Cultivate Ourselves Well and Don’t Push New Practitioners Away

(Minghui.org) I recently learned that many relatively new practitioners in our region have been arrested at one point or another for upholding their faith in Falun Dafa. Many of them had started to do things to raise awareness about the persecution, before they grew mature and solid in cultivation. After they were arrested, they couldn’t resist the pressure and were forced to write statements to renounce Dafa.

As more and more new practitioners are taking up Dafa, we should fulfill our responsibility in properly guiding them, without causing unnecessary losses.

I’d like to share what happened to me when I was still a newcomer to Dafa. I felt that Zhuan Falun was so good that I recommended it to a friend not long after I took up Dafa. She read it and concurred that Dafa was good.

Then a veteran practitioner had a long talk with me. What she said sounded very extreme to me back then and totally confused me. I even thought about reporting her to police. I ended up not reporting her, but became so scared that I decided to not practice Dafa anymore. I called my friend to return the book to me because I didn’t want her to be “harmed” either. She got so scared that she didn’t even dare to step foot in my home. She stood outside my apartment building and asked me to use a pulley to pull the book up.

Looking back, what the veteran practitioner said made sense to me now, but it scared me to the point where I stopped practicing Dafa for a long time. I learned later that the practitioner who introduced me to Dafa specifically asked the veteran practitioner to share experiences with me to help me improve. Neither of them realized that my understanding of the Fa hadn’t reached a high enough level to appreciate high-level sharing.

Even after I resumed practicing Dafa, there were also some incidents that prevented me from becoming more involved. For instance, local practitioners started a Fa study group at my home, trying to help me study the Fa more. One practitioner’s coat looked really dirty and I was really turned off and no longer welcomed him to my home. I also noticed some practitioners failed to keep proper distance between members of the opposite sex. And there were also practitioners who overstayed their welcome. I had many personal and business affairs to take care of, but those practitioners didn’t want to leave after the Fa-study was done. I was very upset about it and almost quit practicing Dafa again.

I also want to remind both new and veteran practitioners to read Nine Commentaries on the Communist Party. All of us living in China have been deeply indoctrinated by the Party culture, which blocks us from truly understanding the Fa and assimilating to the Fa. The Party culture isn’t something that only Party members have. As long as we live in the environment, we can be influenced by it.

Editor’s note: This article only represents the author’s understanding in their current cultivation state meant for sharing among practitioners so that we can “Compare in studying, compare in cultivating.” (“Solid Cultivation,” Hong Yin)