After years of practice, I found very advanced Daoist techniques and was diligently practicing, though not entirely in the right way. I sincerely wanted to reach enlightenment, but I did not have a teacher to explain to me all the necessary details. Because of wrong practice, I started to feel weak. Initially, I just thought that I was tired from work and I continued the practices. However, after two or three years of such practices, I became so weak and tired that I couldn’t breathe properly; I sweated easily; I was fatigued and dizzy. This kept getting worse and worse. I would catch colds very easily and, as soon as I caught one, I would cough for three to five months.

Obviously, there was something very wrong, but I didn’t know what changes I should make in my practice. I had the idea that I was struggling for enlightenment, for achieving something good. Now, if I had been womanizing, drinking, cheating or stealing, then I could understand that Heaven would want to somehow ‘punish’ me or teach me a lesson. However, I thought, that I was doing something very noble; I was trying to become enlightened, so everything should then be okay. I simply couldn’t understand why I was getting more and more sick from the meditations and exercises I was doing for a noble cause.

I tried to find that teacher. I went to several places. I met some Qi Gong teachers, but God would always tell me, “No, this is not your teacher. Don’t study with this one; don’t study with that one, your teacher is someone else.” Eventually, I received the message that my master was in Vancouver so we planned to move there.
Yet, by the time I was to move, Master Sha had already left Vancouver for California.

Why did I want to study with a teacher? What was the change? What made me want to look for a teacher?

The Search for Master Sha

The spiritual journey towards enlightenment, under the training of Master Sha over the last nine years, has been an absolutely amazing and beautiful part of my life. It was very difficult and very challenging, yet, at the same time, very beautiful. My meeting with Master Sha was pre-ordained by Heaven. It was not something that happened by chance.

From childhood, I was exposed to sad struggles of human beings. I wondered how such conflict could be possible when the Holy books spoke about love, about teachings to turn the other cheek and forgive if somebody hit you on one cheek. That sounded so beautiful, but when I saw the reality around me, it was a very different story. However, people around me behaved very differently from the way described in holy books. I was extremely disappointed with all this contradiction. When I went to the churches, I didn’t feel comfortable. I didn’t feel the love; I didn’t feel the light. I felt threatened. Adults would always hush up even the slightest noise. It all seemed to be so stifled, so unnatural.

This type of spirituality was not something that suited me, so I started searching for something else and found Buddhism and Taoism. I read many books and I tried to practice the art of meditation on my own. It was a long journey until I came to Canada. As soon as I arrived in Canada, I wanted to learn about spirituality as much as I could. Because I had learned from books all my life and had become somewhat attached to that mode, I continued studying spirituality from books. However, I did also attend a church.

There were so many books available in Canada. I started reading about Taoism and its practices, of practice in remote mountains and secluded places, about hermits and recluses and so forth. I read stories about masters and their disciples, their training of students, life inside Buddhist monasteries. All that was very mysterious and very appealing to me. From about the time I was thirty-two years old, I realized I wanted to learn from a master, to have one guide me like the old spiritual masters that I had read about in books.

The condition for enlightenment is not something many people understand. I have to admit that I did not understand it until I met Master Sha. My understanding of this issue is still growing, all the time. At every workshop, I learn and see something new.

As we travel around the world with Master Sha, we meet many different people in varying conditions. I can see very clearly what is meant by the conditions for enlightenment. Some of these points are very well known.

The first one is this: “When the student is ready, the guru appears." This signifies that some basic conditions have to be met before we can meet our destined teacher.

The student has to be ready to accept teachings. The student has to have already reached a certain level, and some groundwork already been done.

Until the heart is pure enough and until the soul is pure enough, the student cannot see the teacher, even if the teacher is standing right there. A student can recognize the teacher only when the heart is pure enough, when the heart is open enough.

What is less known, however, is that the higher the level of the teacher, the higher the level of student has to be too. There are not many high level masters, but not many high level students either.

There is another side to it expressed in a sentence not that well known: “A teacher can teach only ready students.”