Western Practitioner: Some Cultivation Insights While Participating in the Media

(Minghui.org) Greetings revered Master! Greetings fellow practitioners!

I began practicing Falun Dafa in 2013. About a year after I began practicing, I started writing and translating articles for the Falun Dafa Info Center Bulgaria. I previously translated movies in Bulgaria and always felt that writing was my passion.

The chief editor of the project had more than eight years’ experience writing for the U.S. Epoch Times, and she was able to manage media. I was very excited to be part of this important project, since I believed that I had some writing skills. I assumed everything I wrote would be accepted and published.

However, soon after the chief editor took over, she harshly criticized my articles and my translations. She repeatedly returned them to me, but did not give me any advice or suggestions about what I did wrong or how I could improve. She always said, “Learn from the way I edited your work,” or, “Read other articles to learn how to write yours.”

I felt disappointed at first. Then I became upset. My frustration gradually turned into hatred, and I started thinking about leaving the project—not because I felt I wasn’t good enough, but because I felt the chief editor did not appreciate my talent. I reminded myself that I was a practitioner so I did not confront her, but I resented her.

I lost my enthusiasm and was barely taking any assignments. One day the project coordinator contacted me and offered to help me put together my articles. He also had many years of experience working for the Epoch Times, and he mailed me his training books on journalism that he used to educate himself when he started working for the Epoch Times in San Francisco.

I sent every article I wrote to him and he returned it to me with detailed remarks about what needed to be changed or improved and how. I noticed that the chief editor approved these articles without making any comments, because she obviously found them well written.

After some time, the chief editor told me that I improved and asked me to submit my articles directly to her because she felt I was now able to write without additional help.

I was very excited to finally hear a compliment from her, and I told the coordinator who had been helping me. He was very happy that his assistance had positive results. Then he explained the reason he offered to help me was because the chief editor was sick of fixing my articles and she planned to dismiss me from the project. He stood up for me and assured her that I had potential but needed some training. She obviously agreed and gave me a second chance.

When I heard this, I felt like I had been slapped in the face! I felt ashamed, humiliated, and angry. My initial reaction was, “Who does she think she is, to decide whether I stay in the project or not?!” But I calmed down and realized that I must look at the situation as a Falun Dafa practitioner and not as an ordinary person.

I remembered that the chief editor wrote more than 300 articles for the U.S. Epoch Times. She was also interviewed on TV and introduced Dafa, and talked about the persecution, the organ harvesting, and clarified the truth—most of these interviews were aired on primetime television. In 2002 she filed a lawsuit with the Hague International Court against the Chinese Embassy interference in Bulgaria, when the embassy staff tried to ban Falun Dafa practitioners from holding public events. As a result, the ban was lifted and every year Falun Dafa practitioners are able to protest in front of the Chinese Embassy in Sofia on significant dates for Falun Dafa.

When I examined myself, I realized that I was wrong all along. First of all, when I joined the project, I did not have any real previous experience, and instead of educating myself, I only relied on my writing skills. When I compared the edited articles with my original versions, I was jealous of the professional way the chief editor rewrote them and I egoistically thought that she obliterated my natural talent and these articles sounded more like her than like me. I never considered how much time and effort she spent, to edit my work.

I remembered that once her husband, who was also in the project, mentioned that on the weekends, she spent more than 12 hours editing articles and she was exhausted, because just like the rest of us she had a regular, demanding full-time job.

I realized that I wasn’t only selfish, bitter and jealous, but I was also consumed by a desire to show off. I forgot that I was in this project to save sentient beings, not to prove myself as a writer. I was in a competitive mode, instead of in a state of compassion. I wasn’t acting like a Falun Dafa practitioner at all. I was the furthest thing from it.

Why didn’t I respect her experience and phenomenal efforts to validate Dafa, and to make the media look professional and successful? My ego and emotion were bigger than the responsibilities I was shouldering as practitioner!

All these realizations made me firmly determined to correct myself. I totally changed my attitude. I started putting extra effort into my writing, and I edited and checked articles multiple times before I sent them to her. I carefully checked her edits and examined her corrections. Not long after she told me that she spent less time on my work, and she praised my improvement.

Meanwhile, another team took over the Bulgarian Falun Dafa Info Center. My chief editor started a brand new media project, and she invited me to be part of it, which was huge acknowledgment of my efforts. I started suggesting different topics to write about, and she gave me the freedom to write whatever I deemed appropriate. This time, my articles needed less to almost no editing. My articles even started gaining attention, and I was invited by a Bulgarian TV station three times to discuss some of the topics on TV.

I also offered to help with the leisure column of the new media with poems and fiction that I wrote in my free time. The chief editor happily embraced the idea and after reading the first few articles and she called me to tell me that my writing talent bloomed in front of her eyes like a butterfly. She was extremely happy and honored to witness my growth. This totally unexpected praise confirmed that I was on the right path.

In May 2020, Bulgarian practitioners launched Epoch Times Bulgaria and I was invited to be part of this project as well. When new writers join the team and I see their amateur work and their sometimes negative attitude, I remember my own experience and tell them my story. I always share the lessons that I’ve learned and remind them that we are in the media not to prove ourselves but to save people. We absolutely cannot do this, if we can’t meet the high standard as professionals and cultivators.

We need to approach each project with Falun Dafa's guiding principles, Truthfulness, Compassion and Forbearance, and even more so when it comes to Dafa media projects. Only then we will be able to cooperate, work well with each other, and most importantly reach the hearts and souls of our audience.

Listen to Master’s Words

As a person engaged in media projects, I need to read lots of news. And as we all know, the news these days is rather discouraging. Seeing the rapid deterioration of people’s moral standards, politicians’ lies, doctors, scientists, and the mainstream media, all serving a political agenda with total disregard for human life, I sometimes felt hopeless.

A week ago, I shared my gloomy thoughts with the practitioner who helped me with my writing, and he reminded me of what Master said,

“If we are to save sentient beings, we cannot eliminate lives across the board—we still need to see whether they can be saved. During this process, naturally lives are going to act in a positive or negative way, and this is something that is bound to happen during the Fa-rectification. There is no need to overreact when you see a being acting negatively during this time when things are such a mess. Study the Fa well, do the three things well, and you will have all that you need. The old forces are now in fact being disposed of, after having been judged to be demons against Fa-rectification. Master is here, and the Fa is here, so nothing will get out of hand.” (“On the Responses to the Piece About Assistant Souls”)

This is my understanding at my limited level – please, kindly point out anything inappropriate.

Thank you, revered Master for the most precious gift in life! Thank you, fellow practitioners!