Himachal Pradesh, India: When You Have the Heart to Reach People, Doors Open – Part 3

(Minghui.org)

Continued from Part 2

After an unexpectedly long stay of two and a half months in Shimla, known for its beauty as “Queen of Hills,” the practitioner decided to move onto another area of Himachal Pradesh (HP).

This was the first time in her life that she took a taxi for such a long distance and the highest amount (RS 5000) she had ever paid for a taxi ride. Yet despite this relatively comfortable mode of transportation, and the accompanying Dafa music of Pudu, Jishi, and Falun Dafa is good, the whole trip was actually quite difficult.

With never-ending curves, tough road conditions, and detours due to landslides, the ride of normally five to six hours took more than eight hours and required at least ten short stops, as the practitioner felt like vomiting with severe stomach cramps. She even considered stopping overnight somewhere, but then decided to “better get it all over with” and not to delay this tribulation for another day.

What a relief to then finally reach the destination Bir, a rural village located 30 km from the hilltown Palampur in the district of Kangra!

Bir is also the location of the Bir Tibetan Colony, founded in the early 1960s as a settlement for Tibetan refugees. There are many famous Tibetan monasteries around Bir. Bir has large terraced fields and a few tea gardens and is a famous paragliding destination. The place is rated as one of the best destinations for paragliding in the world, and is known as the “Paragliding Capital of India.” Bir is also noted as a scenic center for eco-tourism, spiritual studies and meditation, and spectacular views of the Great Himalayas.

The practitioner had been in Bir twice before, in October 2017 and in May 2018, and always felt that this area was blessed. It was indeed quite a relief to come from Shimla, an area where nobody knew her or Falun Dafa, to a place she was familiar with, and where some people knew her, Falun Dafa, and the human rights situation in China.

While Shimla is quite spread out, Bir has basically only one long main road. Due to the many daily busses arriving from Delhi, and people arriving by car, to her it felt somehow as if the whole of India had "descended" upon Bir, and at times it appeared overcrowded.

After the steep hills of Shimla, walking daily long distances in Bir felt like a “piece of cake.” Easily, many fliers in a variety of Indian languages were distributed; various Falun Dafa posters were put up as well as posters that clarify the truth. As there were posters of many events and different courses already put up, many notice-boards were already filled. Anyhow, there were still restaurants, guesthouses, Internet and photocopy shops where the proprietors were happy to accept posters and fliers. Even shops like office supply stores, barbers, massage and clinical shops, electrical repair shops, and pharmacies accepted materials.

Finally, spontaneously, some people came to learn the Falun Dafa exercises. One was a woman who just happened to walk around the area where the practitioner lived, a bit outside and away from the main street, and whom the practitioner happened to meet again later on in another area. The two of them did the exercises regularly for several days in the landing area of the paragliders, an open area near the fields. This person truly seemed to have a predestined relationship with Dafa.

After having practiced the exercises together with this woman for a few days at the landing area, every single day the practitioner planned to take pictures, but somehow didn’t. When she was determined to do so the last afternoon, it was continuously raining, and therefore the last Falun Dafa practice session couldn’t take place. The practitioner deeply regrets not having a single photo of Bir and especially not getting one of the two women doing the exercises in the beautiful landing area surrounded by fields, mountains, the sky and paragliders.

The practitioner also reconnected with some school principals whose schools had Falun Dafa sessions in 2017 and 2018. They expressed their regrets and sorrow that no session could be held this time due to the Covid restrictions and urged the practitioner to come again in the future. She also met a variety of other officers and was pleasantly surprised that some of them had carefully studied and circulated the materials given to them three and four years ago.

In one office a young Tibetan man exclaimed “Falun Dafa!” when the practitioner entered, as he had attended a Falun Dafa session at a school while he was a student there.

From Bir, the practitioner headed to another area not too far away, via another school where she had conducted Falun Dafa sessions three years ago. She had an hour-long conversation with the person in charge whom she had met in Ladakh many years earlier.

This area was the practitioner’s third and last stop of this journey to let more people hear about Falun Dafa.

The Norbulingka Institute is set amid Japanese-style gardens with shady paths, wooden bridges across small streams, and tiny waterfalls. Norbulingka was established to teach and preserve traditional Tibetan art, and has a restaurant, café, and guesthouse. The Norbulingka Institute attracts many visitors daily. Here, too, as everywhere else during the practitioner’s stay in Himachal Pradesh, the visitors and guests she met were from all over India; as due to travel restrictions, hardly any foreign tourists were among them.

Miraculous Happenings

Some miraculous events happened in the surroundings of Norbulingka: While in Bir a variety of posters were just about everywhere, there were none around Norbulingka, therefore the practitioner’s last many big colorful Hindi and English posters along with photocopies were easily put up in shops and restaurants—small and bigger ones, inside and outside. Soon, these posters with the messages of “Truthfulness, Compassion and Tolerance” and “Falun Dafa is good” and information about the persecution in China could be seen by anyone walking the area.

Within a short time, there were so many of these posters that they could not be missed, and hopefully, these words and universal principles will have some kind of positive, healing, or awakening effects on passersby who see them.

For her way back home the practitioner had not a single poster, nor anything else that was leftover, except for a few fliers and bookmarks to be distributed along the way from Himachal Pradesh to her home. This had never happened before.

Here the practitioner met not only people she knew from her short previous stay in 2018 but astonishingly also three family members of a Tibetan family who run a restaurant in Ladakh and whom she has known for many years. She even came across Tibetans from her home place. A Tibetan monk fondly remembered that many years ago a Chinese-American Falun Dafa practitioner had come to McLeod Ganj, the area near Dharamshala, and had introduced Falun Dafa there.

The only three Falun Dafa sessions near Norbulingka Institute were all done at a hostel with children from Spiti, a far-away area in Himachal Pradesh bordering Ladakh and Tibet, where two sessions had been held in 2018. Although most of the children were newcomers, one girl had attended the session three years ago. For the practitioner, it was very heartening to finally be able to have three sessions in a row with the same children. The difference between having just one single session compared to having three sessions was remarkable, with rapid improvement in each consecutive session. The children of the couple working at this hostel, a sister and her brothers, also attended and a relative of the ones in charge of this hostel took part in the last session.

Children from Spiti learn the Falun Dafa exercises at a hostel near Norbulingka Institute, Himachal Pradesh, India.

The boy on the right is one of the brothers whose parents work at the hostel near the Norbulingka Institute, Himachal Pradesh, India, where Falun Dafa sessions are held.

The girl participated along with her brothers in all three Falun Dafa sessions held at a hostel near the Norbulingka Institute, Himachal Pradesh.

On one of her last days in this area, the practitioner felt that she should make an effort to visit two schools within walking distance. She overcame some sort of internal battle, with thoughts like “take it easy, stay home, start packing, don’t take on more challenges, go next time,” etc. Yet eventually the realization took over “better now than later or never...,” “there is no harm in trying at least,” “better to go now than to regret it later on.”

Within a very short time, she was indeed able to meet two principals, which was by itself a miracle, as schools were closed due to Diwali holidays, and they were otherwise only partly open due to still ongoing restrictions. Nobody else was around at both schools, only these two principals, all alone in their office, as if waiting for the practitioner.

As lunch break was approaching, the first principal reminded the practitioner to quickly go meet the other principal and the practitioner sprinted to do so, running to her school and office without any obstructions whatsoever. She had called this school just a few days earlier and requested to meet the principal, but was told to send her requests via email, and although she had explained to the secretary that she had been to many schools in Shimla without doing so, and just wanted to meet the principal for a few short minutes to show her appreciation letters and pictures, the secretary had declined and remained adamant about the procedure.

These two encounters were truly amazing.

On the last morning near Norbulingka, a woman the practitioner met at a restaurant became very interested in Falun Dafa. As the woman was a lawyer in Delhi, the talk turned to the human rights abuses in China.

Even on the way to the airport, when the taxi stopped to give a ride to another woman who was heading in the same direction, an opportunity for another last-minute conversation about Falun Dafa came up. The woman in the back seat asked for fliers, too. Throughout all these many years of traveling around in India, such last-minute encounters had never happened so close to a final departure.

Concluding Thoughts

Many thanks for the many different materials sent to the practitioner for years by practitioners from South India. Although they had piled up due to two lockdowns and resulting restrictions, much was distributed in Himachal Pradesh.

Many thanks to Indian practitioners who write many Hindi and English articles which they mostly post online for blogs, portals, and newspapers. As always, the practitioner printed these out, photocopied, and distributed them. The pages with the webinar information in Hindi and English were mostly put up as posters, and also distributed individually. Even now, during the Internet age, many people still like to read papers and some even expressed their relief, after many hours in their offices with much online work on computers, to read something on paper.

There are always regrets of various kinds, such as not being more diligent with the Falun Dafa exercises, sending forth righteous thoughts, studying the Falun Dafa teachings, or for not having held a press conference in Shimla, which the practitioner considered doing, but then didn’t do.

There are a lot of words in this article, yet the most important and deepest ones cannot be expressed with language. There is this immense, profound gratitude towards the Master of Falun Dafa for allowing this practitioner to have been able to go to Himachal Pradesh, and previously to many other areas of India, most of them remote and where no Falun Dafa practitioner had ever been before.

Although the practitioner was often not aware of this constant guidance, upon looking back, the guidance was there at every single step, encouraging her, giving her the strength, physically, mentally, as well as spiritually to do what needed to be done and to be a tiny part of the immense Fa-rectification-process, and having the honor to help Master in this respect – saving sentient beings in India.

In the whole process, many new insights were gained, as well as inspiration and the courage to keep moving on and not to be held back by any setbacks in a variety of forms and events.

India is more like a continent than a country, with such a huge variety of people, cultures, religions, climates, foods, nature, languages, and dialects. Therefore it is often called “Incredible India,” and it is amazing indeed. The practitioner was also grateful to have yet once again experienced this diversity by being in a totally different setting with nature, trees, and mountains all around in Himachal Pradesh and very amicable, kind, helpful, gentle, and polite people.

Maybe this article can also serve as a little inspiration for other practitioners in the world to venture to near, far, and very far away areas, as this planet holds so many people who are just waiting to be awakened, longing in their hearts to hear about Falun Dafa and the unjust situation in China.

Of course, people waiting for Falun Dafa practitioners to step forward in any of the countless ways possible might just be our own near and dear ones, family members and friends, neighbors, and others we come into daily contact with, and countless others we have never met or known before.

The “venturing out” doesn’t necessarily mean to travel to faraway places, the ‘travel’ might just be an internal change of heart in our own self, deep inside, or to very nearby, in our own home, or next door. Let’s all respond wholeheartedly in our own respective ways to the “clarion call” of saving beings.