(Clearwisdom.net) I have practiced Falun Gong for 10 years. My steadfast belief in Teacher and Dafa has guided me on the path of practice.
1. Teacher Takes Care of Those Who Truly Practice
I am a teacher. Before I began to practice Falun Gong, I had gastritis and cholecystitis (inflammation of the gallbladder). I started the practice because I wanted to cure my illnesses. I read through Zhuan Falun quickly and did not remember much afterward. Even for a person like me, Teacher still took care of me and miracles happened to me.
In March 1998, Teacher purified my body. One day I had a serious fever; I believed it was a process of eliminating karma for I had heard about stories from senior practitioners. I did not take medicine and was not worried. The fever went away the next day. My family witnessed Dafa's power. I was able to calm down and clear my mind when I did the exercises. Many phenomena Teacher talked about in his book happened to me. I felt very comfortable when I exercised. One time when I was doing the second exercise and was holding the wheel, my body suddenly raised up and my legs couldn't touch the ground. This continued for several days. Going through this kind of supernormal experience, I firmly believed everything Teacher said.
In August 1999, when I was riding a bike to work I was hit head on by an auto tricycle. I flipped backward and fell on my head. I felt suffocated by the excruciating pain. The owner of the tricycle was shocked. He also hit another manual tricycle at the same time and knocked the boxes off of it. I remember hearing a bystander say, "That person must be badly injured." I had one thought in my head, "Teacher protects me and I will be fine." I stood up painstakingly. Thinking about it now I realize I was selfish to want Teacher's protection but not tell others I was fine because I practiced Falun Dafa. I failed to validate the Fa at that moment.
After I got home, the physical pain worsened. Even so, I knew I was only enduring a small portion of what I deserved. I had difficulty walking for several days. I was worried that I wouldn't be able to get to work the first day of school and students would think ill of me as a Falun Dafa practitioner. When this thought came to my mind, I felt warm in my heart and I was able to lift my leg up. For two months, I endured the extreme pain at night after working.
My husband was mad at me for letting off the person who had hit me and refused to help me. Once I asked my child to help me but he talked back to me and said, "You have to pay for your own karma." I knew Teacher was giving me a tip. Of course; how could a person full of karma feel comfortable? I stopped wanting others' help and decided to face the tribulation myself. The pain continued to test me. Sometimes my colleagues would warn me of the possible consequences if I didn't not see a doctor. I firmly believed I would be fine like it is said in the Fa. I later recovered and my legs were as good as new.
I teach the senior classes at school. Most teachers who teach senior classes often pay more attention to the students who study well because the teachers want to show high university enrollment rates. I treated all the students the same. By the end of the year, I had such high ratings from the students that it surprised the other teachers.
2. Studying and Memorizing the Fa to Improve My Character
I joined a Fa study group not long after I obtained the Fa. I learned a lot from spending time with righteous senior practitioners and I realized how precious the practice was. I was moved after reading Teacher's article, "A Dialogue with Time" (in Essentials for Further Advancement). I saw that many people were memorizing the Fa at the time and I decided to do the same in order to quickly improve myself. At first it was hard and I couldn't remember anything. Now I understand it was my human notions and the evil party culture which had deeply poisoned me that prevented me from doing so. I used every minute I possibly could to memorize the Fa, even if I only had time for just one sentence. A year later, I memorized articles in Essentials for Further Advancement and this enabled me to judge things based on the Fa. This gave me a solid foundation to face tribulations in the future.
When the persecution started, I had Zhuan Falun in my mind:
"It is under the circumstance of demonic interference that you can demonstrate whether you can continue your cultivation, be really enlightened to the Tao, be unaffected by interference, and be sure-footed in this school of practice. The great waves shift the sand, and that is what cultivation practice is all about. What is left in the end will be genuine gold." ("Demonic Interference From One's Own Mind" in Lecture Six of Zhuan Falun, 2000 English translation version)
I also remembered that Teacher said in "Big Exposure" (Essentials for Further Advancement):
"We have changed the situation in human society and reversed the general climate: Let's see who still says that Dafa is good and who changes his mind. This way, hasn't everything suddenly become crystal clear?"
Teacher's words repeated many times in my head. I realized Teacher had already told us everything we needed to know about this enormous tribulation. At the time, every station on TV played contents that slandered Dafa 24 hours a day. As I read Zhuan Falun, I felt in my heart how firmly I believed in the Fa and how precious this book was. Every word in the book changed me fundamentally.
I still spend a certain amount of time every day to memorize Zhuan Falun. I benefit a lot because I spontaneously want to assimilate to the Fa. The more I memorize the Fa, the calmer I get and the more I understand.
3. Letting Go of Self and Validating the Fa at Work
Before I learned Falun Dafa, I was a selfish and jealous person. I cared very much about my image in front of others. I took seriously personal gains and my heart fell no matter how small a loss I experienced. I felt exhilarated at any extra gain. I used to take gifts from students' parents or let them buy me meals. I felt bad initially but had gotten used to it because many teachers do it too.
After I started the practice, I knew that as a good person, I should not have taken what did not belong to me. I remember not long after the persecution started, a parent of one of my students gave me and other teachers a gift. I wanted to return it to the parent and clarify the truth of Falun Dafa to her. I was a bit worried because the student's father was a policeman. I later found this parent and told her that because I practice Falun Dafa I was not suppose to gain without paying for it. I spoke to her about the facts of the persecution and asked her not to believe what was on TV. She stated that she understood my beliefs. On my way home, I felt extra relief because that was a big step for me in validating the Fa. A large portion of my attachment of fear was eliminated.
I was once jailed after I went to Beijing to appeal for justice for Falun Dafa. The school wouldn't let me go back to work and they stopped paying me. Six months passed and my financial situation was tight. Practitioners quickly helped me find a job. When I got to the company, I saw one of my students was working there. He greeted me but I felt terrible. I felt inferior in front of him because he was my student. I wondered what he thought about me and how others must speculate why I gave up my job as a teacher. I was afraid others would ask me why I went there as if I made some mistakes. That was a big test for my attachment to fame. At that time, I did not give Dafa a proper position and was not clear about the relation between Dafa practitioners and sentient beings. I victimized myself unconsciously, which showed I did not have righteous thoughts. However, I constantly readjusted my attitude and notions and started talking about the beauty of Dafa to my colleagues who did not know the truth of the persecution. I told them how I felt and benefited from the practice. I stopped looking down on myself and my heart was open and noble again.
There also came the test of wanting personal gain. The pay in the company was low and there was so much work to do. There was no time to rest and almost everyone could tell me what to do. I had a hard time adjusting to this change. I especially felt wronged when the head of the factory picked on me and showed distrust in me. I almost wanted to quit after just the first few days but I did not want to disappoint the practitioner who helped me get the job. I told myself, "If I quit now, I will cause damage to the Fa plus many employees here do not understand the facts of Falun Dafa. I must do my job well because I am a practitioner." I started to focus on doing my job well and did not complain when faced with pressure and conflicts. I was always happy. The head of the factory changed his attitude toward me a month later. He stopped watching me and picking on me while I did my job. He did not even worry about letting me collect cash from customers without supervision. There was another practitioner in the factory who did a good job validating the Fa and he had many other practitioners working for him. He had a lot of opportunities to meet with the head of the factory and often talked about Falun Gong when they got together. The head of the factory thus knew a lot about Falun Dafa. One day he even brought a Falun Dafa flier to show me and told me he thought practitioners were good people and did not involve themselves in bad deeds.
The head of the factory started to improve himself too. He used to lie about the earnings of the company. One time he said to me, "Falun Gong teaches people to speak the truth. If I lie again, please correct me." When the staged Tiananmen Square self-immolation incident was aired on TV in January 2001, my colleagues said they could tell immediately that it was faked and they said they noticed many scenes of which they were suspicious. I was so glad these people were saved. I truly understand that Dafa practitioners are one body. If we can all do the three things well and treat people around us with kindness, a righteous field will form and allow more people to be saved.
4. Protecting the Information Site and Doing the Three Things Well
For several years practitioner A and I have been making truth-clarification materials for our local area and we spent a lot of time doing the three things. Sometimes when we got lazy, we immediately felt guilty and felt that we had failed Teacher. We strictly required ourselves to do as the Fa asked us. After watching the DVD of Teacher's "Fa-Teaching Given to the Australian Practitioners," Teacher's unlimited compassion moved me deeply. As I watched it, I felt that some of my attachments were gone and the volume of my heart seemed to expand greatly. Now I can see my attachments as soon as they manifest and they are not as hard to let go of as before. I know Teacher helped me to achieve this.
Doing Dafa work is a process of improving our characters. It would easily become ordinary people's work if we did not behave like true practitioners. Before we make truth-clarification materials, we access the Minghui website (Chinese version of Clearwisdom.net) to download and print out all the information on clarifying the truth. No matter how busy we were, we read a certain number of them seriously because I believe that in order to help sentient beings understand the truth, we need to cherish the truth first. Reading the stories that trigger people's kind thoughts constantly cleansed our mind. After reading the materials we have, we put them together in a way that is attractive to readers and then print them out. Our attitude when making the truth-clarification materials is very important. When our thoughts are not distracted and our minds are pure, miracles happen. If we started doing this work for personal reasons or gossiped about others' business, a lot of times the computers or the printers would stop working. But if we readjusted our attitude, soon everything would become normal again. Practitioner A and I have a lot of similar experiences and we cherish the time we get to validate the Fa together. We allow each other to do what the other person does the best and we never compete with each other. I know we must focus on the work and make saving people the priority. We should not just do whatever we feel like. This will ensure that the materials we produce will have the power to save people.
I thank Teacher for his compassionate protection and the sincere selfless help from practitioners around me. Without them, the information site would not have worked so well.
