[European Fa Conference] Looking Inward to Overcome Adversities and Witness the Wonders of Dafa

(Minghui.org) Greetings fellow practitioners. I would like to share with you the process related to one of the greatest challenges I faced this year while promoting Shen Yun.

I left home to promote Shen Yun in the city of Palermo, in the south of Italy, for the first time. Just at that time, my mother began to suffer from intense and excruciating generalized pain. This happened at the end of October 2021. My mother had also felt sick during Shen Yun promotion previously.

The first time was in 2018 when I found her at home in a confused state. It turned out she had a brain meningioma that needed surgery immediately. This meant that my participation in Shen Yun promotion activities had to slow down a lot to follow my mother’s post-operative process, which was long and complex.

I reflected on what had happened during the following months. I realized my concern for her health had caused her illness to materialize in a severe pathological state. In my understanding, the old forces now use everything that they can to make our hearts unstable to hinder us in the process of saving sentient beings. If our hearts falter, very limiting situations can be created around us.

The following year in 2019, my mother had a heart attack during the promotion of Shen Yun and I immediately put myself on alert. I accompanied her to the emergency room at the hospital and throughout the night I sent righteous thoughts to clean up my state and eliminate any worries. The next day my mother was discharged with treatment and with an appointment to have defibrillation in a month. She never did it because her heart returned to its normal parameters, and I continued to promote Shen Yun.

Thus, when my mother began to feel bad again in October 2021, thanks to my previous experiences, I didn’t worry and I never had a thought of returning home from Palermo, even though I called her often.

I returned home for the Christmas holidays after two months in Palermo. She had followed an extensive therapy and experienced only slight pain and she was still completely self-sufficient. The first diagnosis was that she had suffered from myocarditis caused by the third dose of the vaccine.

I talked to my brother and sister and learned they were greatly dissatisfied with my behavior. From their point of view, I was selfish and insensitive, and they even said the practice I was doing was not good since I abandoned my family members who were in difficulty to follow it.

Strangely, their words didn’t touch me like they would have in the past. For the first time I was able to calmly tell them that I was sorry that they had this perception, but what they were actually saying was not what I had inside my heart. I explained to them that I had no feeling of abandonment inside me and that, on the contrary, all the people I loved were included in what I was doing in Palermo.

I clarified the truth to them again and explained that Shen Yun, by warning people about the danger presented by the evil Chinese Communist Party, would actually help avert impending tragedies for all of humanity, tragedies that I would firstly have liked those closest to me to avoid.

On that occasion, I gave Shen Yun tickets as a gift to my brother and his family, and they gladly accepted them.

I left again for Palermo in mid-January while the situation was stable and the atmosphere with my family was relaxed, but when I returned home in mid-April the situation had worsened again. My mother’s extreme pain had resurfaced even more strongly than before.

My mother went to the emergency room three times in a week and massive pain management treatments based on morphine were required. During these new hospitalizations, a hypothesis of a blood or bone cancer in the terminal stages was beginning to emerge. My mother’s condition worsened visibly until she was completely reliant on others.

It was very burdensome to take care of her during the few days I had to stay at home after the weeks that I had been in Palermo following the Shen Yun promotions. And the time that I would have to leave for Palermo for the last and most delicate phase of Shen Yun promotion was approaching.

Two days before leaving, my mother risked her life with an overdose of morphine. I found her on her bed almost without awareness, in a disastrous physical condition. My father had not noticed anything and thought she was finally sleeping peacefully without pain.

I rushed her to the emergency room and the next day after bringing her home, it was hard to repress the feelings after seeing her so weak and defenseless in a wheelchair, now completely reliant on others.

I was, however, determined not to be influenced by these feelings and to leave for Palermo. I could not betray the trust that sentient beings had placed in me and somehow I was sure that this was also good for my mother.

I talked to her while she was on the bed and tried to do it in a way that she could understand. I told her that I would leave the next day for Palermo, but that I would not abandon her. We had arranged everything, and a woman who would come to the house to clean and to help out with what was needed. Since my mother is very Catholic, I told her that for me following the promotion of Shen Yun was the most sacred thing, like going to pray in a monastery and that my prayers included all the people that I loved, and that I would take her with me, in my heart.

I spoke to her with a sweetness that I had never been capable of, since ours had always been a very conflicted relationship. She didn’t answer me. I kissed her and left.

The next day I had to take a train and then a flight to Palermo. Half an hour earlier, my tenant who lives upstairs and who is also my friend, came downstairs in tears. She was four months pregnant and had vomited and was having severe contractions. She was terrified of losing her baby and didn’t know what to do.

I still had a few last things to prepare and so my husband reassured her. He gave her the number for a gynecologist. The doctor told her to wait until the next morning when she could visit her in the hospital next to her. I was able to be with my friend for only a few minutes. I told her to stay in bed and try not to worry, the next day she would be visited by her doctor. I made her drink something hot. And then I told her that I had to go and that I would call her from Palermo.

My husband accompanied me to the train station and again told me off. He said that I was not a good person if I abandoned these people in difficulty in this way. This time his words touched me. And despite having returned to Palermo I kept thinking what was the right thing. There was a voice in my head that told me “we talk about saving sentient beings and I don’t try to save the people that close to me and who are in obvious difficulty and even life threatening situations. That’s no good.”

I tried to look deeper into this topic and I saw that in the fact that my husband’s words had touched me because I had a great attachment to my reputation, to what others think of me.

At that moment, I thought of Master’s words:

“If you would like to regain the purity you once had and return to your true home, if you would like to develop spiritually, then you must live by the cosmic qualities of zhen, shan, ren. Anyone who abides by these is a good person, while anyone who lives a life contrary to them is a bad person. And so how well someone regards you at your workplace or in whatever setting may not reflect how you really are. Yours is a spiritual life, and you must embody these qualities if you hope to become a spiritually realized being. It’s rather simple, in fact.” (The First Talk, Zhuan Falun)

“The challenging part is that you have to remain unmoved when you knowingly get taken advantage of by people, when things that mean a lot to you are on the line, when people around you are contending over things, or when those you love suffer. You have to learn to see these things in the proper light. Being a practitioner is by no means easy. Someone once said to me, “Mr. Li, doesn’t it suffice to just be a good person in the usual sense? It’s hard to imagine going much further than that with the practice.” I was really saddened to hear that and didn’t reply. Character varies widely from person to person, and each will go as far as his ability to believe takes him. But what faith you do have will be rewarded.” (The Eighth Talk, Zhuan Falun)

Finally, I had the clear vision that everything was nothing but a test for me, put there by the old forces to see if my heart eventually faltered so they could make me fall. I again felt that what we are doing as disciples of the Fa-rectification period of the cosmos are the most sacred things and that everything is included in it, the renewal of the entire firmament. How could Master have not included all the people he has arranged to be close to us at this time? My understanding was that to have trust means to follow Master’s path, to be unafraid of the path of the old forces, but we are able to be unafraid only when we have given up our attachments.

And on reflection, it was the people close to me that I should have saved this year, my husband and my brother’s family, to whom I had given the tickets, the ones who were causing me the most problems and whose judgment worried me the most.

Armed with this understanding, I have been able to let go of this attachment and proceeded with the Shen Yun promotion without thinking about home in a worried way while calling home every day anyway.

After a few weeks my brother phoned me to tell me that unfortunately, our mother has cancer as the doctors thought. They had found a large black mass on her spine and it was inevitably cancer, according to the doctor. They had already spoken to an oncologist and the first thing to do was a biopsy and then other tests.

I didn’t believe it. I had let go of everything. How was it possible that our mother had cancer? I told my brother to wait before drawing conclusions.

I said the same thing to my mother and in the following weeks I told her to be confident, that things might not be what they seemed, that it was better not to think too much about cancer and that maybe it wasn’t so serious.

When it was certain for the doctors that my mother had cancer, the subsequent examinations, one by one, began to give negative results. The black mass in the end turned out to be strong inflammation, probably caused by imbalances from the third dose of the vaccine.

In the following weeks my mother began to regain weight and her self-sufficiency and returned to being able to fully manage her life, while still taking strong painkillers.

All of this was truly a miracle of Dafa for me. The thing that was even more miraculous to me is that my mother stopped attacking me and now treats me with a gentleness that she never had before. The same thing happened with my husband and my brother.

I have shared this experience with you because I think it will be helpful to fellow practitioners, as we often face this kind of situation during cultivation and especially during the promotion of Shen Yun. If there are things that are inappropriate or not in line with the Fa, please let me know. Thank you for patiently listening.

(Presented at the 2022 European Fa Conference)