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CHAPTER 1

SETTING AN INTENTION TO BLOOM

Change is inevitable. Growth is intentional.

—GLENDA CLOUD

The first principle of blooming in the dark is Setting an Intention to Bloom. Before we get to why this is important and how one goes about setting an intention to bloom, let’s get even more clear about what blooming in the dark is all about.

Resilience. It’s a popular word these days. Maybe when you think of blooming in the dark, you think of resilience. It’s a similar concept, but not quite the same. There are many different ways of defining resilience. The American Psychological Association defines resilience as “the process of adapting well in the face of adversity, trauma, tragedy, threats, or significant sources of stress. It means ‘bouncing back’ from difficult experiences”²⁵. Similarly, the Department of Homeland Security²⁶ defines resilience as “the ability to resist, absorb, recover from, or successfully adapt to adversity or a change in conditions.” A meme on the internet said resilience is “the courage to come back”²⁷. I like that definition the best.

Adapting or “coming back” can mean any number of things. It might mean getting back in the driver’s seat after experiencing a car accident. Or, interviewing for another job after being rejected by the last ten companies with whom you’ve interviewed. Or, falling in love again after you have been betrayed. To me, resilience is about not letting an adversity define you or your dreams.

Blooming in the Dark Is More than Being Resilient

Blooming in the dark includes the idea of resilience, but it’s about even more than that. When you bloom in the dark, you don’t just bounce back from a trauma or adapt to adversity—you become more as a result of that trauma or adversity. Let me use an example of a coil spring to help explain what I mean. When a spring gets pushed down, and then the pressure is released, what does it do? Your first answer might be, “It springs back into the shape it was before.” That picture or answer would be the essence of resilience. Coming back to one’s original state.

But there’s more to the picture than that. When you push down on a spring that is, for instance, resting on a table, you have to use a degree of force. It takes some energy to collapse those rings onto one another, and that energy has to go somewhere. When you release your finger, the energy inside the spring is released, and with a boing! the spring expands upward. If you watch carefully, you’ll see that the spring stretches out farther and becomes longer than it had been originally, before it was collapsed upon itself. Already the spring is becoming more as a result of having been under pressure.

The “moreness” doesn’t stop there. When you release the pressure of your finger from the spring, it doesn’t just bounce back to its original state. The spring actually lifts off the table it was resting on and is propelled upward and forward. The larger the spring and the greater the pressure put on it, the farther it will go. The spring will become more, permanently more, as a result of having been under pressure.

When we choose to bloom in the dark, we are allowing the pressure exerted upon our lives to infuse us with the energy we need to propel forward in our lives. We don’t become more despite the pressure; we become more as a result of the pressure. A spring can’t “spring” unless it collapses and momentarily doesn’t look like a spring at all. As Night Bloomers, we can’t “spring” forward into a more incredible version of ourselves without something collapsing in our lives either. Like the spring, when that trial or trauma comes, for a while we might not resemble the people we used to be. It looks and often feels like we’re smaller, weaker, and less than our previous selves.

But despite how it looks and feels, that’s not the truth of the situation. The truth is that while we’re in that down position, looking and feeling like less than we were, we are absorbing the energy we need to become even more glorious than we were before that trial came. We’re absorbing the nutrients to grow.

Do you see it? The weight of that pain has not been placed on you to destroy you. No, that weighty pain is there to give you what you need to grow and bloom.

People Who Bloom in the Dark Become More than They Were

Let’s return to the examples we used earlier to help define resilience: the driver driving again, the job seeker seeking again, the lover loving again. Now let’s take it a step further and see what it would look like if these people bloomed in the dark, allowing their adversity to propel them forward in life. The woman didn’t just drive her car again after the accident, she also became a more patient driver and a more patient person in general. Her character permanently changed, and this change significantly improved her relationship with her husband, children, and friends.

The man didn’t just continue to interview for jobs after experiencing a series of rejections. He took the time to do some difficult soul-searching with the help of a therapist and realized that deep down he didn’t believe he was worth hiring. He expected rejection, not just from potential employers, but from everyone in life. He worked through this negative self-belief and not only did he interview well and get the job, but he also started enjoying life in a brand new way. His whole outlook was more positive and engaging.

The woman who had been betrayed didn’t just fall in love again; this time she loved with her whole being. She fully engaged in her next relationship and experienced a level of intimacy that she didn’t even know existed. This second relationship was far more fulfilling than her first one. Through her experience of loss, she learned how to really love a man and how to receive his love.

In these examples, the individuals weren’t just resilient, meaning they didn’t just refuse to let an adversity define them or their dreams. These individuals bloomed in the dark. They allowed the force that collapsed something in their lives to be the very energy that caused them to become a better version of themselves.

You Must Get Your Hopes Up

How many times have you been told (or even said it yourself), “Don’t get your hopes up!” We’ve been conditioned to think that it will hurt more if we get our hopes up and then they don’t come true. We rationalize that if we set our sights lower, we won’t be as disappointed. In the medical field, I’ve heard my colleagues say things like, “I didn’t want to give my patient false hope, so I made sure they knew the chances were slim for … [a cure, a positive response to a new treatment, a speedy recovery, and so on].”

My heart always sinks when I hear things like this. Hope is a powerful force and critical ingredient for healing and transformation. We must get our hopes up if we want to bloom in the dark. In fact, it’s so important that we’ll return to the idea of feeding our hope in a few chapters.

For now, try thinking about getting your hopes up as setting an intention or an expectation for a future outcome. Why is this important? Because, in general, we get what we expect. I don’t mean this in the way of the Law of Attraction (although I do think there’s something to this idea energetically that we don’t fully understand). In the world of psychology, this principle is called the self-fulfilling prophecy. When we expect something, we act in ways that line up with our expectation. These actions help to bring about the thing we expect. For example, if we expect to have a fun evening with friends, we likely arrive in good spirits and eagerly engage in the conversation. Our positive attitude and engagement is felt by our friends and is reciprocated. We feel encouraged and pleased that we are being responded to well and this inspires more positive feelings and actions. Eventually, by the end of the night, we have created a fun evening for ourselves.

Conversely, if we expect to be miserable, we will likely arrive with a poor attitude and either withdraw from the conversation or contribute in negative and critical ways. This will not be received well by the people we are with, who will send subtle or not-so-subtle messages of their disappointment or disapproval. These messages will further confirm our expectation that this was going to be a miserable evening, and we will end the night having experienced exactly what we expected to experience.

Our Beliefs Are Powerful

The placebo effect is another example of the power of hope or expectations. A placebo is an inert substance that doesn’t have any healing properties in and of itself. However, people can experience benefits from an inactive substance, such as a sugar pill, just by expecting that it will help. When this happens, it’s called the placebo effect. Researchers at Harvard Medical School found that, remarkably, our bodies can adjust our experience of pain relief from a medication just by altering the information we’re given and (presumably^*) the expectations we have as a result of this information²⁸.

Throughout the study, each patient received true, false, or uncertain information about the pill they were taking to help reduce their migraine pain. Sometimes they were given pain medication and were told they were taking pain medication (true condition), and sometimes they were given a placebo pill and were told it was a placebo pill, meaning it was inert (i.e., a sugar pill) and would not have an effect on their pain (also true condition). In the false condition, they were either given the real medication and told it was a placebo (to lower expectations) or given the placebo and told it was the medication (to raise expectations). Finally, in the uncertain condition, they were given a pill and told it could be either a placebo or the medication.

Here’s what happened. People who received the pain medication experienced a greater reduction in pain than those who received the placebo pill. And, those who received the placebo pill did better than no treatment. These two findings were expected (no pun intended!). Now here’s where it gets interesting, where we start to see the power of information and expectancies. People who were given the migraine medication but were told it was a placebo pill experienced less pain relief than when they were told they were getting the medication (false condition to lower expectation). In other words, the pain medicine was less effective when people didn’t believe it was medicine.

Furthermore, people who received the placebo pill and were told it was medicine (false condition to raise expectation) experienced more relief from their pain than if they were told they got the placebo pill. In fact, they experienced the same amount of relief as those who received the medicine, but were told it was a sugar pill! In other words, the placebo was more effective when participants believed they were actually getting the medicine.

These results, and those from hundreds of other similar studies, demonstrate that what we expect impacts us, and it does so at the very neuro-cellular level. The effects of pain medication can be blocked by what we believe. Not only that, but we can also create pain relief in our body just by believing we are doing something that is going to reduce pain. I believe this pain relief isn’t just applicable to physical pain; our beliefs impact our experience of emotional pain, too. The bottom line of the research on the placebo effect and self-fulfilling prophecies is that we get what we expect. And given that, it is so important that we be intentional about what we expect and use this power for our good.

Your Expectation Is Your Choice: Choose Wisely

But when we’ve been pummeled by life, it can be very hard to expect things to get better, especially when the pummeling just seems to keep on coming. It can also feel scary to expect things to get better, because what if they don’t? Then what? It can feel unbearable to think of having to go through more pain and disappointment. However, what I’ve noticed in my own life and in the lives of my clients is that it’s far better to hope for change and not see it than it is to sink in the pit of hopelessness and despair and resignation.

You see, here’s the real kicker: You are never expectation free. You’re always expecting something. You’re either expecting nothing to change, for things to get worse, or for things to get better. Given what we know about the self-fulfilling prophecy and placebos, it’s clear that we can change our reality with our beliefs. Remember in the Introduction we learned about how our perception is our reality? This is where the rubber hits the road. Where you get to make a choice. Where you get to set an intention. Up-level your expectations. Set yourself up to bloom in the dark.

You didn’t have a choice about going through the suffering you’re experiencing right now. But you do have a choice about how you want to respond to it and who you want to become as a result of it. That’s what I mean by setting an intention to bloom. Blooming or transformation isn’t an automatic process; it’s one that requires clarity, intention, determination, and persistence.

Indeed, very few of the things we want to accomplish in life happen automatically. For most everything, we have to set a clear intention (i.e., set our belief and expectation for something), and for most everything, we have to exert some effort and persist in that expectation and effort until we realize our goal. It all begins with the intention we set. The research is clear: What we set our mind on—our intention—affects how things turn out.

Setting an intention: That’s the first step of blooming in the dark.

Your Turn

Below are some writing prompts designed to help you set your intention for blooming. You’ll engage in “possibility thinking,” where you take the limits off of your current level of thinking and dream about how you’d like your situation and life to turn out. This type of thinking helps you to move beyond your current emotional state and challenging life situation. Then you’ll get specific about what type of person you want to become, what character traits you want to develop, and what new focus you want for your life.

As you begin to set specific intentions for this time in your life, you’ll start to notice a greater sense of control and agency despite being in the middle of difficult and uncertain circumstances. Although what we’re doing is essentially setting goals for ourselves, it’s different than making New Year’s resolutions, which is important because hardly any of us keep those! This intention-setting work is deeper; it’s soul work. We’re creating a lifeline to your future self, shifting your perspective about what this time of suffering is all about, and creating new meaning and purpose for it. You’re setting yourself up to be more than you could have been had this pain not happened. As you write, dream big and dig deep!

WRITING PROMPTS

Expectations and Harvests

•What are you expecting during this dark season? For yourself, for others, for how it all turns out?

•What harvest do you really want?

•What expectation or intention would lead to the harvest you desire?

Everything Is Possible

Let’s play for a few minutes. Imagine that you were visited by an all-powerful and loving being who silently presented you with a beautiful gift wrapped in gold foil, just big enough to fit in the palm of your hand. The being disappears as soon as it hands you the gift. Warm light seems to emanate from the small package. You open the gift carefully and inside, wrapped in layers of golden tissue paper, is a little slip of paper. On the slip of paper written in gold ink is the following message: “From now on, there are no more limitations in your life. Everything is possible for you.”

What would this message mean for you? What would you allow yourself to believe, to expect, to hope for that you haven’t been allowing yourself? What limitations would end? What is the first thing you would do? What’s the second thing?

Setting Your Intention to Bloom

While you are still in the germinating seed state, this is the perfect time to set your focus and intention to be in full bloom. In order to set the intention to bloom, you need to first define what blooming in the dark specifically means to you. Take a good twenty minutes to respond to the following prompts:

•In a few sentences, describe your darkness (i.e., your pain, suffering, loss).

•What does blooming in the dark mean to you?

•Who do you want to be at the end of all this?

•If you were to become that fully bloomed person, what would that look like? In other words, how would you or I know that you had bloomed in the dark?

•If we thought of the petals of your bloom as character traits, what would your petals be?

•When I was in the dark, I used to say, “I didn’t ask for this hell, but you better believe that if I have to go through it, I’m going to come out better on the other side.” What’s your intention statement?

Your Blooming Word

For the last few years, instead of making New Year’s resolutions, I have chosen a word for the year. The word represents my theme for the year, who I want to be, what I want to attract into my life, what I want my life to be about for the next 365 days. It’s been remarkably effective and a lot of fun. It’s a simple way to set an intention for the year. My goals then revolve around achieving this word. One year, my word was Joy, and I focused my daily efforts on creating and cultivating joy in my life. It was one of the most joyful years I’ve ever had.

Instead of choosing a word for the year, I invite you to choose a word for your blooming process. If you were to choose one word to represent what you want your blooming process to be all about, what word would you choose? Try brainstorming a long list of words and then choose the one that resonates best.

To help you choose your word, consider these questions:

•Who do you want to be when this is all over?

•What do you want to attract in your life?

•What do you want to embody during this time?

•What would be the greatest treasure or ideal harvest as a result of this time in the dark?

•What word inspires you?

Once you’ve chosen your blooming word, answer the following questions.

•If you were to live this word daily, how would your life be different one year from now?

•What are three habits that will help you to live out this word?

My Blooming Home Run Story

In this final prompt, write the story you want to be able to tell about yourself and your life once this dark season is over. In other words, write your home run blooming year.

Date your page one year from now. Now, describe in detail what happened, how you feel, what you accomplished, what you manifested, what types of thoughts you had, what type of person you have become, and so on. Write your best-case scenario year for blooming—write BIG! Be sure to write in the Present Tense (e.g., I have, I am, I feel, and so on).

BLOOMING CHECK-IN

1.What came up for you as you completed your writing prompts in this chapter? You might have noticed certain thoughts, emotions, themes, insights, or even resistance and doubt. Did anything surprise you?

2.In what ways did you grow this week, even just a little bit? Did you make any changes? What are you proud of?

3.How will you continue to apply this blooming principle in your life?

BLOOMING TIP

Congratulations on working your way through the first principle of blooming in the dark! Like our beliefs, our written words (which are just our beliefs and intentions translated onto the page) have creative power. To keep yourself moving in the direction of your intentions, it’s important to continually remind yourself of your intentions. Take a moment now to think about the best way to do this for yourself. For example, you might read over your journal entries from this chapter once a week. Or you might write a blooming intention note to yourself and post it on your bathroom mirror or put it in your wallet where you’ll see it every day.

If you’re finding it hard to believe this new way of thinking about your pain and suffering, that’s okay. For some of us, the perspective shift comes quickly; for others, we need more time to marinate in it and to make it our own. If you’re finding yourself struggling with the idea of you blooming, try setting a timer for ten minutes. During those ten minutes, allow yourself to suspend your current reality and let your mind play with these ideas. Think about it like dipping one toe at a time into this new perspective. You don’t need to be fully immersed yet. The important part is that you start dipping in and allowing your mind the opportunity to think about your situation from another perspective. We can’t experience something until we’ve brought it into our realm of possibilities, and we do this by allowing ourselves to first believe that something is possible. After the ten minutes is up, you can go back to your former perspective. Every day, you might set the timer for a little longer, write a little more and a little deeper, and allow yourself to play with your blooming possibilities.

Creating a blooming vision and intention for yourself not only begins to build your hope, but it also provides an important container for the grief work that comes next.

Night Bloomer: Darcy

When she was twenty years old, in her first year of college, Darcy fell head over heels for John, a senior who lived on the dorm floor above hers. Enjoying her new independence, Darcy found herself spending more and more time drinking with John and his friends. They introduced her to marijuana and soon she was drinking and smoking weed several nights a week. Many times she would black out from drinking too much. She had twinges of feeling like she was getting off track in life, but the excitement of living with fewer rules and dating an older man overshadowed what felt like minor concerns.

Then she started noticing unexplained bruises and scratches. She chalked it up to being clumsy when she was drunk. That is until one night—her twenty-first birthday—after having a celebratory drink with John at a bar, she woke up in his bed with him on top of her. She remembers feeling like she was drugged, and couldn’t understand why she felt like this after having consumed only one drink. She lost consciousness and several hours later woke once again to John forcing himself inside her. This happened three times that night. Finally, she regained consciousness and, finding John asleep beside her, she texted her best friend to pick her up and quietly left.

She never reported the rape to the police, nor did she see John again. But the memory of him drugging and then raping her replayed in her mind like a nightmare on endless repeat. She was tormented by the fact that this may not have been the only time he had done that to her. She came to see me at the end of the semester. She was depressed, anxious, traumatized, and having frequent panic attacks. She was also cutting herself and drinking and using marijuana to cope with her emotional pain. She feared she’d never feel good again. The world was no longer a safe place, and although she longed for love and a romantic relationship, she was paralyzed with fear whenever she thought about dating again.

Darcy worked hard in therapy. We began by establishing a sense of safety in her environment and in her body, and then we processed the trauma and its aftereffects. After discussing the idea of blooming in the dark, she began a deep reflection on who she wanted to be and how she wanted to live her life going forward. Then she began the hard work of turning her blooming intentions into reality. She joined AA and stopped drinking, using marijuana, and cutting. She removed herself from her friend group, so as not to be tempted to engage in these destructive behaviors. She realized that she had chosen a major that didn’t suit her, and so she courageously dropped out of the computer science program and enrolled in a creative writing program. She joined a poetry group and developed a new set of friends, including good guy friends. She got reconnected to her spirituality and her calling to be a healer in the world.

And she started writing. And writing. Besides blogging and journaling, over several months she wrote fifty-nine poems about the trauma, her brokenness and pain, and her path to healing and resilience. Through her beautiful and sometimes heart-wrenching poems, she narrated how she eventually found meaning in the devastation and darkness: “I found the gift in the darkness,” she said, “and that gift was me.” Indeed, the woman who emerged after the trauma was an even more beautiful and empowered version of the woman she was before going through this dark and painful time. Recently, she published her collection of poetry, dedicating it to anyone who has ever felt alone, broken, violated, or abused, to bring them comfort and hope in their healing process.

* The researchers suspect the effect was due to a change in participants’ expectations, but since they did not specifically measure expectation change, they were hesitant to use this word.