(Clearwisdom.net) I'm a native of Colorado, U.S.A. and I'm 22 years old. I think I always felt that the world was not as small and confined as science makes it out to be, but in this modern culture it hasn't been easy to break through my notions. The first time I encountered the Fa, someone had left a copy of Zhuan Falun lying on a coffee table at a local bookstore. I picked it up and read through it for a while, but I wasn't ready to start on the path. However, I did take a bookmark out of it which someone had left, which I still have today.

Years went by and I had some very supernormal experiences, which I know relate to my having previously skimmed though Zhuan Falun. I practiced Tae Kwon Do for a year and learned my body isn't as limited as a T.V. watching, video game playing kid comes to believe. Later I practiced Taichi, also for a year. In that year I found out many things about oriental self-improvement systems, although the specific type of Taichi I practiced was a somewhat crooked path. Shortly before I obtained the Fa I was planning on spending some time at a Taichi temple in Canada.

Then one day I was walking through a park and I came upon a man practicing Falun Dafa, doing the Wheel-Holding exercise. He had a sign out and I stopped to read it. The Chinese man stopped practicing and came over to talk to me. Since I was interested in oriental culture, even though it was winter I was wearing only a T-shirt, which is an exercise to improve one's ability to thrive in the cold. Years later he told me that was one of the reasons he stopped to talk to me. He talked a lot and gave me some flyers to read, which I later read through thoroughly.

At this time I started spending time selectively reading through the books on the Internet, reading the parts that interested me. Also around this time my car was once parked at an oriental mini-mall and someone put a flyer for a ten-day Dafa workshop to be held. I was unable to make the workshop, but I was interested. With my sister's (a non-practitioner) advice I decided I wanted to give it a try. When I showed up at the practice site, however, there was no one there. I went again and there was no one, but I noticed on the flyer there was a longer practice on Saturday than weekdays, so when I went on Saturday the group was there and I learned the exercises. A couple months after I started practicing, I quit smoking marijuana. I had previously done this every day, and occasionally done harder drugs. I have not done any drugs for more than four years now.

My first conference was a couple of months after I started practicing, in Washington D.C. I had a practitioner friend who was going as well, so I felt very comfortable going, and at my mother's request (I was 18) I called her every day I was gone. That conference allowed me to really break through and become a Dafa practitioner. It's been a really amazing four years.