The Inner Journey of Coming to Recognise My Fundamental Attachment

Greetings, respected Master! Greetings, fellow practitioners!

Today I would like to report to Master and share with fellow practitioners the inner journey of these past few months, in which I found my own fundamental attachment.

I was born with a serious illness and was on medication all my childhood. At secondary school I took Chinese herbal medicine every day, at university I was still on medication, and after graduating, when I was teaching at a university, I was still on medication. Later I came to Germany to study German at a university, and under the strain of intense study I developed a stomach illness that seriously affected my studies and caused me great suffering.

One day in February 1996, I received a copy of Zhuan Falun and a video tape of the exercise instructions, sent by my parents from mainland China. I read the book straight through in a single evening, and afterwards I was tremendously moved: it felt as though I had suddenly understood a great many principles, such as why people suffer, why they fall ill, and what a person lives for. The next day I began learning the five exercises by following Master's exercise instruction video, and before long I had stepped into Falun Gong cultivation.

I began doing the exercises and reading Zhuan Falun every day, and two weeks later I was astonished to find that my stomach no longer hurt. During that time I had even forgotten to take my medicine.

My husband was German, and sadly he had motor neurone disease, an illness for which there is no cure. Seeing that only two weeks of practising Falun Gong had miraculously cured my illness, my husband, who did not believe in qigong, began learning the exercises with me and read Zhuan Falun in English after work, as there was no German translation at the time. After a while, the two of us noticed that his condition had markedly improved as well and that he no longer needed medication.

After the CCP began persecuting Falun Gong in July 1999, we took an active part in activities opposing the persecution. On 16 June 2000, Master published “Towards Consummation”. I remember that when my husband and I were taking part in an activity in Switzerland that year, practitioners from various countries shared their understandings of this scripture together. Everyone spoke about what their thoughts had been when they first stepped into Dafa. At the time I felt that my fundamental attachment no longer existed: I had come in to cure my illness, but two weeks later the illness was completely gone, so there was nothing left for me to be attached to at all.

Time went by, and we were still cultivating. My health remained very good, but my husband's grew worse with each passing year, until eventually he was bedridden and I had to devote a great deal of energy to caring for him. One day in September 2016, my husband sadly passed away. I sank into a deep anguish I could not pull myself out of. I did not know what the old forces had arranged for the two of us, or what gaps in our cultivation they had seized upon.

In September 2017 I moved to Frankfurt and put my energy into my job and into Dafa projects. As for how the old forces had interfered with my husband and me, I no longer gave it serious thought. Yet one thing kept putting me on my guard. In my group I came across several practitioners going through severe tests of illness karma, and the way they went through them reminded me of what my husband had been through. I said to the practitioners in my group more than once that I kept running into cases of fellow practitioners going through illness karma, and that this must have something to do with me. But what exactly it had to do with me, I could not work out.

Jolted Awake

By the start of 2026, I had been living in Frankfurt for more than eight years. One day a fellow practitioner rang me, saying he wanted to talk with me about two practitioners in the Frankfurt group who had passed away from illness karma over the past two years. He said he had asked them whether they had found their own fundamental attachments, and both had said no. He believed this was the fundamental reason they had passed away.

Inspired by this practitioner, the practitioners in our group began to take finding our fundamental attachments seriously. One after another, practitioners identified their own fundamental attachments and shared them sincerely with the rest of us. In the course of this, I too came to see my own fundamental attachment more clearly: it was the thought of curing my illness that I had held when I first entered the door of Dafa, and it manifested as an attachment to Dafa being able to cure my husband's illness.

After that, I also came to understand the question of how the old forces had interfered with my husband and me, along with other questions of that kind. Here I would like to share my understanding in three respects.

Not Letting Go of the Fundamental Attachment Blocks Transformation of a Being

I had stepped into Dafa in order to cure my stomach illness, and remarkably, not long after I took up cultivation the illness was gone. So I urged my husband, who was ill at the time, to take up the practice as well. I believed Dafa was certain to cure his illness, and from the very beginning this thought was a considerable attachment, though I was completely unaware of it.

Looking back now, for all those years I was making every kind of effort out of this strong attachment. For instance, I helped my husband do the exercises every day. As he could not lift his arms, he was unable to hold the wheel, so I would support both his arms for him in the wheel-holding position. I hoped that one day his arms really would rise on their own.

Later, when he could no longer read, I had him listen to the Fa continually, playing the audio and video recordings. Even when he had fallen asleep, I thought Master's Fa would still do his Main Soul good.

I also kept trying whatever might help my husband: reciting the “nine-word auspicious phrase” over and over, sending forth righteous thoughts for long stretches, using the Fa Master taught about benevolently resolving things to benevolently resolve matters with the beings interfering with my husband, and looking inward together with him. All the while I was making these efforts, deep down I was expecting my husband's illness to improve, and I used the excuse that his recovery would powerfully validate Dafa to cover up my desire to cure his illness.

I did recognise this hidden intention and tried to remove it, but at the time I absolutely could not see that it was my fundamental attachment. I only felt that my heart was impure and my motive wrong. And so, however hard I tried, I could not change his situation. My husband, of course, did not realise that this was his fundamental attachment either.

Master said in Fa Teaching Given at the 2003 Atlanta Fa Conference: “Validating the Fa is also cultivation. The cultivation process is one of continually recognizing your own shortcomings and then disposing of them. It’s only that the earlier a lot of fundamental attachments are recognized the better. Recognizing them is, in itself, improvement. Being able to eliminate them, or overcome them, weaken them, and in the end completely eliminate them—that process is one of continually improving yourself, and it’s the fundamental transformation of a being.”

Only now, studying this passage of Master's teaching, do I understand that at the time neither my husband nor I had recognised what our fundamental attachments were, and so the transformation of my husband's being could not be achieved.

Old Forces Held On to My Fundamental Attachment and Intensified the Persecution

Because my husband was in the grip of his illness for so long, my energies were drawn in as well. I knew this was not simply a matter of illness karma but severe interference from the old forces, yet I could never see clearly why the old forces were able to interfere with us, or how we were to break through that interference.

I studied Master's teachings about the old forces over and over, and felt that I only half understood them. Sometimes I asked myself: was it that the two of us had a great deal of karma, and the old forces were using that to test whether my husband and I would still believe in Dafa and in Master while he was in the grip of illness? But I knew that both of us believed deeply in Dafa and in Master. My husband especially, tormented by his illness for so long, never once wavered in his faith.

Perhaps it was because my husband had such a steadfast heart that Master was protecting him all along, and supernormal things happened to him several times. The last of these was in 2012, when he suddenly slipped into a coma and was resuscitated after being taken to hospital. A week later the doctor told me that my husband had only a few months to live, half a year at most, and suggested that he stay in hospital until the end of his life. If he went home, the doctor said, there would be no medical equipment there, and without prompt resuscitation he could lose his life at any moment.

After giving it careful thought, my husband and I decided to go home. Once we were home his condition improved, and right up until he passed away none of the dangers the doctor had feared ever arose. He went on to live for another four years.

Master said in Towards Consummation: “Additionally, they manipulate wicked human beings to examine Dafa and its disciples, putting them through a comprehensive and destructive test that targets all human thoughts and attachments. Had you truly been able to get rid of those fundamental human attachments in your cultivation, this last tribulation would not have been so vicious.”

Only now do I see clearly that because my fundamental attachment had not been removed (and of course my husband's own problems cannot be ruled out either), the old forces went after him endlessly, wearing his physical body down bit by bit, while at the same time, through the illness that interfered with him for so long, doing everything they could to break me as well. This ordeal was so severe and so evil for us.

Removing the Fundamental Attachment and Walking the Path Master Arranged

After my husband passed away, the old forces began piling one hardship after another on me. Bit by bit I felt that my health was not what it used to be: one ailment today, another tomorrow, one after another. It left me very puzzled. Later my stomach developed symptoms like the ones from over twenty years earlier, and they dragged on for a long time without going away. My heart was unsettled and the substance of fear was growing. Seeing practitioners around me pass away from illness karma made me shudder, and I did not know what had gone wrong in my cultivation to bring on these stomach symptoms. Fortunately, what I thought at the time was that whatever the situation, I would step up sending forth righteous thoughts and hold firm to one thought: this is not illness, it is a false appearance. Gradually I made it through this test.

Now I understand: because my fundamental attachment had not been removed, the old forces kept manufacturing false appearances of illness for me, so that deep down I would go on clinging to the fundamental attachment that Dafa could cure my illness. I also found the answer to why I kept encountering practitioners in Frankfurt going through tests of illness karma: having seized on my fundamental attachment, the old forces wanted to use those cases to put me under mental pressure, to wear down my will to cultivate, and to keep me from succeeding in cultivation.

Master said in Fa Teaching at the 2015 West Coast Fa Conference: “Each of your attachments could cause your cultivation to fail. Each of your attachments could result in physical issues, and lead your once-firm faith in Dafa to waver. In other words, to tell you the truth, no one intends for your cultivation to be a success and no one is giving thought to how your cultivation goes. The old forces want only to complete what they want to see completed, and that’s it.”

Now, when something happens with my body, I no longer have the attachment of fear. I firmly deny these things. The old forces used to be something vague, elusive and abstract to me, but now I can see through their tricks and break through their evil arrangements early on.

As I came to recognise my fundamental attachment more and more clearly, I read Master's Fa lectures again and found that in many of them Master reminds us again and again to remove our fundamental attachments. Yet I had clung to my delusion for all those years and walked the path the old forces had arranged.

On 8 June 2026 the Minghui Editorial Board published a “Notice” recommending that Dafa disciples who truly cultivate memorise Master's scripture “Towards Consummation”. I now understand with real clarity how important it is to study this scripture: only by removing the fundamental attachment can we thoroughly deny the old forces' arrangements and walk the path Master has arranged.

If there is anything inappropriate in the sharing above, please kindly point it out.

Thank you Master. Thank you, everyone!

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