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.

Sophia: I call it a discipline because it's not easy and it's definitely not for the faint-hearted. It's something that when you allow yourself, you give yourself permission to go into God's presence and to bring your awareness to His presence and then stay there. I think that the most difficult aspect of this is not to pray, not to worship and not to speak in any way, but merely to allow His presence to impact you. I do a lot of listening and a lot of bringing my awareness to God's truth.

You can do that in terms of picking an aspect of His nature; perhaps the fact that He is our Father and that we are His children. It's just being in that sense of awareness and keeping yourself there, because I think this is what is transformational about meditating in God's presence, is that we spend prolonged periods of time in His presence.

I think that a lot of us are good at praying on the go and maybe doing our devotional in the morning, or a little bit of a Bible study, but this is a prolonged period of time of just resting in God's presence and allowing Him to speak to us. I think it's that aspect that is powerful, because it has the power to change our mind.

Heather: Do you ever struggle with insomnia now, or struggle to sleep in any form?

Sophia: No, I don't, which I am very grateful for. I will never take sleep for granted again, so I'm grateful for every night that I sleep through.

There's definitely residue, because I think for anybody who's dealt with sleeplessness in the way that I have, there was a time, long after I started sleeping again that that fear of the night would come. That has slowly diminished, as the months have gone by.

I know that I will never be able to put this discipline of meditating in God's presence aside, because in our daily lives now and all of our responsibilities and all of the stress that we deal with, sometimes I'll feel red flags going up, where I know that my body isn't quite right, or I know that my thinking perhaps isn't quite right. I know that I need to keep that discipline of meditating in God's presence, so that I can keep my mind focused on what is true, rather than how I am feeling, or what my circumstances may be telling me.

Heather: Who is your book for? Is it just for people who struggle with sleep or for others too?

Sophia: I think it is for everyone. I would definitely recommend it to anyone who is dealing with a storm that they can't fix, where they personally have run out of their own strength, or they have run out of their own resources to change what is happening to them.

It is also for people who feel stuck in life and just feel like, I know there's freedom in God, but I'm just not experiencing it in my life and I don't know why. Or somebody who is feeling like they just keep going around the same issue over and over again. I would definitely recommend it for people like that.

I think it is also a book that can prevent storms or issues coming later in life, so I think it is for anybody who thinks you know what, I would like to learn what it is to live in truth more, so that I don't go through major crisis in the future.

I would say it is for a broad spectrum of people, for anybody.

Heather: What has the response to the book been?

Sophia: It has been amazing. I have to say I'm so excited to hear when somebody contacts me and says, you know this book, you read my mail and I'm so excited because now I feel like I have got some understanding of what I'm going through, but also some tools that I can implement in order to navigate the storm that I am going through. So the feedback has been tremendous.

Heather: How can people buy Stay?

Sophia: They can go to audaciousresources.com. It is also on Amazon and we are working on a Kindle version at the moment.