With the start of every new year, I recognize the temptation and pressure to be better, work harder, and strive more. It is not uncommon to compare our lives to those around us and feel like we are not doing “enough.” Karin Hagfors-Maly wrote beautifully in her blog post last January about the shame, guilt, and embarrassment that come from abandoning New Year’s resolutions a few weeks or months into the new year, and what Scripture has to say. As a result, I would like to invite you to review her blog and then return to mine.
I would also like to invite you to a new way to view the new year. On New Year’s Eve, my grandmother would be excited to pick out a new word to incorporate and claim for the upcoming year. As I reflected and continued this tradition, my word was “presence.”
So often in our fast-paced, high-pressure society, we do not slow down. It is so easy to miss the small moments in life that can bring us joy. In therapy, we call these moments “glimmers.” Glimmers is a concept from Polyvagal Theory that Deb Dana has written about extensively. They are the small, brief moments that signal safety to our nervous systems and commonly appear in everyday life but often go unnoticed.
Examples of glimmers include seeing a friendly face, noticing calming sounds, or something or someone in your environment that makes you experience joy. Deb Dana explains that “the human brain is wired to pay more attention to negative events than positive ones. But once we learn to notice glimmers, we find they are all around us and we begin to look for more!”
David offers us this invitation in Psalm 23, where he describes God leading him beside still waters and into green pastures. These images invite presence. If we slow down enough, we may begin to recognize where calm, safety, and restoration already exist, even in small ways. David also writes that God prepares a table in the presence of his enemies. The hard things do not disappear, yet God is still near, offering care and nourishment in the middle of them. In the same way, moments of goodness, or glimmers, can exist alongside stress or difficulty. When we practice being present, we become more able to notice these still waters and prepared tables, even in the midst of challenges.
I would like to invite you to join me in reflecting on ways you can slow down and find glimmers in your life, even if it is just for a few seconds. By practicing being more present in our lives, we can train our brains to notice the positive things around us that we otherwise miss.
Below is an exercise from Deb Dana’s “58 Practices for Calm and Change Polvagal Card Deck” to help you practice being more present to the joys around us in life.
- Identify glimmer cues. What happens in your body that lets you know you are in a glimmer moment? What do you feel, think, or do?
- Use your cues to recognize glimmers as you move through your day.
- Survey your environment and intentionally look for glimmers.
- Identify the places and times where glimmers routinely appear and make a habit of returning
- Set an intention to be open to finding unexpected glimmers
Tip: Keep a glimmer journal. Identify the predictable times and places you find a glimmer and also write about the unexpected moments.
Written by Garland Douglas-Chang