and difficulty I encountered as an opportunity for genuine cultivation.
Whenever passing a xinxing test was painful, I knew my righteous thoughts were not strong, and I would make an effort to recall Master’s Fa. When I found it hard to let go of the hurt others had caused me, I would recite Master’s Fa:
“As one who truly practices cultivation toward high levels, you should give up various attachments.” (Lecture Six, Zhuan Falun).
When removing an attachment cut me to the bone, I would recite the Master’s poem:
“What’s given up is not oneselfBut instead the folly of delusion”(“Discarding Attachments,” Hong Yin II).
I gradually learned to tell apart the various false selves formed from postnatal notions and attachments. What they mainly do is protect the self from being hurt, and, out of selfishness, they like to find fault with others, to resent, and to feel aggrieved.
The true self, which measures up to the standard of Truthfulness, Compassion, and Forbearance, is not afraid of being hurt by human attachments, is considerate, does not hold others’ faults against them, and can look at others with righteous thoughts. Sometimes it is hard to be aware of one’s human notions, and easy to take the “false self” as part of oneself.
It comes with passivity and negative emotions, and it tries to make me lose my righteous thoughts about cultivation and fail to be diligent amid the interference of qing. So when I become aware that my false self has surfaced, I begin to reject it with righteous thoughts and refuse to accept it. I tell myself that this is not me and that the real me measures up to Truthfulness, Compassion, and Forbearance.
From the Fa, I understand that all the trouble and difficulty we meet at this stage in our families, at work, and in society have an element of our cultivation, and that as long as we raise our xinxing, we can get through it. At the same time, evil factors try to use the karma and the various attachments we are unaware of to arrange trouble and interference for us, and we need to negate all of this completely, from the basis of Fa-rectification cultivation.
Whether it is the difficulties and ordeals we meet in our personal cultivation or the interference that arises in a Dafa project, we must not use human attachments, human thinking, or human emotions to understand the things we encounter. We should stand on the ground of Fa-rectification cultivation and look inward at where we have fallen short in the process. In validating the Fa and in working with fellow practitioners, we should examine where we have not been in line with the Fa, measure our words and actions against the Fa, and rectify ourselves within Dafa.
Our human attachments are the reason and the excuse the evil uses to interfere with the projects that save people. To reduce the losses, and for the sake of the sentient beings of our own cosmic bodies and of the many more people in the world who are to be saved, we must not cling to these human attachments.
Concluding Remarks
So we do not fall short of Master’s benevolent salvation, fellow practitioners, let us remind one another on the basis of the Fa. In our environment of cultivating as one body, amid conflicts and tests, let us quickly let go of our human attachments and use righteous thoughts to clear away and negate the evil’s interference and persecution.
If there is anything not in line with the Fa, please kindly point it out.
Thank you, Master. Thank you, fellow practitioners.
(Presented at the 2026 European Fa Conference)
