PureInsight | June 21, 2004
[PureInsight.org] I used to be very complicated. I didn't know how to escape from sad memories of the past, and I didn't know what to do with myself in society. So, I often just sat in my college dorm room looking out the window, hoping I would someday find guidance from the vast cosmos. Looking up towards the sky one night, I said: "I just want to be good." No fame, no gain, no bad thoughts about people, no matter what, I just wanted to be good. And that's when I came across Falun Dafa in the beginning of 1999.
As the Fa untied knots in my mind and cleansed my soul, I saw that there was still a serious problem in my character. I thought too highly of myself. This manifested mainly in two ways. One was that I tried to become a "famous person" by trying to gain coveted positions on project teams and higher status among cultivators. To correct this problem, I stopped pursuing these coveted positions and began doing whatever needed to be done for whatever truth-clarification project, and felt balanced in my heart playing that nameless, quiet role. As the emphasis gradually shifted away from me and my achievements and towards what was best for Dafa, the team effort harmonized and what we did to clarify the facts to the sentient beings became purer and stronger.
The second manifestation of thinking too highly of myself would occur when I had a conflict with another cultivator. I would feel his understanding from Dafa was not very deep and I felt like I was better than him. To correct this problem, I searched within to find where I had gone wrong, and concentrated on imagining how he would be perfect in the future. When I did this, I truly felt that it would be me who would lose out if I did not encourage and treasure him on his way to reaching perfection. After sending righteous thoughts, I would put my hands in "heshi" and form the image of that cultivator in my mind and say "I'm sorry."
Through this process of humbling myself before Master, Dafa, and my fellow cultivators, I realized that I am simply a most fortunate being in this cosmos who reaches whatever degree of greatness because of Master's continual guidance. Thinking of Master's all-encompassing grace, there are no words to describe how he has touched all of our hearts. So the incomparable theme in the cosmos and the greatest wish for all of us is Master's coming. When I thought of Master, I deeply felt that the purpose of my existence was to treasure my fellow beings and their boundless potential within the Fa, and believed that this would be the manifestation of putting the Fa first.
I'd like to share my experiences from being on the dance team. There was a notion in our area that dancing was an ordinary, difficult, time-consuming activity and not as important as other projects for clarifying the truth. It took months to create a dance team and by the end everyone dropped out but two of us. The other dancer encouraged us to keep going, saying that others would join if we continued, but that we shouldn't be attached to how many dancers joined in the end. We kept very righteous thoughts towards dancing from the first practice. We named each dance move to remind us that we were saving sentient beings during Master's Fa Rectification, so some dance moves were named "sending righteous thoughts," "saving every being including you," and "coming again and again for you." Our thoughts quickly turned from self-centered and uncertain to wonderful, confident, and good-natured.
Within a few weeks of meeting, a few more ladies had joined the dance team. We met only once per week for two hours in a dance room that was lined with mirrors along one wall. I spent those two hours running around to help refine each dancer's movements and timing while another practitioner kept the tempo for each dance move at the head of the room. Towards the end of the practice I joined the dance so we could all harmonize our dance movements but in those rare chances to dance in front of the wall of mirrors I often focused my vision elsewhere. I felt the most important thing was to remember why we dance, not what we look like. So I would think of sentient beings, of telling them in my mind that we had come for them, and that made my heart smile and so the smile never left my face. Sometimes I would do the wrong move and over time my moves somehow didn't look as refined as before because most of my practice time was spent on refining the other dancers' movements. Just as I started to feel sad, I would think of Master and the waiting sentient beings and with a smile I would lift my head up and just try to keep up with the other dancers. I was very encouraged that even those who had been the most resistant to joining the dance team or had the least confidence in themselves as dancers were such beautiful, heartfelt dancers. I hoped the sentient beings were dancing with us because we are all walking this path together to the future that Master has created for us. My husband Rob watched the dance and said he couldn't explain it but felt it was very good. I sensed it was our righteous heart that he was referring to.
We were asked to do a second dance for the Falun Dafa Day celebration. I tried to learn a fan dance I found on the Internet but that dance had been filmed in a way that was not meant to be learned from – it was complicated and cut from different angles and with low resolution. Halfway through, I felt it was a lost cause and the computer program I had used to view the dance video stopped working. One day after working nonstop on a persecution database, I went outside to get some fresh air. As I stepped outside, I looked up and saw there was a beautiful, clear sky. Somehow I felt that I could learn the fan dance completely. This was not for us after all but for the cosmos, so shouldn't the dance be as beautiful as the sky? And so after sending righteous thoughts, I picked up the fan and somehow managed to do moves that I had never quite learned before from the dance video. I clicked on the computer program that had been not working for a few days and it immediately worked. I opened the fan dance video and saw that somehow my movements matched those on the video pretty well, and I continued to refine the moves for more than three hours in the little room of my apartment, with only a little mirror to see what I was doing.
A lot of people came up to talk to us after the Falun Dafa Day celebration. Although our dance was not professional or polished, their hearts had been moved. One man came running up to us with tears in his eyes and he explained that he had heard all the propaganda. After seeing the performances that day, however, he knew he should now defend and learn Falun Dafa, for in his words "It is truly the way."
From the bottom of my heart, I would like to thank and praise Master and also my fellow Falun Dafa cultivators around the world who have the courage and heart to live according to Dafa. May we complete our journey together towards a wonderful, promising future in Master's greatest Fa.
