It was last winter when I got a call from a lady with a really deep voice. I could read from her voice that she was in some deep pain. She wanted to know if I work with Autistic children. It felt that she had called me with a lot of hope and I got compelled to ask her to come and see me at my center at once.

We met and discussed her daughter Raaya (name changed), who was then 7 years old, suffering from Autism and had been undergoing various therapies including Occupational Therapy, Speech Therapy etc. Few of her concerns were –

  • She had a fear of loud noise. Everything right from the honking of car horns to the whistle of the pressure cooker, would make her mad and put her in a panic state. As a result, her parents had completely stopped taking her out anywhere.
  • She used to show no attachment towards any of her parents, which was something really upsetting especially for her mom
  • She used to push everybody in the house with so much force that even fully grown adults like her dad and granddad used to fall down and get hurt badly
  • She used to look around in her house as if staring at some invisible entities and scream at that and often hit family members in irritation
  • She sometimes used to hit herself against the wall or hit herself in her ear

It was indeed one of the toughest cases of my life. No, not because of the concerns above, but because the girl was too small for a Hypnotherapy session.

I still decided to go ahead with the treatment. However, instead of conducting the sessions on the girl, I decided to conduct the sessions on her mother, because I believe that the child’s subconscious mind is always connected to their mother’s subconscious mind.

After the first session itself, her fear of sound went away which was a great success and very motivating for us. With full faith in the process we further conducted more sessions and after every session, we observed positive changes and improvements.

She started framing sentences, showing attachment towards her mother, stopped pushing family members and even stopped shouting at invisible entities to a great extent.

It was such an emotional moment for me when her mom baked a cake specially for me as a gesture of thanks and brought it as a surprise. Yes, what other reason could it be that her daughter cuddling her for the first time in her arms and saying “Mumma, please don’t go anywhere, stay with me”.

It just so happened, that another client who was visiting me for his sessions during those days, happened to be a movie maker and expressed that he wants to make a movie for a good cause.

Immediately I realized that Raaya’s case would definitely create a lot of awareness and give a hope to the parents of such special children that there is one more parallel line of treatment which they may consider. They should just not hesitate from asking for help, as no one knows what may just turn out to be helpful.

With this intention, I decided that I am going to pen down Raaya’s story, with full faith in the universe. My only intention through this endeavor was to be able to reach out to the masses and open another door in their lives for the light to enter, show them that there is another very effective way of treatment for their children, which they can consider.

After taking permission from Raaya’s parents, I wrote a story based on her case and titled it as “Raaya” and shared it with that client.

He liked the story so much that he immediately started working on the project. The movie was shot in Mumbai and after a lot of iterations, it was finally ready and we decided to send it to various film festivals.

It was such a happy moment for me to know that it was selected at 3 International Film Festivals – LA, Romania and now Cannes.  

It is a moment of pride and it makes me all the more confident of the fact that if you start anything with the best intentions, you always succeed. Yes, here I succeeded in making a difference.