(Clearwisdom.net)

Greetings Master; Greetings everyone.

I would like to share with everyone my experiences at Sri Lanka's first ever Fahui last March. It was a remarkable experience in so many ways, mostly because it exemplified for me the purity and goodness of Dafa, something that's really helped me on my own path of cultivation. But first I'll share a bit of background about myself.

Obtaining the Fa

I obtained the Fa slowly. I was first introduced to Dafa by my husband when we met 3 years ago.

When I first read Zhuan Falun, I had a lot of resistance and often found it made me very angry. For one thing, it seemed much more like a religion than I had expected. The other aspect of my resistance was related to why I was reading the book. In large part, it was to answer for myself whether or not there was a romantic future in store with my new practitioner friend. As I read, I felt that the ordinary people's romantic relationship that I had idealized in my mind wouldn't be possible with him. Ultimately, I just relinquished all expectations of what we were or would become and allowed our friendship to develop.

Over the next several months our relationship deepened but I still couldn't imagine marriage because of my reservations about Dafa. The idea struck me that I should read Zhuan Falun again from beginning to end to see if that might make things clearer for me.

I should mention that at the time when I first read Zhuan Falun, I never finished it. I stopped about 15 pages before the end - I just got busy or something, and didn't think too much about it. Over that year and a half I had tried at different time to read Zhuan Falun, Essentials for Further Advancement and Guiding the Voyage, but all with the same result - frustration so intense that I had to put them down.

When I sat down with Zhuan Falun this time, something told me to start with those neglected 15 pages first. The very moment they were complete, all my bad thoughts instantly melted away and I knew this was the path I'd take. I knew at once I should marry my husband and start to practice myself.

It was only a few months ago that I read Master's lecture from New York, 1998, and understand what had happened to me. In it Master says:

"If you stop reading the book halfway through, the thought-karma will try to prevent you from having another opportunity to read or touch the Dafa book. This is the reason some people discover that after reading just a little part of the book it's difficult to find a chance to learn the Fa. So once you decide to read the book for the first time, you must read it from beginning to end without letting up. When you've finished reading the book the first time, you will find that all of the bad notions that affected your thinking have been basically eliminated."

Finding my own path

We got married just over a year ago and I would say that it was about then that I started to see myself as a practitioner. However, I still had a lot of notions that made it hard for me to feel confident on my path. Perhaps it was because I wasn't sharing with any other practitioners; I was only measuring myself against my husband and always felt inadequate. I tried to follow him and do some of his things, but it never felt right.

I felt particularly uncomfortable with truth clarification as it directly targeted my aversion to zealotry. Because I judged it so harshly, I assumed everyone around would have the same reaction. I found it hard to imagine myself as a real practitioner if this is what would be required of me.

Last December, we moved to Thailand due to my husband's work. During that time, we mostly lived apart; he was working in a small village and I was in the capital. Most days I went to the park to practice with the local group. It was the first time I did the exercises regularly and I tried to read as much as possible. I also got very involved with local projects and even initiated some truth clarification activities on my own, such as taking a group of Chinese refugees to other parts of the country and clarifying the truth to social justice NGOs. I worked with NGOs in Thailand for three years in the past so it was an obvious arrangement for me to do this.

All of this was very new to me, and a significant step in my cultivation. It was the first time that I felt personally driven to expose the truth and eliminate evil. I had never felt this in my heart before. Previously, I had just followed behind my husband but it always felt false. Without him, I found my own path. Since moving overseas I have been able to give flyers to people I meet and Dafa just seems to pop up in conversations on its own. This isn't the case 100 percent of the time. I still lapse into the attachment to worrying that people will see me as over-zealous if that's all I do since I had that negative impression myself. And because I was so slow to obtain the Fa, I sometimes have trouble believing that someone else could immediately grasp it. Nonetheless, when I look back at what I was like even 6 months ago, the change is remarkable.

Sri Lanka Fahui

Going to Sri Lanka was another turning point for me. Last March, we had to leave the country to renew our visas. As we were debating the options of where to go, suddenly an email arrived announcing Sri Lanka's first ever Fahui at exactly the right time. Of course it was clear that we were supposed to go.

I had no idea what to expect from this Fahui. I had never heard anything about practitioners in Sri Lanka, had no idea how many there were, what the Fahui would look like and how many other foreign dizi might come.

The magic began as soon as we stepped off the plane in Sri Lanka. There awaiting us was a group of 3 young men with faces beaming as brightly as the yellow Dafa shirts they wore. Immediately, we felt welcomed and well looked after by our hosts. Although it was already late at night, we shared experiences throughout the 2-hour car journey to their hometown where the conference was to be held in 2 days. Specifically, we learned the remarkable story of how Dafa came to Sri Lanka.

About three years ago, the local Martial Arts Federation in their town discovered Dafa and began to teach the exercises to select members of the federation. They only taught the exercises, and entirely neglected the principles and teachings. One of the young teachers asked to borrow the copy of Zhuan Falun that they had. As soon as he read it, he said he knew that the practice couldn't be kept a secret and must be shared. The federation disagreed, so despite the fact that it had been the focus of his life for 12 years; the teacher left the federation to cultivate Dafa on his own. He said he felt very lonely and isolated with only his book. Soon, two of his students left the federation to cultivate as well. Soon after that, the organization collapsed completely.

In a short time, the group of three grew to 10. They didn't have the exercise music and only had one copy of Zhuan Falun in English. They photocopied the book as separate lectures, each person taking a lecture at a time. For a couple of years, the number of disciples didn't grow. Then, in the last few months their numbers rapidly increased to about 150 with two new practice sites. Virtually all of the practitioners were children and teenagers, some as young as five years old.

The next day, we went to a small village a couple of hours away where one of the new practice site had sprouted up, apparently about 40 people attended regularly. When we arrived, a crowd was eagerly waiting for us.

The practice site was in a practitioner's home, a small, unadorned building made from gray cinder blocks. It had one main room plus two small bedrooms and a kitchen all partitioned with curtains. The main room was completely empty except for a couple of plastic chairs and a table against the far wall on which sat the tape player. On the wall above it was a yellow plastic banner reading "Falun Dafa: Truthfulness, Compassion and Tolerance." It seemed so amazing to see this in what felt to me like the middle of nowhere. The banner seemed to me very precious and prized; and also very pure. It also brought home to me how universal Dafa is - people can recognize the Truth anywhere.

After introductions, we sent righteous thoughts then did group practice. Half of us were inside the house and the rest outside, with the music drifting through the open door and window. We did a set of standing exercises then gathered indoors to share.

I felt uncomfortable with the dynamic because I felt like they thought of me as a veteran practitioner, which I wasn't. I let my husband field most of the questions. As I listened I suddenly realized that of course we were the first practitioners they had met from outside of Sri Lanka so they were eager to hear experiences from outside of their group.

We learned that they knew the facts of the persecution, but not a lot about the progress of Fa-rectification, so we also shared a bit of current events.

Then we began to hear more about their own experiences. The practitioner who owned the house had a five-year old son. With his son snuggled in his lap, the man described how he used to be a "monster," easily getting angry and violent with his wife and child, but when he started practicing Dafa, all that had changed. He was now very calm and patient. He told us how one day he sent his son into his room to fetch his copy of Zhuan Falun. When the boy came out he told his dad that he had seen a man in the room. The father went in to look around but found it empty. Later, the little boy was flipping through his dad's book and when he came across Master's picture, he pointed at it and said, "that's the man I saw in the room."

A teenager who was there had been deaf and dumb since birth. Shortly after Falun Dafa came to the village, a friend brought him to the practice site. When the exercise music was turned on, suddenly the deaf man became extremely startled. Pointing at the music box, he signed to his friend, "I hear music! And I think it's coming from there!" It was the first thing he had ever heard in his life. Not long after the experience, he also spoke his first words ever: "Falun Dafa." We were told that the young man was now one of the most diligent students who spent hours on end doing exercises beside his rice paddies.

Another incredible aspect of this group was that they had obtained the Fa without any of the teachings being available in their own language. The few veterans who spoke English would read Zhuan Falun or other texts downloaded from the Internet, and would verbally translate them to the study group. The main assistant, the man who first left the Wushu federation, had also started giving free English lessons as a way to study Zhuan Falun. It seemed to me supernatural how much they had learned. Many of them had even memorized Lunyu. One little girl was particularly exceptional. She was having complete, in-depth experience sharing conversations with us after she'd only been studying English and the Fa for five weeks. The local veteran practitioners were in the process of translating Zhuan Falun into Singhalese.

The following night we went to the main assistant's house to help with the Fahui preparations. The house was a beehive of activity. On the porch a crowd was creating elaborate flower-arrangements, in the bedroom hundreds of paper lotus flowers were being folded, and in the living room a small team was finishing translating papers (on our behalf the conference was conducted in English and Singhalese).

At one point, when it was getting very late, my husband started to doze while folding paper lotuses. The little girl with remarkable English asked him if he wanted to go lie down. He replied no, he would breakthrough the fatigue and keep working. She looked at him very wisely and said, "that's very good - that will be good for your whole future."

Careful consideration had gone into organizing the Fahui. Because so many of the practitioners were children, they decided that the conference would be part "open house" to explain Dafa to the families, and the rest a more typical experience sharing. Apparently, a lot of the parents were still apprehensive about Falun Dafa, so they wanted to make sure everything was done in a professional manner. They accomplished this beautifully. The venue was a stately conference room of the town's oldest and nicest hotel. The hotel was very supportive of Dafa and charged them only a token rental rate. In fact, the entire Fahui was conducted with virtually no funds at all. None of the practitioners had jobs, and they were all from poor families. Nonetheless, they pooled what they had, were sent some materials from overseas, and whenever something was needed Master arranged for it to show up. The main assistant's mother even cooked 200 hundred boxed lunches so all the guests could be served for free.

I learned so much from the young practitioners! Listening to them and watching them, cultivation seemed so pure and obvious and easy. They had none of the notions that I constantly struggled with. My thoughts of not being worthy of the responsibility or wondering if I was a practitioner at all seemed so silly. It came so naturally to them - why was I creating blocks for myself? Also, I had had a prejudice against giving flyers to children before, thinking they wouldn't understand, but now I realized how wrong that was.

At the end of the Fahui one of the local elders got up and said how impressed she was with Falun Dafa. She thought it was wonderful that the children were learning it and thought more should. Two days later, the school vice-principal asked the main assistant if they could come teach all the children.

The obvious pre-destined relationship Sri Lanka has with Dafa continued to reveal itself. Over the next week, the two of us and the other foreign practitioner went to the capital and down to the south to clarify the truth. Our pamphlets evaporated from our hands.

When we went to government offices and the local human rights commission to clarify the truth, Master had arranged everything. We would ask directions outside of a building and just happen to pick the person we should see. We met several important people riding the bus. We went to an Internet café so my husband could pick up an email about a friend of a friend we wanted to contact, and she happened to be sitting in the next cubical.

The trip to Sri Lanka has helped me understand the boundless nature of the Fa. Whoever is meant to be saved by Dafa will be, as long as we do the small part entrusted to us. Master has made it so easy. I just need to remember the awe I experienced in Sri Lanka and take advantage of every opportunity.

Postscript

I would just like to briefly take this opportunity now to renounce my belief in socialism and communist-type ideals. With a Masters degree in Political Science, it has been a difficult process to deprogram my academic training. But finally I have realized that you cannot legislate a society to be compassionate. In doing this, people become ever-more distant from the Fa that teaches us to think of others first. Furthermore, to assimilate to the Fa we have to follow the course of nature and let what's supposed to happen happen, people have to pay back the karma they have accumulated. Any system that prevents this from happening is against the Fa and therefore evil.

That is all. Thank you Master and thank you everyone.