Heather Bellamy spoke with Sophia Barrett from !Audacious Church, about her battle with insomnia, her new book and how meditating on God helped heal her.

I remember talking to a friend of mine and them saying, perhaps God is in the midst of all of this, which was something that never really occurred to me. I had thought, this is something bad; this is something to be rejected that I need to solve and solve quickly. So when I entertained the thought that God was with me in the midst of this storm that I found myself in, then I began to relax. I began to get to a point where I thought, I am going to embrace this. If there is something I need to learn in the midst of all this then I will learn it.

A friend of mine who was also a psychologist said, "Soph, what is happening to you is that your brain is exhausted." He began to give me the science behind what I was going through; that because I was exhausted mentally, then I was depleted in my serotonin levels and what my brain was doing was injecting adrenaline, instead of serotonin, which was giving me that accelerated feeling that I could run a race. In the midst of all that he said, "What you're gonna have to do is you're gonna have to learn to meditate on God."

I've been a Christian for over 20 years and my heart sank, because I thought what on earth does that even mean? I'm doing everything I know to do.

But this is a discipline, if you like, of spending time in God's presence and allowing His presence to impact you over and over again. What I found was that there were lots of things in my life; lots of beliefs; lots of things that I thought about myself that were hurting me on the inside. They were hurting my soul; hurting my thinking and stopping me from actually resting.

What I found was a deep feeling of inadequacy. This deep feeling of 'I wasn't what I needed to be'; that I needed to be better. That was actually keeping me in a perpetual state of disappointment and it was taking its toll, not just on my soul, but it was wreaking havoc on my body.

The key for me was spending time in God's truth and in His presence. That caused me to change my mind. The Bible talks about it a lot, in terms of renewing our mind. This discipline of meditating in God's presence, has probably been the most transformational thing that I've ever done in the whole time that I've had a relationship with Jesus.

Heather: Would you say that you are free of that shame now and those feelings of inadequacy?

Sophia: I would say that it is definitely broken in its ability to affect my thinking and my behaviour. Do those thoughts never come? Absolutely they do come, but I know now exactly where I need to go and what I need to be focusing my mind on and that is that I am absolutely complete in God. So those things don't have the same power.

I'm not the same person today that I was before this storm of sleeplessness. I feel completely different. I have a new confidence that I never had before.

Then I started to speak about it and share it with my church first and foremost and then started to share beyond my church. I found that this story of mine resonated with many people and many people in leadership as well. So that led me to put pen to paper and put it all down in a book and that's why I wrote the book Stay.

Heather: What will people find in your book?

Sophia: It has got my journey and a little bit about my life and how I came to this fateful night in 2010 where I didn't sleep. I talk about how I processed all of that, but also what I learned as I began to meditate in God's presence.

It's a collection of transformational truths that impacted me during this time and tools that people can use in their own context, in whatever they're going through. They may not be experiencing sleeplessness, but they may be experiencing stress, anxiety, depression, or just feeling stuck and frustrated with their lives and not knowing what it is that's causing them to feel like they can't move forward. All those truths are within the book along with tools that will help anybody break into a new sense of freedom and a new sense of understanding.

Heather: You've talked a lot about meditating on God, share a little bit of what you mean by that and how you do it.