Honglan W.

Greetings Master! Greetings Fellow Practitioners!

Time flies, all of a sudden it has been 19 years since I walked into the cultivation of Falun Dafa.
At the beginning of my cultivation, I also just came to the United States. I was doing really well in my study, and just married with a happy marriage. However, walking into cultivation, many of the important life problems needed to be re-evaluated. Within two days a Dafa disciple and a Christian friend in my graduate school talked about belief with me at the same time. I was more convinced by that Falun Dafa practitioner. Who am I? What’s the life for? Why cultivate? Which belief shall I choose? Which one is real? Which one is good? I couldn’t sleep but to ponder on the two friends’ words for three nights. My atheistic roommate laughed at me, “What’s there to think about? Choose neither!” But I could not put aside these questions again when they have been on my mind since I was very young, for I have seen the light of answers from the initial discussions.

After three nights, I still felt that the Falun Dafa practitioner is more rational. I said to myself, “Dafa is so great, I’ll learn it first to teach my parents, and I’ll start practicing after 20 years, when I’m getting old.” I wanted to enjoy my perfect love and shining future, letting go of all of it was too much for me at the time.

However just as I started reading Zhuan Falun, I felt very fond of reading it. Oftentimes when I was doing my homework, I somehow could not control myself and took it out of my drawer to read it. When I read the 8th Lecture, I felt very touched: I could not believe that there were people putting such an effort to teach people to be good. Later I learned the exercises, before I even started; many of my troublesome small health issues were cured like miracle. After I finished reading Zhuan Falun for the second time, I felt every sentence in this book was the truth. Then I gave up the thought of practicing after 20 years. Just like that I started a short nine months of personal cultivation. Studying the Fa was the happiest thing to me every day. No matter whether I was walking, sitting in the car, or before bed, from now and then I would enlighten to something. Just walked into cultivation, there were just too many notions which needed to be changed!

At that time right when I decided to practice Dafa, I was facing my first test of life and death on my path of cultivation: my then husband said he would divorce me if I practice Falun Dafa, choose. One practitioner told me, you would get tested on the things that I’m attached to, because divine being saw it clearly. Another practitioner said, you were facing this test because I was not determined in cultivation.

Indeed, at that time, love was more important than my life. I wanted to practice Dafa, but to lose my love for this…It was a very difficult choice. I thought death would have been easier, I failed the test, and failed again in different way, on the third time, after taking a tear bath for a whole day, with the help of another practitioner, I barely, pretty much passed the test. Now when I look back, Master’s arrangements to us are ordered. I truly wasn’t determined enough at that initial stage. If I cannot make up my mind in a short period of time, I would definitely lose my opportunity of cultivation with the severe persecution a few months away.

A few months later, the persecution started. At that time my heart was very determined. I didn’t have any fear besides feeling angry to the evil persecuting Dafa. I read Minghui every day, one day, two days, a week passed, the persecution continued. Therefore I contacted Minghui to show my support by becoming a volunteer Dafa contact on Minghui, and so I became a coordinator of a city since then, and also my busy Fa-rectification cultivation journey just started.

Now it has been almost 19 years. There have been many heart-breaking experiences during the process of eliminating attachments; I also had many enlightenments and lessons. I would like to share a few with everybody.

As Dafa disciples, we all know the importance of studying the Fa. After I practiced for a while, I became very familiar with the book Zhuan Falun, and then I found I’m not so focused while reading. Later as a way to resolve this problem, I started to memorize Zhuan Falun, because I was much focused during the process of memorizing Fa. Many practitioners said, they could not insist because they were forgetting while memorizing. It’s not that I don’t forget page 1 while I’m on page 10, I do. It’s just that I found through this effort if we want to remember the whole book of over 300 pages, most people had to repeat hundreds of times, like we do with Lunyu. If we keep going back to re-memorize what we have memorized before, we could not make progress. Later I thought about when we go to school, whenever we finish one grade’s study, we passed the test, and then we would move on. When we were in the second grade, we never went back to re-study what we learned in the first grade. Now I’ve graduated from graduate school, I forgot those textbooks in the first grade, but I was never disqualified for not meeting the first grade level. Therefore I memorize one paragraph at a time, whenever I finish one paragraph, I would test myself by reciting and recording, then playing back and checking against the book. If I made every character correctly, that made one count. I would test myself like this for four times for each paragraph, then I passed the test, and I moved on to the next paragraph. I never went back to re-memorize. After I completed memorizing the whole book once, I would go to the beginning and memorize the whole book again. I spent seven years to memorize the whole Zhuan Falun for the first time. It only took half of that long memorizing it for the second time. Now I’m on my third time memorizing Zhuan Falun, and are on Lecture six now.

All these years, to me memorizing the Fa was a powerful method to pass through many of the tests, at difficult moments, and pull my mind back up when I was not diligent. On some days when I could afford to spend three or four hours to memorize the Fa, the one or two weeks afterwards I found my mind became very calm. My righteous thoughts were also more stable and purer, feeling just like what Master said about how it feels when sending righteous thoughts: “It's very pleasant, as if everything is still and quiet and the whole body is enveloped by energy.” [Fa-Lecture During the 2003 Lantern Festival at the U.S. West Fa Conference]

Now I’m in my 40’s, but my memory and concentration is better than when I was a teenager. In the past it took me at least 45 minutes to memory half a page of Zhuan Falun, now I can complete both memorizing and testing within 30 minutes. After I studied couple of methods from the world memory champions, I memorized the whole book in Hong Yin, and Hong Yin II, Hong Yin III in my head with the sequence. Not only can I recite from beginning to the end, I can also do it from the end to the beginning, or even with any sequence number, I can recall which poem it is. So when I have a few minutes somewhere, without book or device, I can quietly recite these three books in my head. This could really increase the time of Fa study in those very busy days.

Because I felt so much benefit from memorizing the Fa, I often suggested other practitioners to give it a try. Often I heard, “I can’t do it, I have bad memory.” I remember I read about how Emperor Kang Xi studied. For every paragraph, he would read it for 120 times, and then recite for another 120 times, and then move on to the next paragraph. What he read was the ancient ordinary books, what we read is the Fa, the ladder to the heaven. Master said in Fa Teaching at the 2007 New York Fa Conference, “I have said that Master has compressed everything into the Fa, but as of today not that many of you have yet grasped the weight of those words.”

Sometimes I thought, if we could read 120 times and then recite 120 times for each paragraph in the Fa with concentration, we definitely can memorize it. Because this is Fa, putting even more effort is worth it. And because this is Fa, we memorize it frequently in years, many notions and bad thoughts were cleared out, our memory would naturally become good.

Now I also found that we just need to insist long enough, a month or two, or repeat enough times, like 60 times a day, till the bad habit got eliminated, and the good habit formed, then it’ll be much easier. Once the initial barrier was broken through, we’ll feel the wonder of memorizing the Fa.

In these 19 years, under the long time persecution, in busy days, in the never-ending tests of tribulations, in the difficult moments when I didn’t know what to do there has been days I was feeling pretty depressed. When my first marriage was at the end, my long-lasting attachment to love was also finally worn off. When I was able to directly face my attachment of jealousy and resentment, I was able to firmly make up my mind that I would not allow these ugly materials to exist in my body or within my surroundings. After I went through the days of looking within and enduring the pain of improving xinxing, I really saw how vast the ocean and sky can be. My heart took loss and gain lightly, there were no more pity or resentment.

After that I asked myself, what is my life goal, my mission? My answer was the three things Master asks us to do well, and that is cultivating myself, sending forth righteous thoughts, saving sentient beings, and also doing a good job with raising my child as a little Dafa disciple.
Though these goals seem to be very obvious as a Dafa disciple, we live in the ordinary human society that is full of temptations. Remaining clearheaded and keep being reminded of these goals help me to make rational choices in this maze, things with important or long-term influence, like marriage, family, purchase of property etc. If we don’t make rational decisions, it’s very easy to be taken advantage of by the old forces, or resources that should have been used on the things that matter most were used somewhere else.

The resources, including time, energy and money that each of us have are limited. We all know how limited the resources each of us has are particularly scarce during the Fa-rectification period. The projects to save sentient beings need resources, and so I chose not to purchase real estate. Houses, lands, real estate are properties that tie up money, consume quite much more additional time and energy, whereas all these resources are also needed to be used on projects to save sentient beings. These years, although many practitioners had talked to me that tempted me to purchase real state, each time my mind was swayed a bit, I would go back to my detailed analysis of resource consuming, and each time my conclusion was all the three resources would be consumed twice as much. Human life is like staying in a hotel during traveling, this life of mine is for Dafa, if I double the time, energy and money to serve a comfortable home, then the resources I invest in Dafa projects would have to be reduced a great amount, this is against the goals of my life, and I believe I would regret it a lot in the future. Therefore though I haven’t purchased real estate for myself, I was able to coordinate Shen Yun in my city for many years with a full time job, and as a single mother.

Master said in Fa Teaching on World Falun Dafa Day, “Actually, with whatever Dafa disciples do, if you put a bit of heart into it you’ll get twice the results with half the effort.” For many years the problem I faced was lack of resources. How to accomplish a challenging full-time job, how to allocate time for my own cultivation, how to coordinate, how to manage intensive Dafa work, and in the meantime spend time to teach my child to study Fa, to learn Chinese, to learn music and form good habits. I really need to, and have to spend time to improve efficiency, using fewer resources to accomplish more.

I put in thoughts on how to use all the few minutes in a day. I use a lot of those little pieces of time to recite Dafa. I copied the paragraph I am memorizing to the page application on my phone using big font, so that I can just view a few seconds and repeat in my mind even when I just have one minute. I carefully calculated, if I use all these minutes well, I can have at least 90 minutes of extra Fa study time. Such as, the time I spent each day driving, the time doing personal hygiene, house chore, even the few minutes walking from the parking lot to my office I was able to memorize one sentence in Zhuan Falun. Especially in very busy days, using these little pieces of time to memorize Fa helps so much in the quality and quantity of my Fa study.

I did quite some arrangement at home and reduced almost 2/3 of the house work I have to deal with. I arranged my kitchen with the principle of being organized and convenient, and so things that need to be done frequently can be done at the fastest speed. The types of food that needs time-consuming process were crossed off my shopping list pretty much permanently; the time-consuming food processing methods were also generally eliminated from my kitchen procedure. I cook multiple dishes at the same time, and start them in the order of cooking time, whichever cooks longer starts first. In this way I usually spend within 25 minutes to make 3-7 dishes based on needs.

Many countries in ancient time have the tradition of not having meals after noon time, and so if having meals in restaurants, I normally arrange it around 1:30pm on weekends. By the time lunch is completed, it’s after 2:30pm, and so dinner can be skipped. In another word, for that whole day, all I need to prepare is a simple breakfast and pay for a comparatively cheaper lunch meal. Just shifting the lunch time a little I can save at least an hour and a half, and nobody complains, since nobody’s hungry at dinner time.

It’s worth spending time up front to organize the home well, and let every family member form the habit of return anything back to its own “home” after use, so the home stays organized and low-maintenance. Consider reducing the frequency of some house chore that cannot be avoided. When I do house chores, I would at the same time listen to audio books. Therefore most of my time doing house work is also the time I study. I listen to books that are useful to do Shen Yun, marketing, sales, management, leadership, negotiation, time and energy management, improving efficiency, or target areas where I need to improve the most, and so on. I look for the best books in each category, since the language is formal, many of the authors are experts or trend setters in that area, I found my understanding to the main stream society of the U.S. got deeper, my English skills, especially comprehension and speech had tremendous improvement. I got all these benefits without spending extra time to study, I think it’s very efficient.

Master said “Dafa disciples are shouldering so many duties at the same time. It’s understandable if you all want to do each of the things that you’re doing somewhat better, but you really need to weigh your priorities carefully.” in Fa Teaching Given at the 2010 New York Fa Conference.

Master also said “Of course, you need to weigh the importance and the urgency, and prioritize things on your own. If you don't prioritize well, then it could affect what you need to do since, let me tell you, all of what you do is for yourself. Being able to prioritize things well is remarkable in its own right, and it will result in your walking the path the right way, and that's mighty virtue.” in Explaining the Fa During the 2003 Lantern Festival at the U.S. West Fa Conference.

No matter how efficient we are, there’re just too many things there that we need to do. So what we do, what we don’t do, what we do first and later is very important. In the past I didn’t have the concept of planning, I always felt that just spending time to plan is a waste of time. I would have a headache whenever I need to arrange anything, and I always pushed these tasks to others if I could. In these years as the coordinator for Shen Yun, it’d be a mess if I continued my old way. I read many books, and put in a lot of thoughts, and found that often when we plan well, we can accomplish more with less man-power and spending, some impossible things can even become possible when arranged properly.

It’s an honor to use the resources we have to save sentient beings and to achieve more. Our children, little disciples should have such honor as well.

It’s normally a challenge to learn Chinese for children who were born in non-Chinese speaking countries. The Chinese school teaches simplified Chinese, I started teaching him reading Chinese when he was three. I started with Hong Yin, and only traditional Chinese was available. From then on I stopped sending him to Chinese school and taught him Chinese myself. Later I started teaching him to read Chinese Zhuan Falun, also in traditional Chinese. At first he read so slow, the time he spent reading three pages I could finish 40 pages. He kept forgetting so many of the characters even though he has read them for dozens of time, or even hundreds of times. My patience and temper were put under severe testing, I often found myself raising voices and acting as a tiger mom.

I tried different methods to teach him memorizing Chinese characters and read Chinese Zhuan Falun. Sometimes I tried one way this week, then another the following week. When he was nine I taught him pinyin, after he turned ten years old, I finally figured out an efficient method. I wrote each Chinese character that he needed to memorize on a card, one character per card. On one side it’s this character by itself, on the back side is the pinyin of this character, a phrase in Chinese and its English meaning. I grouped 15 characters (cards) as one group, and asked him to memorize these characters one by one for 6 times in a row, so it reaches the fluent stage. He would review them in certain days afterwards based on the memory curve. I found most of the time he only needed 8 minutes to memorize 15 new Chinese characters. Because he had memorized pretty well the first day, he only needed a couple of minutes for the reviews in later days. Since I found this method, he can memorize one group to 4 groups a day, not too long later he was able to master about 98% of the over 2,000 characters in the whole book Zhuan Falun. The remaining 2% belongs to the infrequent ones, and need more time to master. He can recognize these characters in other lectures, so he can read other Dafa books too. Just learning Dafa in Chinese, his Chinese is so much better than those children who go to Chinese school. He likes speaking in Chinese; he can understand Chinese stories and movies. Later in the summer, I got help from another Dafa disciple to care for him, and increased his Fa study and practice time based on a tight schedule. He soon experienced a miracle.

He started to play the piano since he was five, but his hands started to grow warts since he was about six. When he was ten, more and more warts grew from almost every one of his fingers. Two months after his first summer of intensive cultivation, the skin on his hands started to peel off. Dozens of baby-sized warts were showing with the peeling. For two weeks his hands were really miserable, even the piano teacher was asking whether his skin condition on his hands was contagious or not. After two weeks the peeling came to an end, all the warts fell off with the dead skin, both his hands were like new ones that were reborn. After that test we both had deep feelings and agreed that it was because his huge improvement in Fa study and exercises, Master pushed out the root cause of this karma and helped him eliminate it.

My child was very tall, but there’s not any dancing training available in our city, so I started him with music as early as possible. However, he was not interested in music at all, and didn’t seem to have any talent on music either. Whenever he sang, he was out of tune. Since there were not many other options, I pushed him to learn piano anyway. After three years of piano, I was surprised that he started to win in competitions. At the same time I found he was able to call out the name of the note when he hears a sound. After test we found he became perfect pitch. That was a gift that one out of ten thousand people have. We know that Master gave him this ability, since other people like Mozart who had it was born with it, but he got it at the age of 8, after three years of piano study. Later he also started to learn trumpet, the time was tighter on piano, but he got better improvement on piano and won a solid solo competition.

Many of my experiences benefited a lot from other practitioners who walked the path earlier than me. Their experiences and lessons were such great help to me, and so I was very much hoping my lessons and experiences could give any hint to others. Please help correct any inappropriate things if you see any.