Tending Glimmers: Building Joy, Resilience, and Co-regulation

Weaving more joy into life.

Spring is toying with me, sending me a bit of warmth one day, snow the next, hints of blue sky on a blustery day. As I’m driving, light bounces off a lake I’m passing, and I catch a glimpse of sparkly blue.

I feel a rush of pleasure, a warmth in my chest, and a lightness in my face.

This moment of delight is an example of what Deb Dana calls “glimmers”, small moments of safety, joy, ease, or connection that we experience spontaneously. They are the opposite of triggers, they add to our resilience, and they support nervous system regulation.

I recently listened to Deb Dana on a podcast with Sharon Saltzberg. She was talking about glimmers in the context of decreasing anxiety. It got me more curious about the nuances of working with glimmers in therapy and in our own lives.

Here are a few things that stuck with me.

Glimmers can support co-regulation.

When I think of glimmers, I typically picture someone having a positive moment. I teach my clients to “catch” that moment and savor it. I encourage them to notice the sensory experience of the glimmer. This helps them to connect to their own felt experience, their own bodies, and a sense of feeling more resourced, even if it’s momentary.

Deb Dana talks about the additional value of sharing glimmers with others. She encourages people to keep a journal, take photos, share with their therapists, friends, or family. This practice helps us to stay with and integrate the benefits of the moment. It also gives us shared experiences and helps us co-regulate, calming or energizing our nervous systems. It makes me think about walking with my aunt, deep in conversation, and her waving her hand to point out pretty things along our way.

Paying more attention to our good moments during the day can nurture us as therapists. Sharing these moments more liberally can shift our awareness, drawing our focus to what will sustain us and bring satisfaction into our relationships. Imagine coming home and saying, “This morning I saw my first bluebird of the season!” instead of, “You wouldn’t believe the stressful day I had.” The stressful day might be a reality, but remembering the glimmer creates a different energy.

We can also model glimmer sharing with our clients, like when I recently noticed my prism making rainbows on the carpet of my office. It was a moment not just to notice it with my client, but to enjoy it together, to take in the sense of warmth, fun, creativity, and connection we shared.

Glimmers can be like seeds planted in a garden. Or compost.

Each glimmer has a positive effect on us. One glimmer plus another plus another begins to help us change the way we experience ourselves and the world around us. The more we notice and take in glimmers as they come our way, the more we build the habit of paying attention to them. This practice helps us collect glimmers so that they stick with us. Even though glimmers are short-lived, the more we are connected to them, the more they fertilize the soil around us, the more their impact grows.

Gardens aren’t meant to be the solution for all life’s needs, but they are meant to grow food or flowers to sustain us. Likewise, glimmers don’t magically take away pain or trauma or struggle, but they do help us cultivate resilience and resources.

We can use glimmers to cultivate an environment within ourselves that has more ease, comfort, relaxation and safety. We can wake up and move through our days feeling more nurtured, grounded, and energized.

Patterns emerge over time.

Glimmers are fleeting moments, but they can act like ripples in a pond when you toss in a stone. That moment when I catch a glimpse of sparkly blue water feels familiar to me now. When it happens, the joy feels fuller and reminds me to be on the lookout for more. I’m not “making glimmers happen”, but I am opening my receptivity to finding them.

It’s like lying under the night sky knowing I might see a falling star. Even if I don’t, I have still shifted my awareness and invited myself to be open to possibility. This can be an incredibly difficult thing to do, particularly for people who have a history of not knowing or trusting that good can come their way, like trauma survivors. It can feel much safer being on the lookout for danger or difficulty.

We can help our clients learn to track what shows up for them, what it’s like to pay attention to glimmers, what the patterns are, and how they change over time. We can help them get curious about whether it might be ok to let glimmers in. This opens doors for developing new resources and resilience. Clients can be curious about what it might be like to be more relaxed, feel more settled and to have pleasure at the center of their relationships.

This morning.

Today I woke to a greyish day trying to be blue. While I was working on going from groggy to alert, movement caught my eye in the trees outside. It was a pair of squirrels scrambling from branch to branch in a wild loop. So deft. So fast. So fun. And then I felt more like moving too.

A resource for deepening the work.

I created a series of prompts to help you take glimmer work further, using journal writing, movement and creative expression. They were written with therapists in mind. You can also use them with your clients or share them with your friends. There’s a bonus section specifically for therapists, on how a glimmer practice can support our own presence and resilience.

© 2026 Annabelle Coote

This content is intended for informational and educational purposes only. It should not be considered therapeutic, clinical, health, professional practice, business, or legal advice.