A look inside 'Dancing With the Darkness'

As I said in the previous post, ‘Dancing With the Darkness’ is designed to share wisdom in ‘bite sized pieces’! Gosh, when I was ill, I couldn’t even read a page in a trash magazine – I just didn’t have the concentration anymore. So, it was really important to me to make my book easy to read and understand. Something you can pick up at any time for a quick piece of inspiration or comfort.

The Introduction is about my journey with postnatal depression. It’s only short but I wanted you to know that I get it. That I’ve been there. This isn’t theoretical. (The Introduction is available to read on Amazon)

The rest of the book is divided into topics such as Self Awareness, Sleep and Support, Mindfulness, and the Spiritual Dimension of Postnatal Depression. In this post and the next, I’m going to share an excerpt from the book

. This is about trying to meditate.

Whilst I was sick, I knew that meditation would help me but I just couldn’t maintain concentration. Then I came across the Buddhist practice of mindful breathing.

Mindful breathing asks that you simply breathe normally whilst counting. However, your mind must maintain focus only on the number you are at – nothing else. So as you count one, that is what you focus on. As you count two, that is what you focus on, and so on. If you count two but think about what to cook for dinner, then start counting at one again. The aim is to increase your ability to maintain focus, which is what meditation is.

Well, I couldn’t even count to one without losing focus when I first tried to do this! That made me giggle. With practice and patience, I gradually increased my counting! This was a great technique for me as it gave my excessively busy mind something to do. Asking my mind to ‘empty all thoughts’ or to just ‘BE’, were concepts still too far from reality at the time.”