Cultivation Breakthroughs While Telling People About Falun Dafa

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

I began practicing Falun Dafa in 2010, and I live in a remote, regional town. When I first had a thought to do truth clarification, I noticed that the methods used in big cities weren’t suitable for regional settings. I understand that Master has arranged for each of us to be responsible for saving a certain group of people. Since I’m an Australian who lives in a remote, regional area, I felt I should reach out to people who live in these areas. But Australia is vast, so I wasn’t sure how to do it. Master saw my heart and showed me a way to clarify the truth about the persecution to people.

My work sent me to a very small, regional town for a few days in early 2017. I later understood that this work trip was arranged by Master. During my spare time there I wanted to deliver flyers to expose the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) atrocity of forced-organ-harvesting, but farms often don’t have mailboxes, and if they do, they are miles apart. Not wanting to give up, I went to the Australia Post outlet at the general store and asked how I could mail unaddressed flyers. I didn’t know at the time that this was the start of a project that would go on for years and would see well over a hundred thousand flyers mailed to residents living in remote, regional Australia.

When I started this project, I was shown in a dream a glimpse of someone who was supposed to be saved. He didn’t get a flyer in his mailbox, because he didn’t have a house. One day he found a flyer at someone else’s house, and he picked it up and read it. From this dream, I understood that I should just send the flyers out, and Master would make sure that they reached those he wanted to reach.

A practitioner in Perth offered to finance the project so it could continue on a larger scale. We’ve now sent flyers to every regional town and city in Western Australia and the Northern Territory, and we have already made a good start at sending them to every town and city in Tasmania.

This unaddressed mail project requires administrative and organizational skills. I have some experience because I spent two decades working in administration roles. After I began practicing Falun Dafa I realized that any talent or skill I had was given to me by Master, to use to save sentient beings.

At school I had a talent for English, particularly spelling. This, too, was a skill given to me to use for Dafa. In March 2018, I was asked to proofread the Australian print edition of the English language Epoch Times. I consider it an honor and a precious responsibility to do this work. I understand that this proofreading job is one of the most important things I do, and I have prioritized it every week for more than seven years.

These two projects, unaddressed mail and proofreading The Epoch Times, are the staples of my truth clarification path. Of course, volunteering to help with Shen Yun is something I will always do when I have the chance. I also look for other truth clarification opportunities.

I initiated an email campaign in 2018 regarding the Confucius Institute at the University of Western Australia (UWA). I saw the UWA Confucius Institute advertise their services to schools across Western Australia, and I took this as a hint from Master that I should do something. So I collated over 2,000 email addresses of principals and deputy principals. This was another good use of the gift of administrative skills.

When it came time to write an email to send to the school principals, I doubted my ability because I’m not university educated, but Master gave me the wisdom to complete the task. I happened to read an article that quoted a person in authority warning about Confucius Institutes. This gave me the inspiration to search for other similar quotes, and after I compiled several quotes, the email was written. UWA closed their Confucius Institute five years later.

Experiencing Interference and an Attachment to Complacency

I did a few more email campaigns in 2020 and 2021, but then, for some reason, I stopped finding opportunities, and I went a few years without doing anything new. I started to tell myself that proofreading The Epoch Times and the flyer mailouts were enough. I stopped being proactive and I became complacent. Looking back, I understand that this was an old forces’ arrangement. It was so subtle that I didn’t even notice when it happened. I can now sense that something was blocking my mind at the time, causing me to not notice the issue.

During that period of time, I engaged in many attachments. I had an attachment to social media and I became a bit obsessed with American politics. When I ironed my husband’s work shirts each week, I watched a movie, and I was a chronic daydreamer when driving. I also gained weight and experienced menopause hair loss. I sensed that my cultivation state wasn’t good, but I couldn’t break out of it.

Over the 15 years of my cultivation, I noticed my attachment to social media and politics, but every time I tried to address it, I would just actually swap the form of it. For example, when I realized that I was being over-the-top on Facebook, I quit that and joined Twitter instead. Then I soon realized how addictive Twitter was, so I quit that too. But to fill the gap I joined Parlor and Gettr. When I eventually quit those, I started watching YouTube to fill the gap. I just kept swapping the form of the attachment while failing to fully eliminate it.

At the same time that I was vaguely observing myself repeating this pattern of behavior, I was also observing that if I finished ironing my husband’s shirts before the movie was over, I sat on the couch and watched the end of the movie. Sometimes, if I watched the first episode of a series while doing the ironing, I might get so into it that I spent a day or two binge-watching the rest of the series. I could sense a thick, dirty fog in my mind after doing this, but I still didn’t enlighten to it.

For over ten years, I have studied Zhuan Falun six days a week with a practitioner in Perth over the phone. He recently started pointing out that he could tell that I wasn’t fully focused on what I was reading. It was painful to have this pointed out, but I instinctively knew that it was very good for my cultivation, so I encouraged him to keep doing it. For a while, he pointed it out every single day. My human mind and my various attachments were not happy with this, but I was able to ignore them. I thanked the practitioner every single time, and I kept encouraging him to continue pointing it out. The old forces tried to get me to resent him, but I wouldn’t have it. They tried to convince me that this practitioner thought I had a poor xinxing level and that he didn’t want to study with me any longer, but some part of me knew that wasn’t true.

I finally enlightened to the correlation between watching fictional entertainment or American politics, and not being fully focused when studying the Fa. My habit of daydreaming while driving was amplified when I watched entertainment media. My thoughts were filled with filth, and I was determined to eliminate this attachment. I took my laptop and mobile phone to a computer service center and I asked them to block YouTube on both devices. I started reciting "Falun Dafa is good, Truthfulness-Compassion-Forbearance is good" while I drove, and I bought a DVD player so that when I ironed I could listen to Master’s “Fa Teaching Given to Australian Practitioners.”

I immediately felt cleaner, and I was able to focus more when I read the Fa. All these years I had been telling myself that it was okay to watch some everyday people’s entertainment because it was part of “conforming” to human society. But now I know this isn’t true. Everything that enters your eyes and ears becomes a part of you. I am now mostly able to remain focused when studying Zhuan Falun, and if my mind starts to get distracted, I notice more quickly and make a big effort to become focused again. Plus, my study partner will still kindly point out any loss of focus. Having said that, this attachment is still an ongoing struggle for me. There are more layers to it.

Master said:

“Since you are here among humans, what your eyes have seen and ears have heard include terribly filthy things from society. Do you know what it means to “have heard” or “have seen” something? It’s not what people think, where after you’ve viewed something, it’s over with if you didn’t take it with you; or when you’ve heard something but didn’t pursue it further, it doesn't matter. That’s not the case. All things are material. When you have heard something, it has been infused into you, and it enters your body. When you have seen something, it has entered.” (“Fa Teaching on World Falun Dafa Day,” Collected Fa Teachings, Vol. XII)

Making a Breakthrough and Eliminating Ego

Over the years, I avoided VIP and government truth clarification work because I’m not comfortable around people who are very self-confident. In late 2024, the city council where I live ended their sister city relationship with China. A few practitioners mentioned this to me, but I didn’t think it had anything to do with me. Looking back, it again seemed that there was a force blocking me from paying attention.

Then in June of this year, an editor at The Epoch Times asked me, “Do you do much truth clarification at your local council?” and I replied, “None.” For some reason, I sat there for a few moments staring at the word “None.” I felt frozen. The force that was desperately trying to stop me from paying attention to this was being overpowered by something else that was determinedly trying to get me to notice. It was like the old cartoon with a devil sitting on one shoulder whispering in one ear and an angel sitting on the other shoulder whispering in the other ear. I understood that I had to do something, although I didn’t know what.

With a new sense of purpose, I attended my first-ever council meeting to see how they work. On this night, only about half the councilors were present. After each councilor had an opportunity to speak, they then allowed a half hour for members of the public to speak. About eight people spoke that night; all of them aired grievances with emotion in their voices. I started thinking about how I could address the council and clarify the truth to them. At first, I didn’t know how to do it because it wouldn’t be rational to address a local city council about the persecution of Falun Dafa. I needed my speech to have a local angle. I held the question in my mind and I had faith that something would come up that would give me a reason to speak to them. I thought I might have to go to a few more meetings before I could figure it out, but then, one night when I was doing the fifth exercise, I had a sudden inspiration... I could thank them for what they had already done, canceling their sister city relationship with China. I knew this inspiration came from Master.

I wrote a thank you speech, and another Perth practitioner helped me polish it. The speech could only be four minutes long, but we managed to include all the important elements. We included a brief explanation of what Falun Dafa is and that it is vilified and persecuted by the CCP. I told my personal story of how Falun Dafa transformed my life, and I told the story of my friend who was imprisoned in China, tortured, and forced to make Christmas light decortions for two years. I also mentioned that he was lucky he wasn’t subjected to organ harvesting. We even fit in a mention of transnational repression and encouraged the councilors to make a belated report to the Department of Home Affairs if they were pressured by Chinese agents when they canceled their sister city agreement. We fit all of this into a four-minute speech.

The night I gave the speech to the council I went there alone. On the drive there, I told myself, “It’s okay if there aren’t many people there. Master is in control of who will be there.” I was the last person added to the list of those who wanted to address the council. When the meeting started, I was very happy to hear that they had a full-house, and every elected official was at the meeting. I knew Master arranged this. In the public arena, there were two opposing groups due to a particular agenda item. I just accepted that they were all chosen by Master, too. I was extremely nervous as I sat through the other people’s speeches, and I actually thought I might throw up or faint. I said “Master” a couple of times in my mind, and I held on to my faith that this was something I absolutely had to do.

There were about eight speakers before me, and every single one aired a grievance. When I started my speech, after I introduced myself, I told them that I was there to thank them. At that moment I heard one of the councilors say, “Oh” in surprise. I don’t think they get thanked very often, so my speech stood out. I was shaking and you could hear it in my voice, but despite that, I think everyone in that room heard every word I said. When I finished, I heard one of the groups of people in the public seating behind me applaud very enthusiastically. Council members don’t normally respond to the public addresses, but one of the council members clapped a little. I left shortly after, and in the car park, one woman called out to me saying, “That was a great speech. Brilliant.” When I got back to my car and turned my phone on, I saw a message from the councilor who had clapped, saying that it was an “excellent address” and he congratulated me for, “sharing such an important matter with the council.” I knew this was encouragement from Master.

At the same time that I wrote this speech to my council, the practitioner who helped me was composing an email to send to other councils in Western Australia who still have sister city or friendship city agreements with China. We used the story of my local council ending their agreement as our reason for writing. The speech that I gave to my council and this project of emailing all the other councils happened at about the same time that I blocked YouTube and quit watching entertainment and American politics.

Shortly after giving the speech, I had a very vivid dream. I dreamed that a severely injured animal suddenly appeared in front of me. It made a weak noise, and then lay down to die. The creature had been completely crushed on one side of its body, with broken bones and ruptured organs. The next day, when I was recalling the dream, I remembered that I had heard my human mind worriedly ask if we should rush the creature to a vet. Interestingly, the version of me who was standing there looking at the creature heard the question from my human mind as though it came from a couple of meters away to my left. That is to say that the version of me looking at the creature was not constrained by my human mind, it was outside of it. This version of me was completely unmoved and calm. I felt compassion without emotion. I sensed that the creature knew me well and had been attached to me for a very long time, probably since my childhood. I felt no emotion. I showed the creature kindness by touching its head as it passed away, but I accepted its death as though it was inevitable.

I understand that many beings have turned bad over the long course of Formation, Stasis, Degeneration, Destruction, but they were created by Dafa originally and Master would have preferred to save all beings. These types of beings interfered with the Fa-rectification, thereby committing a sin that condemned them to elimination. I believe this is why I felt compassion for the creature in my dream. It was pitiable.

I understand that this creature aligned with an attachment I had, but at first, I didn’t know what specific attachment. I thought it might have been related to giving up watching entertainment, or American politics, or YouTube, or that I broke through complacency. But after giving it more thought, I think I broke through a layer of the attachment to self when I gave that speech to my city council. I think the moment I forced myself to give a speech to the council was when the creature was dealt the fatal blow.

Conclusion

Within a couple of days of making this breakthrough, I could see and feel a whole new layer of attachments in myself that I needed to start working on. In my experience, this is a common phenomenon in cultivation. While writing this sharing, it is still taking a very strong will not to indulge in entertainment or American politics. I hope that I can further strengthen my determination, and make more breakthroughs.

These are my understandings at my level. Thank you Master. Thank you fellow practitioners.

(Selected article presented at the 2025 Australia Fa Conference)