(Minghui.org) My hometown was a rather spiritual place. Fortune telling in our small county seat was almost a small industry. Many fortune tellers said I would have a pretty good life in every respect except for academics, and it turned out to be true.
No matter how hard I studied, I was always at the bottom of my class. I managed to finish junior high school but was ineligible to take the high school entrance exam because I’d gone to primary school outside of my hometown. A year later, my family and I immigrated to the U.S., where I attended high school. But due to a car accident, I did not graduate.
The accident killed almost all my hopes. The injury affected the curve of my spine, compressing the nerves such that I had constant headaches and dizziness. Due to my deformed spine, I could not sit for long and had non-stop back pain. I occasionally had to get injections to ease the pain. The doctor said I was fortunate to be young, otherwise, I would have been paralyzed.
The severe concussion made it impossible for me to concentrate, and I became increasingly irritable and depressed. I also had vision and memory loss, and I was unable to attend school.
I spent several years at home in a muddled state. I took the GED (General Educational Development) Test in an effort to get back on my feet, but I was always two to four points short of passing, no matter how many times I took it.
Hope on the Horizon
Just when it seemed my academic life was coming to an end, Dafa turned everything around. The first turning point occurred after my attitude towards Falun Dafa changed.
Just as I was about to give up, my mother began to practice Falun Dafa in 2016. I grew up in China and had been indoctrinated with the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) lies, so I had a great animosity for Falun Dafa and ridiculed my mother non-stop. I gradually learned that the CCP fabricated those lies to slander Falun Dafa, and I even began to participate in some truth-clarification activities.
One day, I found out the cut-off score to pass the GED had gone from 150 to 145, which meant I had automatically passed the GED Test. At that time, I did not realize Master (Falun Dafa’s founder) had helped me. I just thought it was a random stroke of good luck that fell into my lap.
I read Zhuan Falun, Falun Dafa’s main book, and all the physical problems caused by the car accident subsequently disappeared. I had not yet even begun practicing Falun Dafa!
The second turning point happened during my college years. I was aware that I was not cut out for school, but I went to college simply because I wanted to live in a different environment and get out from under the fog of the car accident.
Both my parents, my father in particular, did not like the way education had changed in America. My father preferred to support my hobbies or take me traveling rather than encourage me to study. My grades in the first few semesters were very poor; my GPA was only 1.7, and I received a warning from the college.
Even my professors wondered why I was able to do well on my assignments but failed the exams so terribly. They thought I was not a good “test taker.” I knew the answers to all the questions, but something interfered with me when I wrote them down.
I started practicing Falun Dafa in May 2017. I had a strong belief that Falun Dafa was really good, that Truthfulness-Compassion-Forbearance was really good, and that practitioners were great. Master said,
“A good person, you know, he is good in whatever setting it may be. If you are a student you should study well. If you are an employee you should complete your work.” (Teachings at the Conference in Houston)
I made up my mind to genuinely practice Falun Dafa and be a good student. I earned A’s in almost every course after that and graduated college with a 3.3 GPA.
My Attachments Are Exposed
I didn’t think I would continue my education after I graduated from college, but the third turning point in my academic life quietly arrived. I moved to the Detroit, Michigan, area after I married. My husband is a teacher and very passionate about learning. He is like a walking encyclopedia, educating me everywhere we went, from astronomy to geography. This got me interested in learning.
Moving to the Detroit area was a big shock. I had been living with my parents in a small, laid-back retirement town where life was slow-paced. My parents didn’t have to work, and I rarely left the house because I liked to do crafts at home, so we were pretty socially disconnected.
My parents took care of everything for me before I was married, and my husband assumed that role after I got married, so I had no idea about the outside world, nor did I think I would ever be exposed to it.
After moving to Michigan, I began to hear things about how the job market was connected to areas of study and how to increase one’s competitiveness and so on. My perceptions about life were turned upside down.
For a long time I was at a loss. Looking back on my life, I had done nothing except enjoy myself, so I thought there was no professional future for me to speak of. I lived with my husband in an apartment, and my only hobby of crafting was curtailed by the environment, which upset me mentally and physically. The freezing Michigan winter was a bolt out of the blue for me, a native Southerner.
The last straw was when I learned that a friend was going to pursue her Ph.D. at a top university in the U.K.
All my pent-up emotions exploded: Dissatisfaction with the current state of my life, discomfort with my living environment, incompatibility with my surroundings, as well as jealousy and competitiveness. I felt so inferior that I couldn’t breathe. I felt my whole dimensional field pressing in on me, and I could only gasp for air.
I thought the only way to make up for the 20 years I’d wasted was to continue my education and change my major.
I started to think about studying for a master’s degree in May 2021, because my husband was afraid I would be bullied if I just went to work and I knew I would be bored if I just stayed home every day. The application deadline for most universities was January 2022, so I asked my husband to help me apply and to pick any major as long as it wasn’t liberal arts. I then forgot all about it.
In mid-December 2021, when I learned my friend had gone to the U.K. and my husband hadn’t turned in my post-graduate application, I became so jealous and anxious that I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I became obsessed with university rankings.
There was a university in the top 30 in my area, and, driven by my obsession, I only had eyes for that university. I wanted to put together my application myself but realized I did not have enough time to get everything ready, including recommendation letters, even if I started immediately.
At the same time, I realized that my GPA and liberal arts degree would not help me get admitted to that university with a different major. Driven by jealousy and anger, I started to resent my educational background and the fact that my husband had introduced me to these concepts.
The Situation Changes When I Do
One day while reading the Fa teachings, I suddenly realized I was being greedy, because I was not predestined to have a higher education. Master’s mercy had allowed me to fully recover from that accident and pass the GED and even complete college, but my attachment was driving me to use Master’s mercy to compete for fame and fortune.
I completely let go of that mindset after I realized this.
Master said,
“In the end the notions formed among everyday people dictate everything that people do, yet people believe that they are doing it themselves. At that point the people themselves have been buried, covered up, are no longer exerting any function, and are no longer those people themselves whatsoever. Nowadays the people in society all live like that. Yet they actually think—and people actually praise them—that they’re so great, that they’re not likely to be taken advantage of, they’re not likely to be cheated, they’re capable, they’re super-experienced… I’d say a person like that is foolish to the extreme. He hasn’t led his own life, he has turned it over to something else to live for him, and his body has been controlled by something else.”(Teachings at the Conference in Australia)
I smiled with relief. I had never wanted to study since I was a kid, but notions acquired from other people drove me to become obsessed with diplomas and school rankings, which was really “silly.”
I began to reflect on the whole process after calming down.
I had always been reluctant to engage with society and even avoided it, feeling it was too complex. The more I avoided it, the more I realized how powerless I was when I had to face it. So I just wanted to hide in my comfort zone. When my comfort zone ceased to exist, my weaknesses were exposed and my vanity was touched upon. I wanted to protect it, which is selfish.
Driven by selfishness, I lost myself and wanted to “prove myself” like an everyday person. So I tried various ways to compensate for my weaknesses, such as continuing my schooling to strengthen my “competitiveness.” In the end, when the situation seemed hopeless, I blamed everything on my learning environment, which had not been stable due to family reasons. I thought things might be different if I’d had a good environment.
After realizing jealousy was the reason behind all of this, the dimensional field that I felt pressing down on me dissipated. I sincerely apologized to my husband and told him I had given up the idea of postgraduate studies and that I would apply on my own if I ever did decide to do it in the future.
I received an email from a program I was previously interested in at the end of December 2021, informing me of an admissions seminar in early January. At that time I had completely given up on continuing my education, but my husband saw the email and encouraged me to attend the seminar.
I learned in the seminar that even though the program’s application deadline was January 15, local students could apply until August. Encouraged by my husband, I decided to apply for it and take it as my first step to reach out to society on my own.
The feeling of powerlessness came back to me as I was learning to write the application essay, but I told myself that I just wanted to do the right thing at the moment. I felt embarrassed looking for people to write letters of recommendation for me, but thanks to Master, people took the initiative and wrote the letters.
I submitted my application in February 2022 and expected it would take six to eight weeks to hear back, but to my pleasant surprise, I received an acceptance notice in early March. I was admitted into an engineering program in that top 30 university.
I recall that when I first started to cultivate, several other practitioners and I once clarified the truth to someone who said he did not understand why practitioners went out of their way to practice Dafa. In a very contemptuous tone, he said he thought faith was a spiritual crutch and that we were stupid. I was upset that I didn’t know how to explain things to him.
My mind played back the countless things that I had never been able to do or even dared to think about doing but that had all come true due to Master’s merciful protection. I shared some of those personal experiences with that person. He fell silent.
I have not practiced for long and I have not been diligent, but I have personally experienced countless times that Master has given the best to his disciples on the path of cultivation.
This concludes my limited understanding. Please point out anything improper.
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