(Minghui.org) Greetings, Master! Greetings, fellow practitioners!
I first became acquainted with Falun Dafa in May of 1998. A friend told me about the practice and offered to teach me the exercises. I agreed. She gave me Zhuan Falun and taught me the exercises. After I started practicing Falun Dafa, many illnesses I used to have disappeared.
During my childhood and young adulthood, I lived in Kiev, a city in the Ukraine.When I immigrated to the United States with my family, I worried about whether I would be able to get medicine for the headaches that I had suffered from for many years. I brought a lot of headache medicine with me, but after I started practicing Falun Dafa, I never had a headache again.
In 1997, I was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. There is no cure for this disease. The doctor offered me injections that supposedly could help keep the disease at bay. The cost was $1,000 for four injections, and I would have one injection per week.
After the first injection, I felt very sick and decided to not have any more. I knew there were other ways to heal and get healthy, and I decided to fast in April 1998. I fasted on a popular system for almost 30 days, and then I started eating normally again. After that, I felt much better, and I thought I had fully recovered, but the multiple sclerosis was still there.
A week after finishing the fast, I started to practice Falun Dafa. I am still negating some of the karma that caused the multiple sclerosis, but the symptoms that I experienced are only a fraction of what the progression of the symptoms would have been if I had not become a practitioner.
Over the years I have had many tribulations, but I have also been uplifted many times. There have also been extraordinary occurrences.
I realized that I could only do one practice, and I couldn’t mix it with anything else. I used to look for spiritual paths. I went to Jewish temples, then I was attracted to Christianity and read the Bible. After receiving the Fa, at first, I stood at a crossroads and did not know what path to choose. I followed what I knew deep in my heart, and I became a Falun Dafa practitioner. Since then, I have only been following the path of Dafa.
Another experience that happened to me was that when I started practicing, I realized that I had to remove all non-Dafa books from my house. I removed all the religious literature that I had from my house, well almost all. One day when I was doing the exercises, a fly appeared in the room where I was practicing; it was buzzing a lot and distracting me. I couldn’t get it out of the room. When I saw that it had landed on the dresser, I opened a drawer of the dresser and saw a religious book in there. I took the book out of the house, and the fly disappeared.
I used to always think that I was practicing hard, but that I had no gong. But one day, after finishing work at the office, I got into my car to drive home. A woman suddenly ran up to the car window and started banging on it. I opened the window, and the woman said she was a psychic and could see that there was a lot of energy around me and she could remove it from me. I realized that it was gong, thanked her, and said that I didn’t need anything removed from me and left.
There were also some bad things that happened. I fell down a lot when I went to Dafa events and didn’t understand why this was happening to me. Then, with the help of fellow Dafa practitioners, I realized that I was treating myself badly. I very often scolded myself for my failings and wished bad things on myself. Over time, though studying the Fa, I realized that Master had chosen me from among many other people who were not that lucky to become a Dafa disciple of the Fa Rectification period.
Master said,
“This is the first time man has been given such an opportunity, and it is the whole purpose of the world’s creation. And then when you consider that you, out of all the simply countless, unimaginable numbers of sentient beings that exist, got to be a disciple of Dafa, how could you not do well at this? Follow Dafa’s requirements, and fulfill the vows you made before the dawn of history. Validating the Fa and saving sentient beings look, from the appearance, just like things that occur in ordinary society. But what you are doing in this case is true cultivation.” (“Fa Teaching Given in Manhattan, 2006,” Collected Teachings Given Around the World Volume X)
My attitude toward myself has changed. I have stopped scolding myself and no longer wish bad things for myself. I want to keep up with my fellow disciples, study Dafa well, and be able to fulfill what our great merciful Master requires of us.
I would like to talk about overcoming resentfulness. I long ago discovered a feeling of resentment within myself, and I always try to eliminate it while sending righteous thoughts, but it doesn’t help. Sometimes I can cope with it and not take offense, but I don’t always succeed. I started to search within myself and found a lot of attachments related to resentment, and the main one is selfishness. When I am offended, I can’t calm down, and this feeling grows and becomes bigger and stronger. I then found the fear of losing face, the feeling of competitiveness and struggling against others, anger, a desire to take revenge on the offender. All of this has to be eliminated, and I try to do it, but I’m not very good at it yet. I realized that these are evil substances, which I myself feed with my incorrect behavior and thoughts.
Master said,
“Any type of habit that you form is in fact a material product. In other dimensions that material is there, and only thus does that state manifest here in this dimension. That thing is like a landmine, which detonates the instant you touch it. So it won’t work if you fail to remove that landmine.” (“Fa Teaching Given in Manhattan, 2006,” Collected Teachings Given Around the World Volume X)
That’s why I have to remove these “landmines.”
Thank you, Master!Thank you, fellow practitioners!
(Presented at the 2024 Philadelphia Fa Conference)
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