(Minghui.org) Greetings, venerable Master! Greetings fellow practitioners!
1. Cultivating while participating in Dafa projects
First, I would like to share some experiences I had while participating in ticket sales for the July Shen Yun shows in Chicago. As soon as I returned from the New York Experience Sharing Conference, I heard that Chicago would be adding two more shows in the summer. At that time I felt that Master had given us a second opportunity. I felt like a student who had scored poorly on a test, but was given another chance to take it again. I immediately put off plans I had to participate in another Dafa project and focused all my efforts on the upcoming shows.
It so happened that during that period of time, two Shen Yun performers were staying at our house. They brought up the idea of helping out with Shen Yun promotion, so I took them to the suburbs south of Chicago to post posters. Working with them, I felt that their hearts were pure, and they had few ordinary notions. Whenever they went to a store, they would tell the manager of Shen Yun’s beauty, of how it is a world-class performance, and at the same time bring up that they are actually performers from the show. Some people said, “I will definitely buy tickets and bring my wife and kids to watch.” Others said, “I do martial arts. This is all very good, I will definitely go watch.” Others said that they had long heard of Shen Yun, but had missed the April shows, and that they would definitely go it see this time.
Around that time, we had an experience sharing in our home. One Shen Yun performer shared with us some cultivation experiences from the past months. He said his feeling was that Master’s Fa-rectification was moving at a very rapid pace, and that our cultivation states must also reach the standard that Master requires of us. He said that in the previous year when Shen Yun was performing in one city, Master taught the Fa to practitioners there, and those practitioners gained a new understanding about the “sticky, glue-like substance” that Master mentioned in “Dafa Disciples Must Study the Fa - Fa Teaching Given at the 2011 Washington DC Metro Area Fa Conference.” The subsequent shows in that city were all full-house. Afterward, the main coordinator said, “Let us be diligent together and soon welcome the day when Shen Yun shows can be completely sold out.” The Shen Yun performer went on to say that when they returned to the same city less than a year later, the shows were sold out. The same coordinator told them: “The progress of Master’s Fa-rectification is very fast. Several months ago, when I said I hoped the day would soon come for sold-out shows, I did not think it would come this soon.” After this sharing, I gave up the notion of “making up an exam” and only wished to better coordinate with fellow practitioners and diligently cultivate myself.
Soon afterward, I participated in the ticket-selling effort in Chicago. Another practitioner and I sold tickets at a booth in a mall in south Chicago for more than a month. By chance, I bumped into another practitioner who had helped out with ticket sales in Chicago before. I asked him about his impression of ticket sales in Chicago. We discussed that when arranging a Dafa project, one should not ignore the importance of righteous thoughts and put too much weight on technical skills. We also should not neglect the importance of fellow practitioners' righteous thoughts or personal cultivation state and other important factors. I realized that I often unconsciously put too much importance on human things and forgot to consider things from a divine being’s level. I am sincerely grateful for having shared experiences with this practitioner.
In the following efforts to sell tickets, I often recalled what he had said. I studied the Fa to guide my each and every thought, to make sure that I kept a pure heart when selling tickets. I felt that the biggest improvement was that my heart became very tranquil while doing ticket sales. I could not be moved by any external things, and I did not feel overjoyed when I sold tickets or dismayed when nobody came. All I had to do was follow Master’s words: “With strong righteous thoughts and a calm heart, do what you are supposed to do.” (“20th Anniversary Fa Teaching”)
Soon after the Shen Yun shows concluded, I went back to work on another Dafa project, in which I was participating for the third year in a row. I had no previous interest in this kind of work, but was given this opportunity almost every year. I enlightened that this may be due to my prehistoric wish; perhaps it was something I had vowed to do at this historic juncture. In the process of working on this project, I had a chance to improve my cultivation, coordinate better with others, and fulfill Master's requirements. The biggest challenge for me on this project was getting very little sleep every night. Due to my busy work schedule, every year I stayed involved in this project only for a short period of time. I often asked myself: If I had stayed any longer, could I have maintained righteous thoughts? This time, because the pace of my ordinary work slowed down, I prepared to stay with this project for a longer period. After I realized my attachment to sleep, I was able to get over this challenge easily.
Next, I would like to share two other points.
2. Family environment is also our cultivation environment
My family members are all Dafa practitioners. This may be advantageous for doing the three things, but I never really regarded my family environment as a cultivation environment. When I was not home with my family, in order to save sentient beings around me, I always held myself to the standard of a Dafa disciple. Otherwise, if sentient beings around me could not be saved because of my not having cultivated well, then how could I face Master, and how could I deserve the title of a Dafa disciple? When I was among everyday people, I suppressed my human attachments from being exhibited, but this didn't mean I had gotten rid of them completely - in other dimensions they still existed in other forms. But as soon as I came home, I started to indulge in my human side. My husband, who is also a practitioner, often jokingly said to me, “There’s just something different in the words of someone with poor xinxing.” I would always fire back: “Whatever you say doesn’t count. Master never said that I have poor xinxing, and other practitioners have never said that either.” Over time, I became accustomed to ignoring my husband’s advice on shortcomings in my cultivation. However, this time when I joined a Dafa project, one week into it many practitioners started pointing out problems in my cultivation, and they were exactly the same ones as my husband had pointed out before.
I started to realize that for the longest time I had never regarded my family environment as cultivation environment. I am so grateful for Master’s meticulous arrangement, which allowed me to finally realize this and get rid of my incorrect notions through cultivation. This also paved the foundation for the next test I was about to face.
Last month, my elderly mother-in-law and father-in-law from mainland China moved in with us. Before they came, I was very clear on the Fa principles and reinforced the fact that family environment is also cultivation environment, but I still felt nervous about their arrival. I calmed down and studied the Fa, at the same time examining myself. From the surface, it appeared that I was worried that they would affect us and keep us from doing Dafa work, but deep down I discovered that it was me being selfish. Although they had read truth-clarification materials and withdrawn from the Chinese Communist Party, I thought that since they would now have an opportunity to live with us, they must have a strong predestined relationship with and want to know more about Dafa.
I installed an NTDTV satellite dish for my parents-in-law before they arrived, and once they arrived, I tried my best to be considerate of them. They felt comfortable in our peaceful and compassionate energy field. As a result, my mother-in-law took over some house chores for me, doing whatever she could for my family. She also encouraged me to attend more Dafa activities and to not worry about her and her husband's health. A local practitioner said that it was hard to believe how my family's environment had changed.
I realized that the better my parents-in-law understood the truth, the more benefit they would get. My mother-in-law said to me recently that she hoped the persecution of Falun Gong would end soon. She also expressed that she wanted to practice Falun Gong while in the United States.
3. Finding an attachment that had been deeply hidden
I experienced two xinxing tests in succession while I was working on a Dafa project. The practitioners in our group came from different counties and had different cultural backgrounds. Sometimes, there are still disagreements stemming from human attachments among the practitioners in the group. Members of our group encourage each other to maintain a pure heart when we have to race against time to finish our tasks. Otherwise, we could not have a good effect on saving sentient beings. This is a requirement for everyone. Two practitioners said to me on different occasions that they thought I had a high xinxing because I usually work smoothly with others and rarely display human attachments to others. I said: “Really? You upgrade your xinxing a lot after your human attachments get exposed in disagreements with others, don’t you? It’s great, isn’t it?”
When I attended a group practice thereafter, Master let me see that I had a kind of self-protection attachment, which had been deeply hidden for a long time. I realized that I rarely exposed my attachments to others because I was intentionally trying to protect myself. It was not a result of improvement in cultivation or of actively looking for my attachments and assimilating to Dafa. It was only a kind of self-protection method at the level of ordinary people.
I thought that I had left my family and my job behind to work on a Dafa project to assist Master in Fa-rectification. I only slept a few hours each night and had to endure the sounds of others' snoring in the place where we were staying. I felt that it would be too much if I still had to pass xinxing tests resulting from disagreements with others. Wasn’t this the behavior of an ordinary person? Stepping back and giving up had been my human way of coping before I became a practitioner. Master let me clearly see the nature of my attachment in our group cultivation environment. I saw my attachment of self-protection very clearly, and it was filthy and hidden deeply. From that moment on, I started to pay more attention to how much I still needed to do to eliminate my human attachments.
The above are my recent cultivation experiences. If there are any inaccuracies, please point them out.
Article from 2012 Chicago Falun Dafa Experience Sharing Conference
