(Minghui.org) Greetings, respected Master! Greetings, fellow practitioners!
I started practicing Falun Dafa in 1998. Although my cultivation state has had its ups and downs, I have always firmly believed in Dafa. Looking back on my recent cultivation journey, from family ordeals to helping promote Shen Yun, one test after another has given me a deeper appreciation of just how serious and extraordinary cultivation is, and has made me feel Master’s compassionate care all the more.
A few years ago, our family moved into the new home we had long hoped for. My husband is Danish, and although he does not cultivate, he has always respected my faith, and sometimes even helps with Dafa projects. Our two children were growing up, and I had found a local job. On the surface, life seemed settled and peaceful. Yet just as everything appeared to be going smoothly, my husband was diagnosed with depression. Around the same time, I was unexpectedly diagnosed with diabetes. These sudden turns of events shattered what had been a peaceful life.
I felt shaken. I monitored my blood sugar every day and injected insulin as the doctors required. After a while, I began to look at this from a cultivation perspective. As a cultivator, I know that nothing happens by chance. Through Fa study, I gradually came to understand that whatever tests and tribulations a cultivator encounters should be viewed from the standpoint of cultivation. I had many food preferences, and I had also grown complacent and lax in my cultivation.
I realized that the requirements doctors placed on me through ordinary medical methods were not the standard by which I, as a cultivator, needed to pass this test. For instance, the doctor told me I needed to avoid a certain food, but I knew the food was not the problem; my real problem was eliminating my attachment to food preferences. So I adjusted my eating habits while placing greater emphasis on studying the Fa and doing the exercises. Gradually, and almost without my noticing, most of my diabetes symptoms disappeared.
Just as my condition began to stabilize, my husband’s illness suddenly took a turn for the worse, quickly reaching the point where he needed hospital treatment. At first he stayed in an open hospital ward. Then he was moved to a locked ward, and he was finally placed in a long-term inpatient ward, where he underwent fourteen sessions of electroconvulsive therapy.
The hospital was more than an hour’s drive from home each way. I worked during the day, rushed to the hospital to see my husband after work, and then I still had to look after our two children once I got home. By the end of each busy day, I often felt utterly exhausted. Yet no matter how busy I was, I always kept up with my Fa study. Whenever I felt I could not bear it, I would remind myself, that with Master and Dafa, there is no test I cannot get through.
My husband’s condition improved somewhat. He was able to come home for the night, and later gradually returned to a normal life at home. But his condition still fluctuated. When he could not sleep I studied the Fa with him. I read Master’s works with him, including Zhuan Falun, Falun Gong, and various other teachings. My husband did not study the Fa to cure his illness or to gain anything. He just read and did the exercises. When he did the exercises, he could feel changes in the energy in his body.
As time went on, I came to see more and more clearly that what looked on the surface like illness was in fact interference from karma and various negative factors. While my husband’s condition kept fluctuating I looked inward. I found that I still had a deep attachment to family affection. When my husband’s condition swung between good and bad, my mood fluctuated. My anxiety and unease welled up, and I felt I could see no hope. I understood clearly that Master could help me when I was in line with the Fa. I could not look at these problems the way ordinary people do. I had to face them with righteous thoughts and resolve conflicts with compassion and kindness.
When pressures from family, work, finances, and health all bear down at once, it truly is difficult to take a single step forward. But it is precisely in such a complicated environment that a cultivator improves, tempers their will, and raises their xinxing.
I kept up my daily Fa study, sending forth righteous thoughts, and clarifying the truth, while taking part in whatever Dafa projects I could. I looked inward whenever I ran into conflicts or pressure, and reflected on whether I lacked sufficient faith in Master and the Fa. Was I tolerant or was I too caught up in emotion? Although I still could not see many things clearly, I always remembered what Master said:
“Whatever you experience during your cultivation—whether good or bad—is good, for it comes about only because you are cultivating.” (“To the Chicago Fa Conference,” The Essentials of Diligent Progress III)
Before long a new test arrived. The prolonged strain of this family ordeal caused my emotional state to fluctuate, and it began to affect my work. My manager said she understood my family situation, but felt that my low spirits had begun to affect how customers perceived me. She said she hoped I would improve within a month, or else I might face dismissal. Hearing this, I felt wronged and under pressure. But as a cultivator, I knew that complaining would not solve anything. All I could do was try my best to do what I should, and face everything with righteous thoughts.
Not long after, my husband was in a car accident while driving to get our daughter from school. Although the car was badly damaged, my family was not harmed. This made me feel all the more that my family and I were under Master’s compassionate protection, and that I truly had to cultivate well and not let down Master's painstaking efforts on our behalf.
Yet the truly severe test was still to come. One day, my husband’s condition spun out of control; he suddenly became highly agitated and did something dangerous. He wrapped an electrical cord around my neck. I forced myself to stay calm. I managed to call the police for help. Just before the police arrived my husband took a large quantity of medication. By the time he was brought to the emergency room he was unconsciousness. His heart stopped twice and the situation was extremely critical.
This crisis helped me realize that I needed to let go of human notions. I stayed calm and rational, let go of attachments, faced the ordeal with righteous thoughts, held onto kindness, and calmly met one tribulation after another. When I faced this family ordeal with the mindset of a cultivator, my mind gradually grew calm, my human notions lessened, and things took a turn for the better. Although I did not know how many more tests lay ahead, I knew that as long as I stayed firm on the path of Dafa cultivation, I would surely make it through, ordeal after ordeal.
I had a very vivid dream one night. In the dream, Master compassionately patted my shoulder and said, “It has passed, it has passed.” When I woke, my heart was filled with gratitude, and I felt even more determined to continue being diligent in solid, genuine cultivation. My husband’s condition gradually improved, and our family slowly emerged from its most difficult period.
Looking back on that period, I deeply feel that without Master’s compassionate protection and Dafa’s guidance I would have found it very hard to get through those difficult days. Every tribulation that seemed impossible to overcome was ultimately overcome under Master’s protection. I deeply understand that what truly sustained me through all these ordeals was not personal ability, but firm faith in Dafa. Every tribulation I encountered was there to raise me through the test, which has made me cherish my good fortune in being able to practice Falun Dafa, and made me all the more grateful for Master’s compassionate salvation.
We received exciting news in late 2025, that Shen Yun would finally have the chance to perform in Copenhagen, the capital of Denmark! Over the years, Shen Yun had performed many times in Denmark’s second and third largest cities, and had been warmly received and loved by local audiences there. Many residents of the capital had gone to see Shen Yun in those cities.
But because of the CCP’s economic coercion as early as 2007, and pressure on the local government, it used various means to abruptly cancel a Shen Yun performance that had already been planned in Copenhagen. In the 19 years of transnational repression and persecution by the CCP that followed, we were never able to overcome the difficulty of securing a venue in the capital. It was not until the end of last year that we learned that a newly built theater in Copenhagen received special approval, and everyone felt tremendously excited, and treasured this hard-won opportunity all the more.
The performances were scheduled for late March and early April 2026, five shows in total, with close to 15,000 tickets to sell. The time we had to promote Shen Yun was already fairly limited, and doing the promotion work well within a short period, in a city seeing Shen Yun for the first time, was an enormous challenge for us few practitioners. Everyone threw themselves wholeheartedly into promoting Shen Yun.
I noticed that the audiences at Copenhagen’s various theaters were mainly mainstream society, and the productions staged there were mostly traditional works. So these audiences were exactly the group we needed to introduce and promote Shen Yun to. I handed out Shen Yun materials to the audience outside the theater every night after the show.
During the day, I went to commercial streets in various districts to put up Shen Yun posters. I deeply treasured this important promotional work, knowing that what I was carrying was the responsibility of helping Master save sentient beings. From my dress and appearance to my speech and manner, I did my best to hold myself to the standard of a cultivator, hoping to show the kind and sincere bearing of a practitioner to future Shen Yun audience members.
Getting to the theater each evening meant changing between the subway and the bus, which took more than an hour each way, and sometimes after handing out materials at one theater I had to rush to another. We always handed out materials after the show let out so that the audience members who took our materials would bring them home rather than leave them behind in the theater. By the time I finished handing out materials each night, it was already very late, and I would get home close to midnight, yet still had to go to work early the next morning. As a result, handing out materials outside the theater over a long period left me with very little time to rest.
An even greater test was that Denmark’s winter this year was exceptionally cold. It was the harshest cold that Denmark had seen in decades, with biting winds mixed with heavy snow, with the wind-chill temperature often dropping to more than ten degrees below zero. Because of the severe weather, when blizzards hit, some trains were delayed or even suspended, causing great inconvenience to our promotional work.
Standing in the freezing wind waiting for transport, waiting outside the theater for the audience to come out after the show, or waiting late into the freezing night for a bus home that would not come, I sometimes felt utterly exhausted, and at times even felt physically unwell. But whenever I thought of the people waiting to be saved, I reminded myself not to let surface difficulties hold me back. I had to grit my teeth and go to the theater every single day, without fail.
Whenever audience members came out of the theater, I greeted them with a smile and offered them Shen Yun flyers. Whether or not they accepted them, I always tried to keep a kind and peaceful state of mind. I gradually came to realize that what truly moves people is not just the materials in their hands, but the kindness that comes from a cultivator’s heart. As time passed, more and more people told us they received Shen Yun’s promotional materials and had also seen the advertisements.
Besides handing out Shen Yun materials at the theater every evening, on weekends I went to Copenhagen’s various districts and busy commercial streets. I went to each shop to introduce Shen Yun to the staff, and with their consent put up beautifully printed Shen Yun advertisements in shop windows or by the counter. I often carried several hundred flyers. My back was so heavy that walking became difficult, but I kept going from shop to shop, forming a bond with people and telling them about the beauty of Shen Yun.
Although I went to the theater to hand out materials every day and did promotions on weekends, this year we also faced yet another round of global, transnational repression that the CCP launched against Dafa and Shen Yun, leveraging the influence of The New York Times in Western countries, where a series of fabricated, slanderous reports were published about Shen Yun. Furthermore, in cities where Shen Yun performed, they arranged negative coverage about Dafa and Shen Yun in local media outlets that had been misled.
Shen Yun's promotion in Copenhagen ran into the same CCP interference. People who did not know the truth were more easily swayed by the lies, which meant ticket sales moved more slowly than expected, and some people who had already bought tickets asked for refunds after being influenced by the propaganda and lies. Seeing how slowly ticket sales were progressing, I felt anxious and impatient. I kept asking myself what was I so anxious about?
After I looked inward, I found that I still had an attachment to seeking results. I wanted quick success. On the surface, I was doing Shen Yun promotion, but in reality it was still mixed with human notions and human thinking. Once I recognized this, I required myself to make an effort to let go of my attachment to results, and to focus instead on doing well what I ought to do. At the same time, I increased the length of time I sent forth righteous thoughts.
My company was restructured and I was terminated. I was paid several months’ salary. Many people felt sorry for me because I lost my job, but my very first thought was one of gratitude, because I could now promote Shen Yun full-time! Thank you, Master! Right around then, my husband also successfully found a new job, which eased our family’s financial pressure somewhat and allowed me to focus even more on promoting Shen Yun.
This experience made me realize that many things which seem bad are not necessarily bad at all. When I was able to let go of personal loss I could see the compassionate arrangements Master made for me. I had more time to study the Fa, and was even able to join in sending forth righteous thoughts outside the Chinese embassy every day. I kept a peaceful state of mind, and when I met with difficulties I did not complain or react negatively, but instead focused on the requirements of a cultivator and did the three things well.
Through the joint efforts of practitioners in Denmark and fellow practitioners who came from other countries to help, Shen Yun’s performances were finally successfully held. When I saw people walking into the theater, watching Shen Yun’s magnificent performances, moved by Shen Yun’s beauty and praising it wholeheartedly, and did not hear a single audience member showing any sign of being affected by the CCP’s or the media’s negative reporting, I deeply felt Master’s immense compassion in saving sentient beings, and I also felt proud to have had the chance to take part in promoting Shen Yun.
Over the whole course of this, I let go of many attachments. In the past, when I ran into difficulties, I easily fell into fear and the wish to escape. Now, through cultivation, I’ve become much stronger! I will treasure every opportunity to clarify the truth and save sentient beings, cherish the limited time I have for cultivation, work hard to do the three things well, cultivate myself well, save more people, and not let down Master’s compassionate, painstaking salvation and the expectations of sentient beings.
The above is a little of my cultivation experience at this stage. If there is anything not in accordance with the Fa, please kindly point it out.
Thank you, Master. Thank you, fellow practitioners.
(Presented at the 2026 European Fa Conference)