(Clearwisdom.net) As a veteran practitioner who has practiced for over ten years, I feel really ashamed that, for such a long period of time, I had not learned to look within.
I am a retiree, thus the tests and hardships I encounter in my cultivation practice basically all come from within my family. To break the shackles of selfishness and reach a realm of unselfishness, I must cultivate through the frictions within my family. If I cannot even handle family conflicts well, how can I be compassionate toward other sentient beings? Teacher did not arrange for me to develop attachments toward my family, but rather to let go of these affections. They are for me to cultivate and train myself, to go above and beyond, and in the end, become a great Dafa practitioner. I believe that I have understood these teachings very well.
Every day, I take care of my children, study the Fa, do the exercises, and clarify the facts about Falun Gong. I felt that I had done pretty well and was doing my best to practice in this society. It was not so much about conflicts in my family. However, I did not realize that I was just working on the formality, that I had not truly cultivated my xinxing, and that I had not truly put my heart into learning the Fa. Thus my understanding of the Fa became stagnant at the state of personal cultivation in 1999. And for such a long period of time, I did not realize this.
Teacher has left us with an environment for studying the Fa in a group, sharing experiences and having discussions. He wants us to cultivate ourselves, "so as to attain the righteous Enlightenment of selflessness and altruism." But I had not done things according to Teacher's requirements. Particularly, I had not gotten rid of the attachment of selfishness. For example, when I studied the Fa with my husband, I disliked it when he read so slowly, so I did not want to study the Fa with him, worrying that he would hinder my improvement. After a fellow practitioner pointed this out to me, I realized my problem and dug out my hidden selfishness. I even worried about being hindered when I studied with my own family. I cannot imagine how it could have been were he someone else! As a veteran practitioner who had practiced for over ten years, why did I still have such a strong selfish mentality? It was really terrible. How had I practiced all these years? In front of my own husband, I always emphasized myself. As one family, I thought I never needed to consider the effect of my own actions. I let my own mutant personality expand, and sometimes I really embarrassed my husband. It had not even entered my mind that it was for cultivating myself, and I forgot that I should be a practitioner within my family. As a matter of fact, cultivation is about cultivating oneself during these little daily things, looking within to find one's own attachments, shortcomings, ordinary people's mentalities and concepts, in addition to the influences inherited from the ideology and culture of the Chinese Communist Party, etc. All these deformed things that do not conform to Dafa must be dug out and eliminated.
When I tried to carefully look inside, I found that my selfishness was not only exhibited at home. If such an attachment is not rooted out, it will naturally appear at any time and at any place.
Our coordinator made me responsible for producing Dafa information material for our site, and Practitioner A was responsible for the distribution. After doing it several times, Practitioner A claimed that he was too busy to do it and had my husband bring the material to a certain place and give it to a certain person. But this certain person was one of our acquaintances. When I heard Practitioner A's proposal, the first thing that came into my mind was: "We produce the material, and now you want us to deliver it. Won't the person we deliver it to figure out that we produce it?" I was afraid, and I was not happy about it, but my husband agreed to take on that responsibility. After Practitioner A left, my husband asked me, "Where is the unselfishness we practice? Why do you think of yourself first in everything? Practitioner A has other things to take care of--he is really busy. If we deliver the prints when they are ready, won't we be helping him out a little?" Immediately, I found myself having no place to turn to. Why did I only think of myself and no one else? When I dug deep into my own attachments, I found that, apart from selfishness, my fear and affections were also surfacing. I found that I still had so many bad things that I had not gotten rid of!
During the past two years of producing informational materials, with the patient help and training of a fellow practitioner who knows technology (a technician), I have improved my knowledge of how to produce these materials. The process of producing these materials is also a process of cultivating my own xinxing. At the beginning, whenever there was a problem with the machine, I would first think of asking for help from this technician. However, a lot of times, the machine broke down immediately after the technician left. The machine seemed to fight with me a lot, and I often felt very troubled and annoyed, and therefore could not calm myself down to study the Fa. After some time had passed, I practiced and learned to look inside whenever a situation occurred. Now I regard it differently. Whenever there is an abnormality with the machine, the first thing I do is to study the Fa and look inside, and usually, the machine will work again after that. I only ask the technician for help if I cannot solve the problem. At the same time, I came to understand the hardships of the technician; it is irresponsible of me to push all my problems onto the technician to solve.
After a period of Fa study and with the help of fellow practitioners, I learned to look within. I found my mentality of self-protection, fear, and more attachments that were hidden all these years; they all stemmed from my selfishness. In my future cultivation practice, I still need to calm myself down to study the Fa and look within first. I need to measure my every thought, every word, and every act during my daily life against the standard of Dafa. I need to do well according to the requirements of Dafa, and I must get rid of my selfishness.
Whether one thinks about oneself or others is the difference between the thought of an ordinary person and the thought of a god. Only if one can get rid of the selfishness of the old universe at its root can one walk out of being an ordinary person and become a god of the future universe. May all of us who truly practice the Fa fulfill the promises we made before we came. May we improve and rise in our realms as a whole and save more sentient beings. May the persecution of Falun Gong stop, so that we can soon return to our home with Teacher.
