Italy: Looking inward to overcome adversities and witness Dafa miracles

 

 

Greetings Master, Greetings fellow practitioners, 

I would like to share with you the process related to one of the greatest challenges I faced this year while promoting Shen Yun.

At the end of October 2021, just when I left for the first time to follow the promotion of Shen Yun in Palermo, in the South of Italy, my mother began to suffer from intense and excruciating  generalized pain.

It had happened in the past that my mother felt sick during the promotion of Shen Yun.

The first time it happened was in 2018. I found her at home in a confused state and it turned out that she had a brain meningioma that needed to be operated on urgently. This meant that I had to slow down a lot with my participation in the Shen Yun promotion activities to follow my mother's postoperative process which was long and complex.

Following this event, reflecting on what had happened in the following months, I realized that it was my concern for her health that caused her illness to materialize in a severe pathological state. In my understanding now the old forces use everything that can make our hearts unstable to hinder us in the process of saving sentient beings. If our heart falters, very limiting situations can be created around us.

The following year in 2019, therefore, when my mother had a heart attack during the promotion of Shen Yun, I immediately put myself on alert. I accompanied her to the emergency room at the hospital and throughout the night I sent righteous thoughts to clean up my state and make any worries disappear. The next day my mother was discharged with treatment and with an appointment to have a defibrillation after a month. She never did it because her heart returned to normal parameters and I continued to promote Shen Yun.

This time, therefore, thanks to this past experience, when my mother began to feel bad in October 2021, I did not worry and I never thought of returning home from Palermo, even though I called her often. 

When I returned home for the Christmas holidays, after two months spent in Palermo, her situation, following a massive cortisone therapy, had settled on slight pains and she was still completely self-sufficient. The first diagnosis was that she suffered from myositis caused by the third dose of the vaccine.

Talking to her and my brother it came out, however, a great dissatisfaction with my behavior. According to their point of view, I was selfish and insensitive and even the practice I was doing was not good since I abandoned family members in difficulty.

Strangely, these words didn’t touch me like in the past. 

For the first time I was able to calmly tell them that I was sorry that they had this perception, but what they were actually saying was not what I had inside my heart. I explained to them that I had no feeling of abandonment inside me and that, on the contrary, all the people I loved were included in what I was doing in Palermo.

I clarified the truth to them again and explained that Shen Yun, by warning of the danger represented by the evil Chinese Communist Party, would actually avert impending tragedies for all of humanity, tragedies that in the first place I would have liked to avoid for those closest to me.

On that occasion, I gave the Shen Yun tickets as a gift to my brother and his family, and they gladly accepted them.

When I left for Palermo again in mid-January, the situation was stable and the atmosphere with my family relaxed, but when I returned home in mid-April the situation worsened again.

My mother's extreme pains resurfaced even more strongly than before. My mother went to the emergency room three times in a week and massive pain treatments based on morphine were needed.

In these new hospitalizations, the hypothesis of a blood or bone cancer in the terminal stage was beginning to emerge. My mother's condition worsened visibly until she was completely dependent on others.

It was very burdensome to take care of her in the few days I had to stay at home after weeks that I was in Palermo following the Shen Yun promotion, and the time when I would have to leave for Palermo for the last and most delicate phase of Shen Yun promotion was approaching.

Two days before leaving, my mother risked her life from an overdose of morphine. I found her on her bed, in disastrous physical condition, in the midst of her urine and feces. My father had not noticed anything and he thought she was finally sleeping peacefully and without pain.

I rushed her to the emergency room, and the next day brought her home. It was hard to repress the feeling towards her seeing her so weak and defenseless in a wheelchair, by now completely dependent on others.

I was, however, determined not to be influenced by these feelings and to leave for Palermo. I could not betray the trust that sentient beings had placed in me and somehow I was sure that this was also good for my mother.

I talked to her while she was on the bed and tried to do it in a way she could understand. I told her that I would leave for Palermo the next day, but that I would not abandon her. We had arranged everything with a woman who would come to help with the house cleaning and whatever else was needed. Since she is very Catholic, I told her that for me following the promotion of Shen Yun was the most sacred thing, like going to pray in a monastery and that my prayers included all the people I loved and that I took her with me, in my heart.

I spoke to her with a sweetness that I had never been capable of, since ours had always been a very conflicting relationship. She didn't answer me. I kissed her and left her with this image in the eyes of a person who was now at the end of her life.

The next day I caught the train and then flight to Palermo. Half an hour earlier, my tenant who lives upstairs and who is also a friend, fell in tears. She was in her fourth month of pregnancy, and had vomited, and she was having severe contractions. She was terrified of losing her baby and didn't know what to do.

I still had the last few things to prepare, so my husband thought about reassuring her. They called her gynecologist who told her to wait until the next morning when she could visit her in the hospital. I was able to be with my friend for only a few minutes. I told her to stay in bed and try not to worry that the next day she would be visited by her doctor. I made her drink something hot, and then told her that I had to go and that I would call her from Palermo.

My husband accompanied me to the train station and again railed at me, because he said that I was not a good person if I abandoned those in difficulty in this way.

This time his words touched me. And despite having returned to Palermo I kept thinking about what was the right thing to do. There was a voice in my head that told me "We talk about saving sentient beings and I don't try to save the people close to me and who are in obvious difficulty and even life threatening. That's no good".

I tried to look deeper into this topic and I saw that in fact my husband's words had touched me, there was a great attachment to my reputation, to what others think of me.

At that moment, Master's words in the First Talk of Zhuan Falun (2003 version, translated by North American practitioners) in the section “One Standard Alone Determines if Someone is Good or Bad: Whether He is Able to be True, Good, and Endure” came to mind: “For anybody here, only if you can follow the universe’s nature, to be True, Good, and Endure, only then you can call yourself a good person. And a person who goes against this nature, now that’s somebody who’s truly bad. Maybe when you’re at work or out and about, someone will say that you’re bad. But maybe you aren’t really bad. Or maybe someone says that you’re good. But, turns out, maybe you aren’t really good. And for a cultivator, if you assimilate to this nature you’re someone who has attained the Dao. The truth is really just that simple.”

And in the Eighth Talk of Zhuan Falun in the section “The One Who Practices Gets the Gong”, Master said: “When your family or friends are suffering, are you affected inside? And are you able to keep these things in perspective? Being a cultivator is that hard! Somebody once said to me, "Teacher, it’s good enough to just be a good ordinary person. Who could get that far in cultivation?" I was so sad to hear that! I didn’t say anything to him. There are all types of character out there. There’s only so much he can comprehend, and nobody can do anything about it—it’s the person who comprehends it who gains.”

And finally, I had the clear vision that everything was nothing but a test for me, put there by the old forces to see if my heart eventually faltered and they managed to make me fall. Again, I felt that what we are doing as disciples of the Fa-rectification period of the Cosmos is the most sacred thing and that all things are included in it, the renewal of the entire firmament. How could Master not have included all the people He has arranged to be close to us at this time? My understanding was that to have trust means to follow the path of Master, to be afraid of the path of the old forces, but we are able to not be afraid only when we have given up our attachments.

And on reflection, it was the people close to me that I should have saved this year, my husband and my brother's family, to whom I had given the tickets, the ones who were causing me the most problems and whose judgment worried me the most. Armed with this understanding, I have been able to let go of this attachment and proceeded with the Shen Yun promotion without thinking about home in a worried way, while calling anyhow every day.

After a few weeks my brother phoned me to tell me that unfortunately our mother had cancer, as the doctors thought. They had found a large black mass on the spine and it was inevitably cancer according to the doctor. They had already spoken to an oncologist, and the first thing to do was a biopsy and then other tests.

I didn't believe it. How was it possible that our mother had cancer? I told my brother to wait to draw conclusions.

I said the same thing to my mother, and in the following weeks I told her to be confident, that things might not be what they seemed, that it was better not to think too much about cancer and that maybe it wasn't so serious.

While it was certain for the doctors that my mother had cancer, the subsequent examinations, one by one, began to give negative results and that black mass in the end turned out to be a strong inflammation, probably always caused by the imbalances of the third dose of vaccine.

In the following weeks my mother began to regain weight, became more self-sufficient and returned to being able to fully manage her life while still taking strong painkillers.

All of this was truly a Dafa miracle for me.

The thing that is even more miraculous is that my mother has stopped attacking me and treats me with a gentleness that she never had before.

The same thing happened with my husband and my brother.

I have shared this experience with you because I think it will be helpful to fellow practitioners, as we often face this kind of situation during cultivation and especially during the promotion of Shen Yun.

If there are things that are inappropriate or not in line with the Fa, please let me know.

Thanks for patiently listening.

(Selected to the European Fa-conference 2022 in Warsaw)