This weekend I watched a documentary about Eric Dane, and I did not expect it to undo me.

What moved me was not only the ALS diagnosis, nor simply the fragility of life, but the stripping away I felt beneath it. There was a softness there, a clarity, a presence that felt closer to essence than identity. It was as if the layers we spend decades building, layers of achievement, persona, control, and image, had thinned, leaving something unguarded and raw.

It felt like witnessing an awakening in real time, not packaged or explained, not wrapped in spiritual language, but simply honest.

It broke my heart open, because I realized that most people never reach that place. Life simply consumes them before they have the chance.

The noise, the striving, the endless proving, the quiet voice that tells us we are not enough. We build entire identities trying to outrun that voice. We chase prestige, validation, and safety, believing they are the answer, only to find ourselves entangled in illusion.

Sometimes it takes something existential for that illusion to loosen its grip.

Watching him, I did not just see illness. It felt as though he was carrying a simple but profound message: remember who you are, live here and now, stop believing the voice that tells you you are not good enough, fall in love with your purpose and your gifts and give yourself to them, get up again and again.

For me, it felt like clarity distilled.

And it brought me back to my own crossing, when parts of me had to die through illness, through loss, through the collapse of identities and the conditioned stories I thought defined me.

When those layers fell away, I did not disappear. I remembered who I was. In that raw place, my purpose became undeniable.

That is where NEH was born.

The last three letters of my name, meaning nose and rebirth, as though my purpose had been encoded in me all along.

My greatest gift was never something I had to invent. I only had to awaken to it, remember it, and trust myself enough to embody it.

And what I have realized since is that our purpose is not something we find outside of ourselves. It is not a title, a milestone, or a role we perform, but who we are when everything false falls away. It is our authentic self, stripped of what we are not.

The Altered States collection is a tribute to that threshold – the moment when ego softens and spirit becomes accessible, when the noise quiets enough for your gifts to surface and purpose stops being something you chase and becomes something you recognize.

Scent has always been my language.

But it was only when I stepped fully into that gift that I began to use it to reveal other parts of myself that had long been waiting to emerge.

Fragrance has the ability to bypass performance. It moves faster than thought, reaching memory, emotion, essence. Before we have time to construct who we think we should be, scent brings us back to who we are. Each creation is not just something you wear, but something you embody. A portal back to yourself.

What feels most important to say is this:

We do not have to wait for life to force us awake. We do not have to face mortality to remember who we are. We can soften in small moments. We can practice presence. We can build language for our inner world and choose grace, integrity, and dignity before life forces our hand.

For me, it is no longer about simply being alive.

It is about learning how to live: how to find unconditional love before we lose it, how to remember who we are before we lose ourselves in the noise, how to stand in our essence without needing to be stripped down to reach it.

When we remember that version of ourselves, something shifts. We step into our highest frequency – not the loudest or most impressive version of ourselves, but the most aligned. We begin to lead from the heart instead of from fear, from integrity instead of insecurity, from wholeness instead of lack.

And that changes everything.

Because when we are whole, we do not take from the world to fill ourselves; we contribute to it. When we are aligned, we no longer chase external validation but create from truth. The truth is that we are not separate from the whole; we are part of it. When one person remembers who they are, something in the field shifts, and it is felt by all of us.

Maybe that is why I cried.

Not out of fear, but out of recognition — recognition of how fragile all of this is, how easily we postpone ourselves, how much is available to us now if we are willing to look within and be honest.

I do not want to wait for life to corner me into presence. I want to practice it willingly.

And if watching him stirred something in you too, perhaps it is not just sadness.

Perhaps it is remembering.

And perhaps that remembering is the invitation: not to fear the end, but to live fully, honestly, and awake now.

With love, always,
Taraneh

When we access our light, more light is created.