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My First ‘Illness’ Test

February 02, 2018 |   By a Falun Dafa practitioner in Inner Mongolia, China

(Minghui.org) I heard about Falun Dafa from a relative. When I first started to read Zhuan Falun, I just couldn't put it down. That’s when I started to practice Dafa. My first major test was being “ill,” which took me a quite a while to pass.

In the fall of 1999, I was reading Zhuan Falun at home. Suddenly my stomach started to hurt and I felt like vomiting. I laid in bed, but the pain got worse and worse. Nauseated and in pain, I managed to get to the bathroom to throw up. When I stood up and was about to go back to my room, all of sudden I stopped feeling anything, as if I was in another dimension.

After a while, I heard my daughter calling me from far away. Her voice got louder and louder, and I opened my eyes. She was next to me, crying. She helped get me to my room and told me that I had fainted and that I'd hit my head on the heating pipe.

Back in bed, my head was totally blank. Then I started to think of many bad possibilities. I looked at my daughter and thought about my family. As all kinds of attachments surfaced in my mind, I could see many human things that I still cared about.

I struggled between human thoughts and a cultivator's righteous thoughts. Fear appeared, then it was gone, and later it came back again.

I finally decided to treat this as a test for a cultivator and not to acknowledge it as a human illness, because Master has told us that true cultivators will not be controlled by the human world's arrangements, including being sick.

My son and husband do not practice Dafa. Not understanding that a Dafa practitioner does not treat illness like an everyday person, they kept asking me to go to the hospital, but I insisted that I would not.

I knew this was caused by my karma, but I didn't know how to deal with it, so I just tried to bear it.

It lasted for months. I felt I was getting better every day, but there was no significant improvement. I was muddleheaded—sometimes I had a headache and sometimes I felt dizzy. I fainted a few more times and had stomach pain. I couldn't fall asleep at night because of my headaches.

People talked about me. Some said I must have stomach bleeding, which was critical. Others said that I might have a concussion.

Both the physical pain and what people said tortured me.

I didn't know I should look within. All I knew was that I should trust Master.

Eventually I found the problems in myself. I was an orphan, and my brother and his wife raised me. That taught me, or so I thought, how to endure hardship. After I started to cultivate, in my heart I often laughed at other practitioners when they could not endure hardship and or pass an illness test quickly.

This test was teaching me that it was not as easy as I thought, especially in the face of death. I also discovered that I was selfish and not very nice.

It also showed me that I had a lot of attachments. I used to think that I needed to do many things: help my son find a wife, help my daughter to find a job, buy a new apartment, etc.

When I was ill, I understood that reputation, self-interest, and even material things are worthless in a test of life or death. I took myself too seriously. In fact, my son and daughter took care of their own affairs just fine when I was ill.

I started to let go of my attachments. I repeatedly read Zhuan Falun and other Dafa books. The more I studied the Fa, the more I realized how ignorant I was before and how profound Dafa really is.

As I improved myself, I started to get better. I could do some housework by the Chinese New Year (February 5, 2000). By that spring I was mostly recovered.

This “illness” test laid a good foundation for my cultivation. I was new to cultivation, and many of my understandings of Dafa were superficial at that time. Through this “illness,” Master taught me to concentrate to study the Fa, to let go of human attachments, and to try to understand others.

Over the years, I have deepened my understandings of karma, illness, human sentiments, and the arrangements of the old forces. Now I can better handle problems in my cultivation.