We use the word often. Awakening. It sounds mystical, elevated, almost dramatic. But awakening is not an escape from reality. It is a return to it.

To awaken is not to become someone new. It is to see clearly who you already are. It is the moment the story you have been telling yourself begins to loosen its grip. The identity built on performance, validation, achievement, and control starts to feel heavy. You begin to notice where you have been living on autopilot, where you have been shaping yourself to fit rooms that were never meant to hold you.

Much of what we call identity is unconscious patterning, the need to be liked, the instinct to avoid shame, the reflex to perform in order to belong. Over time, these strategies disconnect us from our own internal signals. Awakening begins when we notice that split.

Awakening is radical honesty. It is the quiet recognition that something is misaligned, even if everything appears successful from the outside. 

It is not always beautiful. Often it feels like loss. Like the unraveling of who you thought you had to be. But what dissolves in that process is not your essence. It is the layers that obscured it.

Most people avoid awakening because it asks for courage. It disrupts comfort. It threatens identities built over decades. It reveals where we have abandoned ourselves in order to belong. It requires us to see clearly, and clarity can be confronting.

It is easier to stay busy. To stay distracted. To chase the next milestone, the next validation, the next achievement. The noise becomes familiar. The striving becomes a shield. The voice that says “not enough” becomes part of the background. Life continues in loops, until something forces a reckoning.

But awakening does not have to arrive through devastation. It can be practiced.

It is built in small, quiet moments of choosing differently. When you pause instead of reacting. When you tell the truth instead of performing the answer you think is expected. When you set a boundary that once felt impossible. When you sit in stillness long enough to hear your own voice again.

Awakening is not a single event. It is a practice of returning to yourself.

The Altered States refer to a shift in perception, a movement from our ordinary mental patterns into deeper awareness and connection with ourselves and the world around us. In this context, awakening is not about escape. It is about access. Access to the parts of us that exist beneath conditioning and performance. Access to clarity. To coherence. To remembrance.

Ritual transforms ordinary moments into intentional practice. When approached consciously, even something as simple as applying scent can become a return to presence. It becomes a pause. A breath. A reminder.

At NEH, we believe the most important journey is the one from the head back to the heart.

Fragrance moves faster than thought. It bypasses narrative and reaches memory, emotion, and the body before the mind has time to construct identity. It speaks directly to the subconscious, the layer where patterns live, where associations are formed, where much of our behavior quietly begins.

Sound works similarly. Frequency helps the nervous system settle into a new rhythm., shifting state without force. In that softened state, affirmations begin to imprint differently – not as something to perform, but as an internal truth remembered.

This is the portal.

The Altered States Collection was created as a support for that return — not to create something new within you, but to help you access what has always been there.

And when you begin to live from that place, your life shifts. Not because everything becomes easy, but because everything becomes honest. Decisions clarify. Relationships align. Your nervous system softens because you are no longer splitting yourself to maintain illusion.

To awaken is to remember who you are beneath fear, beneath conditioning, beneath performance. It is to live with integrity before life forces you to. It is to choose presence not because you are cornered, but because you understand that this moment is fragile and precious.

Because awakening is not about becoming someone else.
It is about remembering who you are.

And sometimes, all we need is a portal back to ourselves.

Welcome in.