Having Righteous Thoughts Improves How People View What We Do As Practitioners

(Clearwisdom.net) I've realized a bit about righteous thoughts and how they affect people's view of what we do as practitioners.

A while back I had some serious doubts about what I was doing, thinking it was strange to be working as much as I did for a practitioners' media without getting any pay. I thought that everyday people would find it weird. During that time, a lot of people in my life were giving me a hard time about working on this project. One of my good friends, in particular, seemed quite turned off by it. My family was also talking to me about it, making the point that I needed to support my family and should not be doing so much for this project.

I stopped and thought about it for a while. I realized that I had forgotten why we do what we do. We are saving people. Even from an everyday person's perspective, what we are doing is upright--it is helping people who are persecuted in China, and is working toward creating an honest media that upholds the traditional values of journalism.

I also realized that I had notions about what people think about me, notions about people's opinion of Falun Dafa, everyday people's opinion of practitioners, and how that would relate to this media project.
I realized there is nothing strange about what we are doing and there is nothing wrong with it. It was my own notions that were causing me to not be calm when explaining to people what we do and why I choose to do it, and it was my own notions that were causing problems in what I was encountering. I realized that I can't explain something if I don't believe it myself. I had to get rid of my own notions if I was going to clarify the truth to others.

After becoming more clear on what I was doing, my environment started changing. My mother-in-law stopped worrying about my working on the project, and other family members also stopped worrying. I met my friend recently and even his notions about our media and Falun Dafa seem to have cleared up. Looking at the situation, it was just my own notions that were affecting him--he seems to have been fine all along.

Yesterday I was talking with my dad over the phone. I'm doing a bit of work on the side now to support my family. We were talking about business. I told him that regardless of the situation, I still plan on working on this project. He said something along the lines of, "Of course, it's good experience. Even if you don't get paid, what you're doing is good."

It reminded me of what Master said in "Teaching the Fa at the 2009 Washington DC International Fa Conference":

"If a Dafa disciple's heart is unsteady, it will cause changes in his or her surroundings. When you have fear, for instance, you will find that the sentient beings around you are not quite right. When you change such that your presence is refreshing and uplifting to people, and your mind becomes broad and full of optimism, you will find the things around you to be correspondingly different. When clarifying the truth, when validating the Fa, and when encountering challenges as you do things, adjust yourself and look at things with righteous thoughts. It might just prove to be effective. "