Cultivating Away Attachments Amid Family Ordeals and the Shen Yun Project

Greetings respected Master! Greetings, fellow practitioners!

My name is Ying, a Dafa disciple in Denmark who obtained the Fa in 1998. My topic today is "Cultivating Away Attachments Amid Family Ordeals and the Shen Yun Project." Over the years, although my cultivation state has had its ups and downs, I have always held firm faith in Dafa. Looking back on my cultivation journey in recent years, from family ordeals to taking part in promoting Shen Yun, one test after another has given me a deeper appreciation of just how serious and extraordinary cultivation is, and has made me feel Master's compassionate care all the more.

I. Strengthening My Faith in Master and the Fa Through Family, Illness-Karma Ordeals

A few years ago, our family moved into the new home we had long been hoping for. My husband is Danish, and although he does not cultivate, he has always respected my faith and sometimes even helps with Dafa projects. Our two children were growing up healthy, and I had found a job locally. On the surface, life seemed settled and peaceful. Yet just as everything appeared to be going smoothly, my husband was diagnosed with depression. Around the same time, I too was unexpectedly diagnosed with diabetes. These sudden turns of events shattered what had been a peaceful life.

When I first faced these things, I too felt shaken. After being diagnosed with diabetes, I monitored my blood sugar daily and injected insulin as the doctors required. After a while, I began to look at this from a cultivation perspective. As a cultivator, I know that nothing happens by chance. Through Fa study, I gradually came to understand that whatever tests and tribulations a cultivator encounters should be viewed from the standpoint of cultivation. I had many food preferences, and I had also grown complacent and lax in my cultivation. I realised that the requirements doctors placed on me through ordinary medical methods were not the standard by which I, as a cultivator, needed to pass this test. For instance, the doctor told me I needed to avoid a certain food, but the food itself was not really the problem; my real problem was getting rid of my attachment to food preferences. So I adjusted my eating habits, while also placing greater emphasis on studying the Fa and doing the exercises. Gradually, and almost without my noticing, most of my diabetes symptoms disappeared.

Just as my own condition began to stabilise, my husband's illness suddenly took a turn for the worse, quickly reaching the point where he needed hospital treatment. At first he stayed in an open ward of the hospital's emergency department, then was moved to a locked ward, and finally was placed in a long-term inpatient ward, where he underwent fourteen sessions of electroconvulsive therapy.

The hospital was more than an hour's drive from home each way. During that time, I worked during the day, rushed to the hospital to see my husband after work, and then still had to look after our two children once I got home. By the end of each busy day I often felt utterly exhausted, in both body and mind. Yet no matter how busy I was, I always kept up my Fa study. Whenever I felt I could not bear it, I would remind myself: with Master here and Dafa here, there is no test I cannot get through.

After treatment, my husband's condition improved somewhat. He began to be able to come home for the night, and later gradually returned to a normal life at home. Even so, his condition still fluctuated. Sometimes when he could not sleep at night, I would study the Fa together with him. During that time, I read Master's works with him, including Zhuan Falun, Falun Gong, and various teachings. When my husband studied the Fa, he did not do so hoping to cure his illness or gain anything in particular; he simply read, and tried doing the exercises. While doing the exercises, he could feel changes in the energy in his body.

As time went on, I came to see more and more clearly that what looked on the surface like illness was in fact interference from karma and various negative factors. While my husband's condition kept fluctuating, I made an effort to look inward. Facing my family's suffering, I found that I still had a deep attachment to family affection. When my husband's condition swung between good and bad, my own moods would swing along with it; anxiety and unease would well up inside me, and I felt I could see no hope. I understood clearly that, as a cultivator, only when I was in accordance with the Fa could Master help me; I could not look at these problems the way ordinary people do, but had to face them with righteous thoughts and resolve conflicts with compassion and kindness.

When pressures from family, work, finances, and health all bear down at once, it truly is difficult to take even a single step forward. But it is precisely in such a complicated environment that a cultivator improves, tempers their will, and raises their xinxing.

At that time, I kept up my daily studying the Fa, sending forth righteous thoughts, and clarifying the truth, while taking part in whatever Dafa projects I could manage. Whenever I ran into conflicts or pressure, I made an effort to look inward, reflecting on whether I lacked sufficient faith in Master and the Fa, was insufficiently tolerant, or was too caught up in emotional attachment. Although I was still caught up in delusion at the time and could not see many things clearly, I always remembered what Master has said: "Whatever you experience during your cultivation—whether good or bad—is good, for it comes about only because you are cultivating." (The Essentials of Diligent Progress III, "To the Chicago Fa Conference")

Before long, however, a new test arrived. The prolonged strain of this family ordeal caused my emotional state to fluctuate, and it even began to affect my work. One day, my manager spoke with me. She said she understood my family situation, but felt that my low spirits over that period had begun to affect how customers perceived me, and hoped I would improve within a month, or else I might face dismissal. Hearing this, I felt wronged and under pressure. But as a cultivator, I knew that complaining would not solve anything. All I could do was try my best to do what I ought to do, and face everything before me with righteous thoughts.

Not long after, my husband was in a car accident while driving to collect our daughter from school. Although the car was badly damaged, my family members were unharmed. This made me feel all the more that my family and I were under Master's compassionate protection, and that I truly had to cultivate well and not let down Master's painstaking efforts on our behalf.

Yet the truly severe test was still to come. One day, my husband's condition spun out of control; he suddenly became highly agitated and did something dangerous: he wrapped an electrical cord around my neck. I forced myself to stay calm while looking for a chance to protect myself, and in the end I managed to call the police for help. Just as the police had already been dispatched but had not yet reached our home, my husband took a large quantity of medication. By the time he was brought to the emergency room he had already lost consciousness, and at one point his heart stopped twice; the situation was extremely critical.

Amid this ordeal, I came to realise that I needed to let go of human notions. I stayed calm and rational, let go of attachments, faced the ordeal with righteous thoughts, held onto kindness, and calmly met one tribulation after another. When I faced this family ordeal with the mindset of a cultivator, my mind gradually grew calm, human notions lessened, and things would often take a turn for the better. Although I did not know how many more tests lay ahead, I knew that as long as I stayed firm on the path of Dafa cultivation, I would surely make it through, ordeal after ordeal. One night, I had a very vivid dream. In the dream, Master compassionately patted my shoulder and said: "It has passed, it has passed." When I woke, my heart was filled with gratitude, and I felt even more determined to continue being diligent in solid, genuine cultivation. In this way, my husband's condition gradually improved, and our family slowly emerged from its most difficult period.

Looking back on that period, I deeply feel that, without Master's compassionate protection and Dafa's guidance, I would have found it very hard to get through those difficult days. Every tribulation that seemed impossible to overcome was ultimately overcome under Master's protection. I deeply understand that what truly sustained me through all these ordeals was not personal ability, but firm faith in Dafa. Every tribulation I encountered was there to raise me up through the test, which has made me cherish my good fortune in having Dafa and my Dafa cultivation all the more, and made me all the more grateful for Master's compassionate salvation.

II. Cultivating Away Human Notions Through the Shen Yun Project

At the end of 2025, we received exciting news: Shen Yun would finally have the chance to perform in Copenhagen, the Danish capital! Over the years, Shen Yun had performed many times in Denmark's second and third largest cities, and had been warmly received and loved by local audiences there; many residents of the capital had gone to see Shen Yun perform. But because of the CCP's economic coercion and pressure on the local government, as early as 2007 the CCP used various means to abruptly cancel a Shen Yun performance that had already been planned for the capital. In the nineteen years of transnational repression and persecution by the CCP that followed, we were never able to overcome the difficulty of securing a venue in the capital. It was not until the end of last year, when we learned that a newly built theatre in Copenhagen had received special approval, that everyone felt tremendously excited, and treasured this hard-won opportunity all the more. The performances were scheduled for late March and early April 2026, five shows in total, with close to fifteen thousand tickets to sell. By that time, the time we had left to promote Shen Yun was already fairly limited, and doing the promotion work well within a short period, in a city seeing Shen Yun for the first time, was an enormous challenge for those of us with so few practitioners. Even so, everyone mobilised urgently and threw themselves wholeheartedly into the Shen Yun promotion project.

I noticed that the audiences at Copenhagen's various theatres were mainly mainstream society, and the productions staged there were mostly traditional works. So the audiences at these theatres were exactly the main group we needed to reach in introducing and promoting Shen Yun. I therefore took it upon myself to hand out Shen Yun materials to the audience outside the theatre every night after the show let out, and during the day I went to commercial streets in various districts to put up Shen Yun posters. I treasured this important promotional work deeply in my heart, knowing that what I was carrying was the weighty responsibility of saving sentient beings. So, from my dress and appearance to my speech and manner, I did my best to hold myself to the standard of a cultivator, hoping to show the kind and sincere bearing of a Dafa disciple to those predestined future Shen Yun audiences.

Getting to the theatre each evening meant changing between the underground and the bus, taking more than an hour each way, and sometimes after handing out materials at one theatre I had to rush to another to keep going. So as not to add extra cleaning work for the theatres, we always handed out materials after the show had let out, so that audience members who took our materials would bring them home rather than leave them behind in the theatre. Because of this, by the time I finished handing out materials each night it was already very late, and I would get home close to midnight, yet still had to go to work early the next morning. As a result, handing out materials outside the theatre over a long period left me very little time to rest.

An even greater test was that Denmark's winter this year was exceptionally cold. This winter happened to bring the harshest cold Denmark had seen in decades, with biting winds mixed with heavy snow, and the wind-chill temperature often dropping to more than ten degrees below zero. Because of the severe weather, when blizzards hit, some trains were delayed or even suspended, causing great inconvenience to our promotional work. Standing in the freezing wind waiting for transport, waiting outside the theatre for the audience to come out after the show, or waiting late into the freezing midnight for a bus home that would not come, I too sometimes felt utterly exhausted, and at times even felt physically unwell. But whenever I thought of the sentient beings waiting to be saved, I reminded myself not to let difficulties on the surface hold me back: I had to grit my teeth and go to the theatre every single day, without fail, not missing a single one.

Whenever audience members came out of the theatre, I greeted them with a smile and sincere words, and placed Shen Yun materials in their hands. Whether or not they accepted them, I always tried to keep a kind and peaceful state of mind. Gradually, I came to realise that what truly moves people is not just the materials in their hands, but the kindness that comes from a cultivator's heart. As time went by, more and more people told us they had received Shen Yun's promotional materials, and had also seen the advertisements.

Besides handing out Shen Yun materials at the theatre every evening, I would also, on weekends, go around Copenhagen's various districts and busy commercial streets doing what we call "street sweeps": going shop by shop to introduce Shen Yun to the staff, and, with their consent, putting up beautifully printed Shen Yun advertisements in shop windows or by the counter. I often carried several hundred flyers on my back at once, so heavy that walking became difficult, but I kept going from shop to shop, forming a bond with people and telling them about the beauty of Shen Yun.

Although I went to the theatre to hand out materials every day and did street sweeps on weekends, this year we also faced yet another round of global, transnational repression that the CCP had launched against Dafa and Shen Yun. Leveraging the influence of New York Times in Western society, they published a series of fabricated, slanderous reports about Shen Yun; furthermore, in cities where Shen Yun performed, they arranged negative coverage about Dafa and Shen Yun from local media outlets that had been misled. Shen Yun's promotion in Copenhagen ran into the same CCP interference: people who did not know the truth were more easily swayed by the lies, which meant ticket sales moved more slowly than expected, and some people who had already bought tickets even asked for refunds under the influence of that propaganda of lies. Seeing how slowly ticket sales were progressing, I too felt anxiety and impatience welling up inside me. I kept asking myself: what was I so anxious about?

After looking inward, I found that I still had an attachment to seeking results, wanting to see success quickly. On the surface I was doing Shen Yun promotion, but in reality it was still mixed with human notions and human thinking. Once I recognised this, I required myself to make an effort to let go of my attachment to results, and to focus instead on doing well what I ought to do. At the same time, I increased my efforts in sending forth righteous thoughts.

Just at this time, my company restructured and terminated my employment, paying me several months' redundancy. Many people felt sorry for me at the time for losing my job, but my very first thought was one of gratitude, because now I could promote Shen Yun full-time! Thank you, Master! Right around then, my husband also successfully found a new job, which eased our family's financial pressure somewhat and allowed me to focus even more on promoting Shen Yun. This experience made me realise deeply that many things which seem bad are not necessarily bad at all. When I was able to let go of personal loss and stop calculating, I could see the compassionate arrangements Master had made for me. I had more time to study the Fa, and was even able to join in sending forth righteous thoughts outside the Chinese embassy every day. I kept a peaceful state of mind, and when I met with difficulties I did not complain or react negatively, but instead focused on the requirements of a cultivator and did the three things well.

Through the joint efforts of practitioners in Denmark and fellow practitioners who came from other countries to help, Shen Yun's performances were finally completed successfully. When I saw sentient beings walking into the theatre, watching Shen Yun's magnificent performances, moved by Shen Yun's beauty and praising it wholeheartedly, and did not hear a single audience member show any sign of being affected by the CCP's or the media's negative reporting, I deeply felt Master's immense compassion in saving sentient beings, and I also felt proud to have had the chance to take part in promoting Shen Yun. More importantly, over the whole course of this, I let go of many attachments. In the past, when I ran into difficulties, I easily fell into fear and the wish to retreat; now, through cultivation, I have become much stronger! I will treasure every opportunity to clarify the truth and save sentient beings, cherish the limited time I have for cultivation, work hard to do the three things well, cultivate myself well, save more people, and not let down Master's compassionate, painstaking salvation and the expectations of sentient beings.

The above is a little of my cultivation experience at this stage. If there is anything not in accordance with the Fa, please kindly point it out.

Thank you Master, thank you fellow practitioners.

(Speaker at the European Fa-Conference 2026 in Prague)