My Understanding of Coordination

By a Dafa disciple from Xinzhu, Taiwan

(Clearwisdom.net) The most important thing for a coordinator of Dafa activities to do is to put down his own notions and communicate with fellow practitioners openly. Since his job is to coordinate, he will work not only with one or two practitioners, but with all the practitioners in his area. The practitioners will have various feelings and different reactions to different things. Treating fellow practitioners' ideas and actions with a positive altitude and not getting angry, guarding one's xinxing, sincerely listening to other practitioner's opinions, and transforming negative things into positive ones, all need to achieved during one's cultivation. In my current cultivation, I feel that I can take negative things and help make them positive, using the energy obtained from the Fa.

Everyone's understanding is different and everyone's opinion is different. Sometimes when I adopt one practitioner's idea, I won't be able to accommodate the idea of another practitioner. Later, I realize that this is all a part of cultivation and not being attached to oneself does not mean one should accept all the opinions of other people or do things completely according to other people's opinions. In the past, for a long period of time, I tried to be a "good person without a backbone." When one practitioner recommended one thing, I would follow his recommendation, and when another person recommended something different, I would again change course. It wasn't that I didn't have my own opinion or my own understanding of the Fa. I did have my own opinions. But due to human sentiment, I didn't want to contradict fellow practitioners' good intentions. Later the conflicts became very intense and I felt so troubled that I sometimes no longer wanted to be a coordinator, and wanted to find others to do the job. Through sharing with fellow practitioners, I have realized that we are cultivators, and therefore have to be responsible for everything we do, as everything we do will be recorded.

If I leave a mess for others to take care of, I am not a good cultivator. As long as I take good care of the things that I am supposed to do, I won't be attached if someone else assumes my position or responsibilities. I shouldn't give up because I have done a bad job and don't want to be responsible for it. So many things happened during the last few years. At the beginning, because Taiwan is very different from Mainland China, I didn't know whom to contact to hold group practice and activities of spreading the Fa. I did everything myself, including moving tables and so on, but did not know how to coordinate. Only after a long period of time did I know what coordination was. It's to express practitioners' opinions and what we should do in the most perfect way. A very important part of coordination is the process, because the result is actually already there. What needs to be cultivated during the process is to position oneself correctly. The process is of utmost importance.

During the long years of being a coordinator, I always thought a certain practitioner had too many opinions and ideas, and after a long time, I didn't even realize that I had developed a preconceived notion about him, feeling that he would always make things more complicated. As a result, we had more conflicts as time went on. One time during the coordination of a truth-clarification activity in the Yuan District, I ran into this practitioner again. I thought to myself, "No matter what happens, I will do a good job coordinating the activity, eliminating troubles and cultivating righteous thoughts towards fellow practitioners." The practitioner once again had lots of complaints about the coordinators, and the conflict was so severe that everyone became irritated in the meeting and left feeling bad. However, that truth clarifying activity was very important.

Because that practitioner complained about the coordination, other practitioners were irritated by him. I really felt sad when I noticed that. I thought that I am a cultivator and my heart shouldn't be moved by anything, so I wrote a letter to everyone and said, "I have many shortcomings in organizing this activity, but I want to be responsible and coordinate the activity to the end. Please come to the meeting tomorrow after sending forth righteous thoughts." However, the next day I started having a stuffy feeling in my chest at 8:30 a.m. and couldn't sit down at all. I paced back and forth, weighing whether I should go to the meeting. I couldn't sit down to send forth righteous thoughts and couldn't send forth righteous thoughts well at 9 a.m. From 8:30 a.m. to 9:10 a.m., when I finished sending forth righteous thoughts, I couldn't help feeling sad. But in the end I chose to face the problem by saying to myself, "I am going to sit down and face what I have to face." I was the coordinator, and two minutes after I became determined, everything became better. The stuffy feeling in my chest disappeared and the bad substance was removed. The practitioner who had complained about me had written a letter saying that he wouldn't participate and attend any more meetings, but he also came to the meeting. Finally, everyone arranged the activity perfectly.

I had only one thought at that time, "No matter what I have to face, I will face it head on, because I must behave as a Dafa practitioner firmly and I must eliminate the bad elements firmly." As this thought emerged, I felt the bad component dissolving instantly. It was like what Master has said, "When it's difficult to endure, you can endure it. When it's impossible to do, you can do it." (Zhuan Falun) Sometimes we might face a situation so difficult that it is as if there is no way we can overcome it. But in fact, when we treat it as insignificant and take a step over it, it will become nothing.

The above is my personal understanding at this time. Please point out anything improper.

May 22, 2006

Chinese version available at http://www.minghui.org/mh/articles/2006/5/26/128577.html

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