(Minghui.org) I’m 34 years old and I’ve practiced Falun Dafa for 10 years. I feel so fortunate to have found Dafa, begun cultivation, and become a practitioner—I’m the most fortune being in the universe.
No Longer Puzzled
After I became a young adult and entered society, I felt confused. Before I began cultivating, I felt lost and lonely, but I wanted to walk a righteous path so that my life would be meaningful. But I never found any like-minded people.
I had a strong desire to study when I attended college, but the complexities of relationships and changing environments left me exhausted. I couldn’t concentrate and my grades kept dropping. After I began working, although my superiors praised me highly and I diligently completed my tasks, I still felt empty inside, increasingly lost, and I was unable to find meaning in life.
I was terrified of making mistakes, so others had a bad impression of me. I constantly protected my reputation, and I was afraid to reveal my true thoughts. Every day was exhausting. I encountered setbacks at work when others didn’t cooperate as I expected. I couldn’t accept it and I secretly cried in the restroom.
About two years after I started working, a friend recommended that I read Falun Dafa’s main book, Zhuan Falun. I usually found it hard to read books, unless they were textbooks. I also knew very little about cultivation.
But when I read Zhuan Falun I was deeply drawn to it. I gradually understood the truth about life and the universe: It turns out that people are all caught in a mystery, and there are other dimensions! Falun Dafa showed me a new world. The word “cultivation” took root in my heart. The book used some terms that, although I didn’t understand them at the time, I had a vague feeling that Dafa is a high-level Fa that is upright and helps people elevate to high realms. I wanted to cultivate.
After I started practicing Falun Dafa, I understood that the purpose of life is to return to one’s true self and innate nature. I finally found the meaning of my life! Thinking about this filled me with immense satisfaction. I know that in this lifetime I must strive to elevate myself, become a better person, and ultimately assimilate to Truthfulness, Compassion, and Forbearance. I believe this is the most sacred and meaningful thing. In comparison, the trivial troubles of life became insignificant, not worth being so anxious about.
After I began practicing, I realized that for years millions of people in China have also been practicing Falun Dafa, and they are the kindest people! They were right here among us, practicing and carrying on our traditional virtues. I felt like they were my family. However, I was brainwashed by the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) slander and turned against them. After I understood the truth, I felt ashamed of my ignorance, shallowness, and inability to distinguish right from wrong. I couldn’t wait to share the beauty and truth of Dafa with my family and friends.
My Family Benefits
Although I didn’t have any major illnesses, I had various minor ailments. When I was a child, I frequently caught colds, coughed, and had sore throats that made it difficult to speak. In college, I developed rhinitis, conjunctivitis, and pharyngitis, and my allergies flared up every fall. During my junior year I often had difficulty breathing. I had to stop eating after only a few bites to take a deep breath. A hospital checkup revealed my spine was deformed, so I took traditional Chinese medicine to relieve the symptoms. After I began working, I was diagnosed with breast hyperplasia and I would wake up in the middle of the night due to the pain.
After I began practicing Falun Dafa, Master continually cleansed my body and mind. For nearly 10 years I no longer needed medicine or went to hospitals. I truly felt the beauty of being illness-free. Even when I did high-intensity work, I was fine after a good night’s sleep. When I was under pressure or in a poor mental state, as long as I studied the Fa or did the exercises, I was fine. I felt full of vitality and energy.
My father learned about Dafa a few years ago, and began to read the Dafa books and do the exercises. He had previously suffered from rheumatism, heart disease, and hypertension, and had heart stent surgery. Because this type of surgery requires the patient to continue taking medicine, and long-term use of Western medicine can cause stomach bleeding, my father decided to gradually reduce the amount of medicine he took. After he began reading the Dafa books, he no longer needed any medicine. It’s been over 10 years since his surgery, and his heart is in excellent condition during his follow-up checkups.
My father suddenly suffered a severe stomach hemorrhage in early 2019. He vomited a basin of blood at home in the middle of the night and went into a brief shock. He was rushed to the hospital, where he vomited even more blood during an endoscopy. His blood pressure dropped to 30, and he received blood transfusions. The endoscopy revealed a mass of pus-like material in his stomach. The hospital initially wanted to perform an emergency gastrectomy, but considering his weakened state after vomiting so much blood and the risks involved, they temporarily stopped the bleeding with clamps.
A few days later, after another endoscopy and biopsy, the hospital diagnosed him with stomach cancer and recommended a gastrectomy. The night before surgery, when the family was signing the consent form, the doctor told us it was a total gastrectomy, meaning the entire stomach and gallbladder would be removed. Upon learning this, my mother hesitated. My father decided not to have the surgery and went home.
My family was still worried, so we took my father to Beijing for a follow-up examination. The surgeon in Beijing reviewed my father’s gastroscopy report and said that surgery was necessary, but a follow-up gastroscopy was required first.
The night before the gastroscopy I did the Falun Dafa exercises. My father was a bit weak, but he also managed to do some of the exercises. He also read the Fa.
The third gastroscopy was performed only one week after the second. The results showed that the wound healed very well. There were no more pustules, only one ulcer, and the rest of the area was smooth and even. The biopsy report showed “no cancer cells detected.”
My husband took the lab results and specimens to the head of the pathology department for a personal review. The pathologist carefully examined them and said, “There’s nothing wrong!” My mother wept tears of joy, and relatives and friends exclaimed, “How fortunate! It’s truly a blessing from God!”
My father recovered quickly, and everyone says he looks healthy. I knew all of these were because of Master’s benevolent protection—my father came out of danger and is safe.
Although my mother doesn’t practice Falun Dafa, she has seldom been treated at the hospital. She rarely gets headaches or colds and never takes medicine or injections. It was just as Master said, “...with one person practicing, the whole family benefits...” (Teachings at the Conference in Australia)
I truly believe this, and there are no words to express my gratitude for Master’s grace.
The True Meaning of Cultivation
My body and mind were transformed after I began practicing Falun Dafa, and I experienced the beauty of cultivation. Every day was fulfilling. As I continued cultivating, the conflicts I experienced became increasingly intense. I went from an intuitive understanding to realizing what practicing meant.
I began dating my future husband two years after I began practicing. I grew up in the provincial capital, protected by my parents and loved by relatives and friends. I excelled academically and I was admitted to a prestigious university in Beijing. After graduating, I stayed in Beijing to work. My husband grew up in the countryside, attended school in the country, and his parents had little education. I met him by chance, and after several years of getting to know him, I found him to be upright, thoughtful, and talented. He was different from most people, and I began dating him.
Before I met him, I had few conflicts with others. Apart from having disagreements with my parents, I was always polite and courteous to everyone. I felt that I treated people well, and others treated me well in return, so I naturally assumed that my way of interacting with others was correct. I expected my husband to conform to my approach. However, according to him I was “self-righteous” and “self-centered.”
I initially didn’t realize these were cultivation opportunities for me to look inward and improve my xinxing. I continued to do things my way, insisting that I was right and that the other person hurt me. Looking back, this kind of thinking of “imposing one’s will on others and one is always right” came from CCP culture, but I didn’t realize it.
As I kept studying the Fa, I realized I wasn’t as good as I thought I was. I understood that I was just good at maintaining an outward appearance. I didn’t dare express my opinion because I was afraid others wouldn’t understand, agree, or accept me—I wished to protect myself. Because I was afraid of conflict, I was polite to everyone and I didn’t complain—it wasn’t that I was indifferent—I just kept silent.
My husband’s arrival in my life marked my first close interaction with a stranger, and these hidden issues were exposed. I slowly opened up, and learned to express my true feelings, communicate sincerely, and let go of my superiority and self-protection. I began to genuinely care for others. I began to relax. I felt I was honest and experienced how amazing it is to look inward.
After we dated for over a year and began discussing marriage, his mother sent me a message saying that they wanted him to stay in their hometown. She said if I wanted to marry him, I would have to live in their county, otherwise, we shouldn’t be together. This was very difficult for me to accept.
I found it hard to let go of my feelings for him. After a long and painful internal struggle, I finally made the decision that even my relatives and friends opposed. I left Beijing, where I had studied and worked for nearly 10 years, and I moved to his hometown.
My husband and I lived with my in-laws in their old house in the country. It was on a low floor, dimly lit, and the walls were blackened. In many places, the plaster was moldy and peeling. In damp weather the plaster fell off. Many things in the house, such as the lights, sliding doors, and wardrobe doors, were broken. The kitchen was piled high with pots and pans that hadn’t been used in a long time, and everything was greasy and crawling with cockroaches.
I knew that as a Dafa practitioner, I should let go of fame, self-interest and sentimentality. I treated my marriage as my cultivation environment and an opportunity for me to improve.
My husband’s grandmother and maternal grandmother brought out their best treats for me whenever they saw me. When his grandmother didn’t feel well, I played for her the videos made by practitioners, including songs. She liked them a lot.
My husband and in-laws left for work early and came home late. I usually did all the grocery shopping, cooking, and laundry. Sometimes, when I was working in my room at night, I heard my in-laws come home, complaining that there was no hot water, the house wasn’t cleaned, and the laundry hadn’t been brought in from outside after it was dry. They also frequently checked the kitchen to see if I’d bought groceries, always saying that food from outside wasn’t hygienic and telling us not to eat out. Over time, I felt a lot of pressure.
I was young, but I didn’t have my own life. I was always being told this and that—that I should learn their dialect, learn to cook their way, and support my husband’s work—without considering my feelings. I felt that my family background, education, job, and life skills were all better than those of my husband, yet my mother-in-law always told me to “follow my husband wherever he goes.” I was not willing to accept this!
I asked myself: “Do you want a comfortable life or do want to cultivate by enduring hardship?” This was truly a profound and soul-searching question. I understood that that everything I wanted stemmed from my desires, from selfishness. The pursuit of self-interest and yearning for a better life like that of other people, was exactly what I needed to eliminate because they were opposite of the requirements for practitioners.
I identified my jealousy, attachments to comfort, fame and resentment toward my in-laws. I tried to let go of my ego, and not use my own opinions and standards to measure others. Instead, I tried to see things from their perspective, understand their hardships and difficulties, and be more understanding of them.
I knew that only by having a pure mind, could I treat others kindly, which was also true kindness. No matter how much I did on the surface, it all stemmed from sentimentality, which is selfish, seeking rewards, and expecting others to treat me well. I resented people when they failed to meet my expectations. Besides sentimentality, there was also the desire for recognition—wanting my in-laws’ approval, wanting them to praise me. I was afraid that I’d fail to meet their expectations and they would criticize me. This wasn’t true kindness. My heart was always focused on myself, so I was not compassionate. When I understood how to treat my in-laws properly, my heart felt much lighter.
The winter before last, they renovated their house in the countryside and moved there. With that, my living and cultivation environment became more relaxed, with more time and space for myself. Before, I had no concept of “in-laws’ family” or “my own family,” and I didn’t know what “marrying far away” meant, or even realized that I was “marrying far away.” Only after several years of marriage did I gradually understand how many issues I had to face.
Letting Go of My Attachment to Self-Interest
When my husband and I first returned to our hometown, he began teaching at a high school in a rural area. Shortly after the start of term, one of the teachers was transferred, creating a vacancy. The principal then asked me to fill in for her, because I had a degree in that subject. I was deeply grateful for Master’s arrangement, which gave me a job in a completely new environment.
I told the students to be sincere, kind, and tolerant. I wished to inspire their compassion, and I explained that atheism is wrong.
My husband and I lived at the school during the week and returned on weekends. For over two years, I was a substitute teacher for the regular teachers. When teachers were on maternity leave I covered for them. After their maternity leave ended, I was unemployed again. The substitute teaching fee was about 1,000 yuan per month, far less than my salary in Beijing. However, through letting go of my attachment to fame and fortune, I still found a lot of joy.
Due to my father’s health issues in the first half of 2019, I stayed with my parents and I stopped teaching. After he taught for three years, my husband was transferred to a school in the county.
By chance, I discovered an online job opportunity that seemed suitable. After an online interview, I was hired. Thus, I had a formal job and a decent income. This job allowed me to fully utilize my professional skills, and the work location was flexible. All I needed was a computer and internet access. This was very convenient because I had time to study the Fa and do the exercises. Even when I went back to my parents’ home to visit them, it didn’t interfere with my work.
Dafa has opened up my wisdom, so I found the work very easy and learned things quickly. Master arranged our cultivation path. All we have to worry about is to cultivate ourselves. Master is so great!
I was fortunate to join a Dafa project, and I was responsible for editing and proofreading. The process of editing articles is also a process of cultivating myself. I wrote articles before I began practicing. But when I began writing articles again after I began cultivation, I realized that things were completely different. All my experience, methods, and skills seemed useless. It was like starting from scratch.
When my cultivation state wasn’t good, it was difficult to write. Sometimes what I wrote was changed by other practitioners. When I saw how concise and clean their writing was, I realized that I needed to improve. I understood that what my writing expressed came down to my own cultivation and my xinxing level.
Thank you, Master! Thank you, Dafa! Practicing Falun Dafa has filled my heart with light!
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Category: Improving Oneself
