Truly Cultivating While Promoting Shen Yun

Greetings, respected Master! Greetings, fellow practitioners!

My name is Linda and I am from Norway. I obtained the Fa and began cultivating in 1997, in China, together with my family. I normally work remotely, and over the past few years I have been doing my best to promote Shen Yun alongside that work. I would like to share with you my cultivation experiences from promoting Shen Yun in the Nordic countries over these past few years.

1. Truly Cultivating Amid Conflicts and Removing Negative Notions About Fellow Practitioners

On one occasion while promoting Shen Yun, I had a phone conversation with a local coordinator. She came across as very forceful, and what she said was hard to listen to. Outwardly I stayed polite and did not argue back, but inwardly I was extremely impatient. I gave a few perfunctory replies and hurriedly hung up. As soon as the call ended, my ear swelled up. I realised that Master was reminding me to let go, right then, of my attachment to hearing pleasant words. I apologised to Master in my thoughts and sent righteous thoughts to clear the negative view of that practitioner from my mind.

Later on, as we worked together on the project, one part of the work she was responsible for held up the overall progress, and everyone hoped it could be improved. I had done that part of the work before, and a fellow practitioner suggested that I take over. At the time I did not agree straight away, because I did not want the trouble. Afterwards I realised that I should not be afraid of trouble: I should take the initiative to make up for what was lacking, and not let the Shen Yun project be held up on that account. I told the coordinator that I could help her improve the work she was doing, but she would not accept it, nor would she give me the material she was holding. I focused on cultivating my own heart, not letting myself form any negative thoughts about her that would affect how we worked together, and I also sent forth righteous thoughts to clear away every factor interfering with our cooperation on the project. Master saw my heart and gave me wisdom: I thought of another way to solve the problem of having no material to work from. That night I did not rest but worked through until morning to improve that part of the work. The next day I showed her the improved result and offered to take on that part of the work from then on. Perhaps because I was genuinely thinking of her, she felt my goodwill. In our later work together on the project, I in turn listened humbly to her suggestions and improved the things she raised.

A fellow practitioner once shared something with me about a country in Europe. For a period of time, practitioners there did a great deal of work to promote Shen Yun, yet few tickets sold. Later the local coordinator took some advice: at Shen Yun meetings, practitioners were encouraged to share only about how their xinxing had improved through the process, and not to bring up anything unrelated to xinxing improvement. As a result, the Shen Yun performances that year were a great success. This inspired me to focus on improving my own xinxing while working with fellow practitioners on a project, rather than focusing only on the outcome. Master said in “Lecture Four” of Zhuan Falun: “Tempering the will is the key to truly raising your level. If one could improve just by working the body, I would say that Chinese peasants suffer the most. Shouldn’t they all become qigong masters, then?” 

I came to realise that, having done so much work to promote Shen Yun, we must not be like farmers ploughing a field, all labour and no gong. In promoting Shen Yun we should focus on cultivating our xinxing. Just as Shen Yun’s performers need a pure heart on stage, promoting Shen Yun also requires us to keep improving ourselves and to promote it with an ever purer heart. When we work with fellow practitioners and speak face to face with sentient beings, things that touch the heart sometimes happen, and all of them are helping us improve our xinxing. We should validate the Fa with an ever purer heart.

2. Looking Inward, Things Took a Turn for the Better

Earlier this year, while I was away promoting Shen Yun, I suddenly received a message from a fellow practitioner telling me that everything I had stored at his home had to be moved out, because he was about to leave for another country. I had to find a way at once to clear out everything I had left in his storeroom. At the time I was living away from home to promote Shen Yun, and most of my belongings, which I could not take with me, were in that storeroom.

At the same time, there were already few people helping to promote Shen Yun where I was, and there were shopping centre promotions several weeks running, so going back would have held up the promotion of Shen Yun. I did not want that to happen, so I asked a practitioner back home to help me deal with the furniture. But that practitioner had his own things to sort out and had no way to handle mine. I felt a great deal of pressure at the time, and the matter stayed on my mind. While studying the Fa, I realised that this was a form of interference with my promoting Shen Yun, and a test. I sent forth righteous thoughts to clear away this interference, and at the same time I looked inward, asking myself why I had run into it. I realised that I should be able to “let go”: I should not be attached to the things I had accumulated. Apart from what I genuinely needed, I should be able to let go of everything else I had no use for. The main reason I felt so much pressure was that I was unwilling to give up what I had built up over the years, and behind that lay an attachment to personal gain, a reluctance to have to spend money buying it all again in future. In fact I had no use for much of it at the moment. It occurred to me that I could donate the furniture I did not need, so that these things could actually be put to good use.

A charity came to the house and took away most of the furniture I had no use for, but one table was left. I tried all sorts of ways to get rid of it, yet nothing worked. Time was short, and in the end all I could do was ask another practitioner to take it away and keep it for the time being. She had agreed at first, but the day before she suddenly told me she could not help after all, because she would not have the time. All at once the pressure on me became enormous, and negative thoughts began to surface. Just then I happened to be on the phone with my mother, who is also a practitioner. Hearing me sighing, she asked what was wrong. After I had told her, she reminded me from the Fa to look inward, to see whether I had an attachment to personal gain in this matter, a heart that blamed others, a passive attitude, and so on. Her words woke me up. I quietened down and went over the whole thing, looking at the attachments this matter had exposed in me. From the bottom of my heart I sent out a thought: I do not want these attachments, none of them accord with “Truthfulness, Compassion, Forbearance”. And as I was looking inward, a miracle happened. The advertisement I had put online earlier had not drawn a single enquiry, yet while I was quietly looking inward, someone contacted me and took the table away that same day. Through all this I felt deeply how extraordinary this treasure, “looking inward”, truly is: in looking inward I not only found a deeply hidden attachment, but the difficulty was also resolved in a way I could never have imagined.

3. Firm Righteous Thoughts in the Fa, Negating All Interference and Persecution

Master said in “Expounding on the Fa”: “You should also be clear that ‘natural’ does not exist, and ‘the inevitable’ has reasons behind it.” 

From the Fa I came to understand that interference and persecution are evil factors exploiting the loopholes in our thinking. Such a loophole might be a human attachment a Dafa disciple has not cultivated away, or a point of Fa principle we are not clear about, or something we have not done in a righteous way, or somewhere we have not cooperated well, and so on.

Over these past few years of promoting Shen Yun, I have noticed that in every country there are many practitioners going through tests of illness karma, unable for years on end to promote Shen Yun or take part in Dafa projects. There are also many practitioners who, though not facing illness karma, run into a great deal of trouble and many tribulations in their families and in their work in society, so the time they can free up to validate the Fa is very limited. At the very time when Dafa’s projects most urgently need people, many practitioners are caught up in their personal lives or are in tribulations of one degree or another. It is hard enough for them to keep up their personal cultivation, let alone throw themselves wholeheartedly into validating the Fa.

In recent years, in the course of promoting Shen Yun, I have met with all kinds of tests: interference from my own thought karma, my attachment to comfort and various notions; tests coming from “fame, gain, and sentiment”; and the pressure of conflicts in working with fellow practitioners. When human attachments surfaced, I felt I could barely take a step forward.

I knew it was because I was holding on to my attachments and being driven by a false self made up of postnatal notions, taking those notions to be a part of me. I did not want my human attachments to become an obstacle to the project saving people, so I treated every conflict and difficulty I met as an opportunity for genuine cultivation. Whenever passing a xinxing test was painful, I knew my righteous thoughts were not strong, and I would make an effort to recall Master’s Fa. When I found it hard to let go of the hurt others had caused me, I would recite Master’s Fa: “As one who truly practices cultivation toward high levels, you should give up various attachments” (Zhuan Falun, “Lecture Six”).

When removing an attachment cut me to the bone, I would recite Master’s Fa: “What is given up is not one’s self; it’s all foolishness in the maze” (Hong Yin II, “Discarding Attachments”). Gradually I learned to tell apart the various false selves formed out of postnatal notions and attachments. What they mainly do is protect the self from being hurt, and out of selfishness they like to find fault with others, to resent, and to feel aggrieved. The true self, which measures up to the standard of “Truthfulness, Compassion, Forbearance”, is not afraid of being hurt by human attachments, is able to think of others, does not hold others’ faults against them, and can look at others with righteous thoughts. Sometimes it is hard to become aware of one’s own human notions, and easy to take the “false self” as part of oneself. It comes with passivity and negative emotions, and it tries to make me lose my righteous thoughts about cultivation and fail to be diligent amid the interference of qing. So when I become aware that my false self has appeared, I begin to reject it with righteous thoughts and refuse to have it. I tell myself that this is not me, and that the real me measures up to “Truthfulness, Compassion, Forbearance”.

From the Fa I understand that all the trouble and difficulty we meet at this stage in our families, at work, and in society has an element of our cultivation in it, and that as long as we raise our xinxing we can get through it. At the same time, evil factors try to use karma and the attachments we are unaware of to arrange trouble and interference for us, and we need to negate all of this completely, from the basis of Fa-rectification cultivation. Whether it is the difficulties and ordeals we meet in our personal cultivation, or the interference that arises in a Dafa project, we must not use human attachments, human thinking, or human emotions to understand the things we encounter. We should stand on the ground of Fa-rectification cultivation and look inward at where we have fallen short in the process. In validating the Fa and in working with fellow practitioners, we should examine where we have not been in accordance with the Fa, measure our words and actions against the Fa, and rectify ourselves within Dafa.

Our human attachments are the reason and the excuse the evil uses to interfere with the projects that save people. To reduce the losses, and for the sake of the sentient beings of our own cosmic bodies and of the many more people in the world who are to be saved, we must not cling to these human attachments.

Conclusion

So as not to fall short of Master’s benevolent salvation, fellow practitioners, let us remind one another on the basis of the Fa. In our environment of cultivating as one body, amid conflicts and tests, let us quickly let go of our human attachments and use righteous thoughts to clear away and negate the evil’s interference and persecution.

If there is anything inappropriate, please kindly point it out.

Thank you Master, thank you fellow practitioners.

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