What, I call the Japanese Diaper Trick is useful for changing habits. I discovered in Japanese while potty training our daughter. It is one of those things that is incredibly obvious when it is spelled out, but much trauma and shame is traditionally connected to the process, which reflects how we treat, not just our children, but ourselves
You begin with a child whom you think is ready to potty train; You say to the child: “Tell me when you notice that you have gone in your diaper.” It is mentioned casually and when the child does, you respond with praise; “You are so smart. You know that your diaper is wet. Do you want to have it changed?” If she does, fine, if not then, later. As the child is ready, she or he eventually comes and tells you that the diaper is soiled.
After a week or so when that is going well, you say, “Lets see if you can tell when you are going in your diaper!” And again, no pressure, just responding with acknowledgment; “Good for you, you can feel when you are peeing.” Let them experience the process, praising her and giving her the option to change out of the used diaper when she wants to.
The last step is to say to the child; “Lets see if you can tell me before you go in your diaper. Your body is pushing out what you don’t need and you might be able to feel it before it happens” Then again, it is important to just respond with feed back; “Wow, you could feel it. Your body is telling you something is going to happen before you can see it..” And you let her go in the diaper, don’t rush her off to the toilet, let her practice noticing what her body feels like before it needs to eliminate. When she gets comfortable with that you ask; “Oh so you can feel that you are going to pee, do you want to take off your diaper and go in the toilet?” She has become aware of body function, and now has a choice.
Many of you may have experienced the challenge and frustration of the battle between a thoroughly ingrained habit and desire for change. This is an example of the Transcendent Principle which Einstein refers to when he said that, “A problem cannot be solved on the level in which it is created.” It requires a new perspective to be recognized, which offers a new choice, resulting in a higher value, raising the bar on how I see myself and my responsibility.
How many of you are familiar with the word paradigm? Can you define it? Or give an example? One way to talk about it is to say that it is a matrix in which we are embedded. It is like the proverbial fish in water. Just as the fish cannot separate himself from the water, it is hard for us to see the belief with which we are identified. Often you must somehow get out of a paradigm to discern it.
I would like to appeal to your imagination. Take a moment to imagine yourself back, deep in the middle ages, in European Christiandom. You live in a small village with thatched roofs, rutted roads, where no one you know has traveled more than 30 kilometers from your village and lived to tell about it. You picture yourself on a flat world plane at the center of the Universe. Metaphorically and literally the matrix belief, amplified by the church, is that if you go too far, you will fall off. That fear of falling off the edge follows you into your nighttime dreams in which you tumble regularly into oblivion, waking before you land. Most of the population lives in filth, illness, early death and hard labor. You would be hard pressed to come up with another workable model. You might look to the landholders or those better off than yourself, but on closer look they are certainly not exempt from accidents, disease, human foibles and death. Let us say you are a bright lad or lass and have heard some talk that astronomers say there is an entirely different picture of the cosmos than what you have always imagined. Let say that you are standing now looking out to sea, trying to image a different shape to the earth. You have noticed the round sun and moon, you have observed that the sailing boats seem to disappear from the bottom up as they go towards the horizon, but it is hard to imagine too many new elements at one time. Then you look down and see an ant making its way along the surface of a large rounded bolder. This gives you pause to consider that what if the scale of the earth was much larger than you thought. From the ant’s point of view, his little patch is flat, as it is for you. Bingo, an idea, which begins the possibility of new model, which will challenge all your constructs of thinking.
Let us come back to our time, when quantum physics is having the same effect on us now, as astronomy did on the Middle Ages. Most of us do not fear stepping off the edge of the known world literally, but I sense in my self a belief just as crippling. It is the mind construct of polarity. It echoes the ancient cosmology of heaven and hell; good/bad, right/wrong, win/loose. These metaphors are inherent in our language and our thinking. We have created a world of duality which is so inclusive that it is almost impossible to imagine another continuum.
I want to share a personal experience I had in regard to a relationship, which broke apart a paradigm in a moment, but however, is taking years to realize a new one. I remember it so clearly, because it was a time when our country was entering yet another war, so the question as to why we keep creating war was on my mind.
I am standing before someone that I had loved for a long time, in fact I still love him, but I cannot access that at this moment. I am hurt, feeling abandoned and betrayed. I am in a deep trance of my history, my childhood, reliving similar experiences. I look for evidence of how this person in front of me is wrong, and I find it. Standing in front of him, I do not see him, or hear him, The dazed person in front of me is also reliving his past. Neither one of us is present.As I stand there, a thought slips in sideways; if I look at this one I have been so closed to without seeing him, NO WONDER WE HAVE WARS!
This is enough to break the trance and bring me back to present time; in a flash I know that I have created this entire story. In this moment of realization I sense my alienation from him, is really alienation from myself. I feel a choice, that I did not have seconds before. He somehow miraculously witnesses my shift, which at first lowers his defenses. Then I see him go into confusion. In his acute discomfort, he turns to flee, but then looks at me. We smiles in some bizarre recognition, as if we were both caught in a joke. It is a life-changing event that allows space for a new paradigm to develop for both of us; to live life differently, make new decisions.
