Is 'Owning Stuff' Really the Right Thing To Do?

I've been involved in personal development, massage, Reiki and alternative healing for close to fifteen years.

Something that has been said at one time or another, by most of the folks whose work I have studied,  has been something to the effect of 'own your own stuff'.  Furthermore, I've heard this business of 'owning your own stuff'  being touted as being a great thing to do; I suppose it is, *if* you aren't the person with an issue that you're trying to clear.

At one point in my life, I had a massage therapist who told me, quite frequently and emphatically, that I had to 'own my stuff' and that 'it was clear that you have issues that are your own fault that you need to clear' while she was working on my neck.  At the time, I was too busy saying really rude things that amounted to "ow!',  to take a deep breath, and use it to tell her to take a look at her phrasing and intent vs. results.

 As a client, I found it both nonsensical and un-helpful, to be repeatedly informed that my issue was my own fault and I had to _own_ the issue that I was paying her to help me _heal and clear_.

After experiencing more than one of these therapists, I wound up in massage therapy and hypnotherapy school, and wound up becoming a Reiki Master/Healer/Teacher myself.  Having done the work to make the transition from a patient/client to a healing facilitator in my own right,  I feel the phrase 'own your own stuff' is both an unhelpful one to be bandied about during a client's process, as well as to the success of a therapist/facilitator.  Also, I think that the phrase is a likely accidental mis-use of either language, intent, or both on the part of a therapist/facilitator/educator.

  _Ownership_ of a thing, or an issue, implies that whatever the thing/issue is, it is going to, and is welcome to stick around as a fixture, and that this fixture is welcome and will be maintained, as welcoming and maintaining a thing is what one does when one owns something.

 From an admittedly new-age-y therapeutic standpoint, when an issue becomes an attachment, or entrenched, as would be implied in the case of ownership of it,  I feel issue ownership/entrenchment /attachment makes any given issue that much more of a challenge in terms of time, cost, talent and effort for the therapist/client team to clear/heal.

I can see some therapists saying that if one 'owns' an issue, then one could easily elect to give the issue away, etc.  I don't deny this, as it is certainly a valid enough approach, but, when one owns something and elects to give it away, there is still the 'charge' of having owned an item/issue in the first place, which can be somewhat challenging to clear in some clients.

I think that a better way of phrasing 'own your own stuff' is to say, instead, "own up to having stuff".  Owning up to stuff,  has more of an admission-style connotation, without that whole ownership connotation attached to it.  Why can't an issue just be present, without being owned, before it can be healed or cleared?  I see no reason for this to not be the case.

Healing and clearing issues is what we as therapists are here to facilitate, and we all know that this process can go easily, or it can go hard.  Why would we as therapists/facilitators elect to make a clients process more difficult than it needed to be?  Why would a facilitator/therapist use terms, phrases or techniques that unwittingly leave a client hurting more, physically, mentally or emotionally?


Until next time..peace.