Recently Married Practitioner: Letting Go of the Attachment of Desire and Lust

By a practitioner from Liaoning Province

(Clearwisdom.net) I am a new practitioner who recently got married. The issue of lust has always been a difficult one for me to navigate and have a clear understanding on, given that my husband does not practice Falun Gong. Recently I have intensified my Fa study and gotten clearer on this issue.

First, I realized that the Fa's requirements are the same for practitioners married to other practitioners and for those who are not. In other words, unequivocally I need to remove the attachment. At the same time, that doesn't mean a forced separation between husband and wife. It's more about improving xinxing than simply removing the desire. Teacher said,

"People in the past went to temples and monasteries or into the mountains to cultivate while avoiding the world's people. Those people didn't physically endure too many xinxing tests or have their attachments directly tugged upon, and didn't have the most direct test of material things. So for the person's main body it is as if he didn't cultivate. Even though the person gave up a normal life during his lifetime, for that person it was nothing more than taking up a different lifestyle." (Teaching the Fa at the 2004 International Fa Conference in New York)

Therefore, it should be "a manifestation of the realm of your cultivation. It is truly great magnificence," as a fellow practitioner put it. At the same time, we shouldn't use the fact that we cultivate in everyday society as an excuse and lower our standards for our conduct and thinking. If we truly achieve the state of no desire and no pursuit, our environment would be entirely different.

At the beginning, I was not very determined to get rid of this attachment. Other attachments such as showing off and fighting can be easily distinguished because they are bad substances even from the perspective of ordinary society. For the attachment of desire and lust, for ordinary people these things are considered normal, so I did not realize how bad it was and was not very determined to get rid of the attachment. Sometimes I was reluctant to try to get rid of the attachment. Looking deeper, I found that fundamentally, getting rid of this attachment was difficult for me because I was pursing a life of happiness and comfort in the human world, rather than focusing on improving my xinxing to a different realm. Teacher said in the book Zhuan Falun,

"People often think that what they want are good things. But in fact, when you look at it from a high level, that's all just for the instant gratification ordinary people like. "

After coming to grips with my attachment, I feel like I'm well on my way to looking at the issue from the Fa's perspective and fundamentally improving my xinxing.

Chinese version available at http://minghui.ca/mh/articles/2008/4/12/176177.html

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