Every client is a unique and complex individual, and Alaya takes special care to ensure their wellbeing is honored with tremendous skill, and countless client successes.  Alaya's interweaving of depth hypnosis with her extensive experience with Neuroscience creates a potent transformative process that goes directly to how and where the brain imprints.  In her processes, new neurons fire and wire together creating new neural pathways and new ways of being, new perceptions, new behaviors and new lives are formed.

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Alaya utilizes the knowledge that the visual cortex, the position of our eyes when we gaze, is directly linked and has a direct influence to our state of being. The visual cortex links to the midbrain where trauma is stored. by utilizing a technique called Brain Spotting and determining the key locations of a client's gaze when they feel specific emotions and somatic sensations, she can facilitate release of stored trauma without  the client having to reenact the trauma nor to risk becoming activated as a result.  This is a very powerful modality that a skilled practitioner such as Alaya can use, along with her other specialized expertise, to help a client's brain naturally self scan, file away presently not needed memories and other content, and there transform their life. 

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Brain Spotting is a natural, gentle and organic process that allows the client to access the middle brain or subcortical brain, and it's visual cortex where trauma is held as a frozen time capsule.  Brain Spotting directly accessing this midbrain location where the trauma is stored, unlike talking or conceptualizing that only connects with a part of the brain where trauma is not stored.  While for some clients talking may feel comforting at first, it actually can imprint trauma further as it never connects to the brain location where the trauma can be accessed and released. Brainspotting is said to heal even deeper levels of trauma that have been thought to be resolved through EMDR and Somatic Experiencing though reveal themselves to still be held at a greater depth.  It uses a form of interpersonal neurobiology.  There are over one trillion connections going on in the brain, and they must unfold within us.  The therapist listens, attunes and follows these connections as they naturally focus within the midbrain to find it's place of source, and are resolved with less activation and reaction.  With an empathic and expert ally in Alaya along with the neurobiology, together they create a frame for the individual brain's natural capacity to heal.  

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Brain Spotting stays within the client's window of tolerance, and Alaya often combines it with other modalities such as EMDR and Timeline Therapy.  Where one looks affects how one feels.  The goal is for permanent neural change and healing from the affects that trauma has on the brain's structure and filters.  It helps a system locate self scanning and locate, process and release the frozen trauma. It is highly successful and may continue over several sessions.  Brain Spotting can also be done with couples, each within their own process and then with a consensus spot.  As with all trauma techniques, only skilled, present and empathic therapists should be chosen for this work.  Alaya is one of those rare therapists who holds these qualities in highly refined ways creating the safety with great skill, presence and compassion for her clients to resolve trauma deeply and effectively without re-imprinting it.  The result is lasting change and healing. 

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Somatic Experiencing is another form of trauma release created by Master Somatic Therapist Peter Levine and his school in Boulder, CO. that reveals the body as the keeper of stored trauma.  This work is a great breakthrough in trauma treatment. This golden route serves to help people have experiences in the body that contradict those of overwhelming helplessness associated with trauma. Somatic Experiencing focuses on including and putting emphasis on the physiological aspects of trauma. Working with the trauma in this form emphasizes the fact that through the body is necessary to any trauma resolution, and a required step before addressing emotional and cognitive issues that can reinforce and even re-traumatize an individual.

 

Alaya has personally found this modality to be one effective form of Somatic work to transmute trauma that had accumulated in her own life along with others.  She uses an interweaving of several trauma release modalities according to what she discerns will be most effective for each individual client.  She creates a safe session space for her clients with her sensitivity, special care and refined expertise, as well as her awareness of the timing that is required when working to this depth.  Working to heal trauma emotionally and in body-centered awareness is the best form to not reinforce and re-traumatize an individual who is seeking relief and healing from trauma.  

 

Below is more research and information on Somatic approaches to healing trauma.
As described by Peter Levine:

The systems that are associated with trauma are orchestrated by the primitive structures in our brainstem—the upper part of the brainstem. They’re instinctive and they’re almost reflexive. The tonic immobility is the most primitive system, and it spans probably over 500 million years. It is a combination of freezing and collapsing—the muscles go limp, the person is left without any energy. The next in evolutionary development is the sympathetic nervous system, the fight-or-flight response. And this system evolved from the reptilian period, which was about 300 million years ago. Its function is enhanced action, fight-or-flight. The third and most recent system is the social engagement system, and this occurs only in mammals. Its purpose is to drive social engagement—making friends—in order to defuse the aggression or tension.

 

More Information About Held Trauma:
Bessel van der Kolk showed when he first started to do trauma research with functional MRIs is that when people are in the trauma state; they actually shut down the frontal parts of their brain and particularly the area on the left cortex called Broca’s area, which is responsible for speech. When the person is in the traumatic state, those brain regions are literally shut down; they’re taken offline. When the therapist encourages the client to talk about their trauma, asking questions such as, “Okay, so this is what happened to you. Now, let’s talk about it,” or, “What are you feeling about that?” The client tries to talk about it. And if they try to talk about it, they become more activated. Their brainstem and limbic system go into a hyper-aroused state, which in turns shuts down Broca’s area so they really can’t express in words what’s going on. They feel more frustrated. Sometimes the therapist is pushing them more and more into the frustration. Eventually the person may have some kind of catharsis, but that kind of catharsis is due frequently to being overloaded and not being able to talk about it, being extremely frustrated. So in a sense, trauma precludes rationality.

 

All of this activation, this “energy” becomes locked in the body when one feels they must get out of a situation and get back to where one could be protected. So what happens is all of this activation, this “energy” that becomes locked into the body when one is overwhelmed, is still there in a latent form. When we’re overwhelmed like that, the energy just doesn’t go away—it gets locked very deeply in the body. It is essential to release that energy in a safe space, and also to re-channel that energy into an active response so then the body has a response of power of its own capacity to regulate, and the person comes out of this shutdown state into a process in which they re-own their own vital energy—as in the term “life energy.” It’s not generally used in psychology but it’s a term that is profound in people’s health, that people feel that they have the energy to live their life fully, and that they have the capacity to direct this energy in powerful and productive ways.
(“Why Self Regulation is the Most Important Thing in the World.” - 
https://www.goodtherapy.org/blog/why-self-regulation-is-most-important-thing-in-world-0807175 )