JordanCornblog

I put my mat down
First thing. No impediment
Now to the next step.

It’s okay for me
To show off. Just not okay
For anyone else.


What else is there to say? Everyone already knew this, right?

I don’t need to hold
Onto anything. When it
Hurts, just let it burn.

To this point in my life I have felt and behaved as if my integrity depended on ferreting out and holding onto the ‘truth’ of my experience. It’s been a fairly serviceable way to live. But it involves a lot of looking back. And it doesn’t foster agility or allow for a lot of movement. There’s no place for letting go, really.

Now I am coming to see the utility of what Pema Chodron advises when she speaks about Shenpa. The essential practice is to let the seeds of my karma burn when I feel ‘hooked’ by something. This doesn’t require looking back to try to understand the feeling. It simply requires letting myself experience the feeling and then letting it burn.

It’s so much more efficient and effective than trying to ‘understand’ what is going on when I feel hooked. Honestly, I feel hooked a lot. And every time I let one of those seeds burn, I am lighter.

If your glass is half
Empty, then pour more water
Into it right now.

I don’t need any
Thing from you. Not because I’m
Angry. It’s just true.

It’s the work of a lifetime, when you didn’t get what you needed as a child. The normal developmental steps of individuation can’t happen the way they’re supposed to. You get older. And you keep looking for what you never got but needed then.

In an episode of The Bear (Season 3) that I recently watched, Jamie Lee Curtis (aka Donna, aka JordanCornblog’s mother) has a complicated and ultimately sweet interaction with her daughter Suger. In the course of their exchange, she describes Sugar’s birth and tells Sugar that she was/is beautiful. You can see how moving it is for both of them.

But you also know that it isn’t what Sugar needs. Sugar has already done what she needed to do (and was capable of) to survive her experience of Donna. And Donna can’t fill those needs anymore. No one can, because the time for filling them has passed.

It’s just true.

So it’s good to stop looking. And good to start giving yourself what you can, here and now. Better than good – it’s great!

Maybe she just did
The best that she could and I
Need to forgive her.

NOT forgiving is a form of attachment.

And yet, it’s so very hard to let go of wanting to be right…especially when I have said and done and thought things that I want to justify. So maybe I just did the best that I could, too?

I honor every
Experience I’ve had and
Let the old seeds burn.

I used to think that the point of emotional work was to get to a core issue or trauma and then do whatever was needed to let it go. Subsequent events that echoed that trauma were just opportunities to learn necessary lessons. They were experiences I presented to myself to illuminate that core issue and help me acknowledge it and let it go.

But now I’m coming to realize how layered life’s experiences are. There’s that core thing that has certainly been an animating principle. But all of those repetitions, so painful at the time, laid down their own tracks in my brain. They were real and added their seeds to the ground I walk each day.

There are so many karmic seeds just waiting to take root. It’s important to honor their power—each and every one.

And it’s vital that I embrace my power by choosing to burn rather than water them.

They said there was a
Golden Time when things were good.
In truth, there was not.

My mother was an actress. (Not a famous one, but we knew that she could/should have been…another story for another time…)

Anyway, when I was new to the world, it appeared that she offered something wonderful and just out of reach.

I knew I didn’t quite have it, but needed to believe it was there.

And that was the family myth — that it had been there but was lost.

A golden time.

My habit was to
Clutch what I thought I needed.
Never really did.




I have occasionally behaved as if a relationship could provide something vital to me. With the exception of my earliest years, that was never true. But believing that has led me to hold on way too long to connections that weren’t healthy for me while simultaneously missing the ones that were.

I don’t need to be
An old soul (or a new one).
Just be me and breathe.




I came to consciousness in a home where grandiosity (though absolutely unrealized) held all the shine. And now I notice that I want to be an old soul. There is no end to this letting go…