(Shared at 2001 Chicago Conference)
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I first started practicing in November of 1999. Like others who just started, I was really self-absorbed.
This self-absorption was really hard to give up. For a long time all I thought about were my own problems. I thought, "How can I improve myself? How can I feel better? When will my unhappiness go away?"
After practicing for some time, I read an article in English Minghui. The writer realized that his cultivating in order to attain a higher level was selfish. As a result I looked very seriously at my own selfishness. With this realization, I started to become much less important.
Several months ago, a man who practiced with us had a stroke. Later he had a heart attack. Teacher says, "As a genuine practitioner, however, you cannot practice cultivation with an ill body. I will purify your body." I wanted to understand what was happening with this man that he would have a heart attack. When I talked to him, he admitted that he took medicine, frequented doctors, studied other cultivation ways and doubted that Teacher had any powers beyond those of an ordinary person.
I saw that I might have some responsibility here. If I did nothing whatsoever, this person could die tomorrow never having known Dafa. Because of his stroke, he lost his driving privileges. He lived too far away to pick him up and bring him home for English-speaking discussion group. So I decided to start an English-speaking discussion group that would meet at his home. While I don't know for sure what effect this study group has had on him, I know he just bought a bicycle so he can get around.
This Dafa is so amazing. The night after the first English speaking discussion group that I led, I could barely sleep. I cried thinking about all of the opportunities I had missed to use my compassion to help people.
My name and phone number have been on the Internet for a long, long time. I rarely received any calls. I always considered myself a beginning practitioner.
After I started the discussion group, I began receiving phone calls from people wanting to learn about Dafa. A church group invited me to teach the exercises. A San Diego psychologist who had been drawn to hear Lili Feng speak at a conference in Albuquerque asked me to teach her. A man in a wheelchair wanted to learn. I wrote a brief article about Falun Dafa for beliefnet.com. After it was published, a man from Germany started e-mailing me. I led him to Zhuan Falun in German and he is now a practitioner. Thus I was no longer a beginning practitioner.
Here is another example. When I started practicing, Chinese people would get together after practice and chat with each other in Chinese. I wanted to socialize with them, but they would stand around talking to each other in Chinese with their backs to me. No one opened the circle to include me in the conversation. When they went out for breakfast after practice, they never invited me. I came to this conclusion: that Chinese people never talk about anything personal.
Once I had a misunderstanding with a Chinese practitioner about communication. That practitioner said he always had to adjust his thinking because of the "cultural differences" between Chinese and Western practitioners.
When my compassion grew stronger, I started initiating conversations with people. I started caring more about what happens to them. I got really concerned about people. So a funny thing happened. Once I started being interested in other people, other people started being interested in me. The first time I got together with some Chinese women, we talked about everything personal there is to talk about. Today I get together with Chinese practitioners and we laugh and tease each other a lot. We openly discuss relationships, attachments, how to improve ourselves and all sorts of personal things.
The less I think of myself, the more I think of Dafa, and the more I think about other people, the more I realize this: among practitioners there are no cultural differences. There are just attachments to eliminate.
Another change occurred after I took Gail Rachlin's media training in San Francisco on the weekend of June 9th and 10th. In one exercise, we had to tell each other how we kept ourselves from full participation in Fa Rectification. I shared that I am very attached to sleep. I also have a pattern of working that is very important for "getting things done." While sharing these things, I realized that I still have the values and mind-set of an ordinary person. I still did not put Dafa before my own interests. This was yet another example of my selfishness.
After having this realization and coming back to San Diego, I had requests for help from three different practitioners to do things for Dafa. I had already worked a little on "Women of Conscience," so our contact person knew I would have information in my computer. She called me from Gothenberg, Sweden, and asked me to write a 7-minute speech for her about the torture of women. Because I'm Jewish, a practitioner in San Francisco asked me to find a way to invite the Jewish population of San Francisco to a public information sharing event for the United Nations International Day in Support of Victims of Torture. A third practitioner asked me to help him publish an editorial about the Masanjia labor camp in the Western press.
Thus, just because I had the realization that I was putting my work before Dafa, I was given more Dafa work to do. That is, since I am ready for more, I am given more. When a change occurs on the inside, there is a manifestation of the change in the world also.
If the world outside changes as a result of changes that happen inside, then I have to ask this question. I am a particle of Dafa. I am responsible for sending out righteous thoughts to eliminate evil. But Teacher said to us at the 2001 Canada Experience Sharing Conference that "if you have the intention of showing off, have ordinary human fears, or have impure thoughts, you won't be able to achieve the goal."
Evil is still here. Is it still here because I have not changed sufficiently inside? Clearly, I still need to do more work on myself.
