Spousal Tribulations, Falun and the Lust Test

By a UK practitioner

Spousal Tribulations

When I obtained the Fa I had been married for 20 years to the same man and had 7 children all as outgrowths of a love that I had always experienced as spiritual in nature. I had been brought up as a Catholic and sexual activity was largely taboo and never directly referred to. I myself had always been comparatively shy in this respect compared to the wider society that I encountered later outside my Catholic community. I always found promiscuity and pornography low and repulsive. Yet I still of course developed the ordinary persons drives which as a Catholic female it was not considered wholesome to have -yet have them I did! This situation continued into my married life which was, I suppose, affected by a certain amount of shame and guilt associated with my “natural” drives, making me resist their full expression. It turns out that this resistance was maybe not such a bad restraint at that level. Anyway I obtained the Fa and when the enormity of it’s significance began to finally sink in, huge tribulations came thick and fast. They came most painfully in my marriage. I made many mistakes but also at times did exactly the right things according to the Fa, clarifying the truth about Falun Gong to my husband as best I could. When I could not meet the standard I pointed out that my conduct, which was faulty, did not represent the Fa which, if followed properly, was pristine. There were many strands and layers to these tribulations, which were often difficult to explain and included much evil interference and Karma. But all in all, everything was because of my attatchments.

The Falun

One night we had had an argument in which I basically behaved like an ordinary person wanting only my own feelings to be considered. I endured anger in my heart and plain dislike for my husband. My suffering was doubled by a knowledge of my own selfishness and that a practitioner should not behave like this. I reached a point of mental torture. I was broken because I was beginning to think I had no other choice but to give up cultivation because I just couldn’t meet the requirement. My husband had remained coldly aloof in his office. From my despair I looked up into the room lit only by moonlight and my heart leapt at what met me. Everything was made of Falun! The scene was like a “white out” in a Canadian winter but instead of snowflakes, thousands of small Falun rotated all around me. I could hardly absorb what I saw so I shut my eyes tightly and when I opened them again the colours and discs had gone leaving only the myriad tiny silver law wheels like particles composing everything.

Dafa had reached down to me from the height of stupendous Mercy and saved me for another day.

More Spousal Tribulations

So I carried on but everything came to a head when I found that whilst I had been away doing Dafa work my husband had started an affair with a 24 year old girl! He did not deny it, rather he wished me to allow this “freedom” which he said was not a reflection of his feelings for me. Was I moved? I was devastated! Then through much suffering and arduous cultivation I managed to assuage the tide of the ordinary reactions of injustice, humiliation, injury, insult, loneliness, abandonment, betrayal and fear for myself and for my children and for their moral welfare with such a bad example before them. Gradually I let go all these attachments and the extent to which I gave them up was exactly the extent to which the situation improved. He agreed to accept my terms - that if he wished to be with another he must be honest and let me go as I felt it was wrong from many different points of view to conduct a marriage in this fashion. Notwithstanding master’s wish that we do not divorce due to the practice, I did not think this situation really contradicted that. It turned out that after a very painful crisis in which the childrens’ sense of security that I had carefully protected for 20 years began to fall apart, he agreed to be faithful and I did not doubt that he would stick to his promise. One day I saw the girl across a crowded shopping street and was overcome with compassion for her and for him. They seemed so lost in delusion but still trying to find a way out, albeit in a deviant way. I saw that all sentient beings are indeed suffering.

The Lust Test

Despite his agreement I knew I did not really have it from his heart. I resolved to work hard on mine so that I could be a good wife and to show him the goodness of Falun Gong to save him. I knew I owed him a debt as he had been the instrument that revealed huge and deeply buried attachments to my notice. I thanked him most sincerely. Things improved but it was an uneasy peace followed by a period where I did not care but in a cold way. I know now that bitterness still lay half hidden inside me. Then all of a sudden the “man of my dreams” turns up! Someone from my distant past whom I’d once adored, but almost forgotten, turned up having recently been divorced from his wife. I was immediately overpowered by an extremely strong desire to make love with him. This surprised and confused me. The very thought of him seemed to unleash a long repressed desire made stronger by being unrequited. It deluged me like an overturning ocean and as it swept over me, alone in my room, I failed the lust test. Over the next few days I failed again and became so distressed I almost complied with his request to go meet him and assuage the painful longing. I knew if I did that would be a different step, that it would be betraying the Tao, my husband and even the other man’s wife, though they were divorced. It would also have made me a hypocrite in terms of my disagreement with my husband’s recent conduct. I knew it was wrong but it still didn’t “feel” wrong. It felt natural to want to go. Master Li’s words “What does your feeling account for?” restrained me and I stopped short of a big mistake.

When my husband asked me why I had changed my mind about the trip I had seemed to be planning, I explained openly and honestly what had occurred and why I was not going. This took some courage on my part but my loyalty and adherence to principle, even in the face of his “betrayal”, moved him so much that since that moment all has healed between us. We are harmonious now in a way we never had quite been before even in our younger days. This harmoniousness has extended to a wholesome and happy physical relationship in which his ordinary needs are satisfied yet restrained by my righteous disposition. Now he comes closer and closer in his heart to Dafa as time passes and supports me a great deal in my Dafa work. Thus his position is vastly improved and my cultivation more solid.

But what about the test I’d failed?

Well I was just hoping without much real faith that when it came along again somehow I would conquer it. I had completely lost my attachment to that other man but failed the test again in a dream. I was calm, however, and resorted to hoping I would yet overcome this persistent attachment that Master says we all must pass. Then suddenly the means arrived. I was reading in “Zhuan Falun” in the front seat of another practitioner’s car, Master’s words in chapter 5, second paragraph of “The double cultivation of a man and a woman’. I read, ‘Because a human body has yin and yang, it can develop through cultivation practice a variety of supernormal abilities and living beings like the Immortal infant, Cultivated infants, fashen etc. Because of the existence of yin and yang one can develop through cultivation many living beings which can grow in dantian regardless of whether one’s body is male or female--it is the same “

At last I saw the words that had lain flat on the page for so long, lift and open out into meaning. I recognised the tremendousness of the drive that I had experienced as “natural” in a completely different way now. Naturally it is tremendous, I said to myself, if it is a powerful demon interfering in the cultivation of living beings from dantian!
I had experienced even the creation of a human child as highly spiritual. How much higher, I thought, is the yin and yang within us bringing to birth the living beings? -but not if the precious essence is carelessly spilled. Now I feel I have enlightened, at my level only but nevertheless, “knowingly and consciously” as Master requires, to the laying waste that takes place in the mere gratification of the demon of lust. Guilt was no substitute for conscious enlightenment. With consciousness raised my falling for it again seems out of the question!

Dafa is truly flawless, pure and pristine, spreading “propriety and justice” and rectifying all, even these, abnormalities!