Alive, Useful, Sacred… As Is

Hello.

Are you in the midst of one of those funky, changing times when your inner world is letting go of what you thought you knew?

Maybe your body is changing—aging, living with chronic or terminal illness, or carrying the aftereffects of injury.

Maybe your relationships are changing. Some need repair. Some are falling away. Some feel as though they might.

Maybe there are moments when you question your worth, wonder where you belong, or ask yourself whether you are still useful—to another person, to your community, to life.

The word useful makes me think of A. A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh stories and an old pot that, though no longer particularly beautiful or perfect, could still be a very useful pot.

I love that image.

I think we are all useful pots.

We get cracked and scratched. Our finish wears thin. Sometimes pieces of what we once thought defined us fall away altogether.

And still, here we are.

Our usefulness does not come from being flawless. It comes from our willingness to be alive and present—to notice where something is needed, whether that need belongs to another person or to ourselves.

Perhaps that makes us sacredly useful.

My name is Anisha Zo. If you knew me ten or fifteen years ago, you knew me as Kerry Ryan.

I worked in Boise, Idaho, as an evidential medium and Soul Support guide.

My son Kevin had died by suicide. I was living inside profound grief, and somehow, being present with other people in the great challenges of being human became part of my own healing.

I am still healing.

I suspect I always will be.

So will my family.

Our lives are not only about Kevin’s death. And yet his death continues to live within our family because we loved him. Our lives were bonded with his. When someone we love dies, the entire shape of our world changes.

This is part of why I have come to understand every human life as important.

Each of us participates in the whole.

When someone leaves physical life, something changes for everyone whose life was intertwined with theirs. The family reshapes. Relationships reshape. We reshape.

In my own understanding and experience, the person we love has not become nothing. Physical form has ended, but love, consciousness, memory, relationship, and what I understand as soul continue in ways I have spent many years exploring.

And meanwhile, those of us who remain are still here—trying to learn how to live.

After eleven years away from private practice, much of that time spent raising my grandson and tending to what life asked of me, I have reopened my work.

My grandson is becoming increasingly independent.

My husband of forty years—always one of my closest friends—and I are separated, each of us finding our way through a new season of life.

My body is aging. My appearance is changing. An old neuromuscular condition recently flared, and sometimes I walk with a cane or another mobility aid.

And I continue learning who I am.

I am learning how to be healthier in my relationships and, perhaps most importantly, how to have a healthy relationship with myself.

I am learning that when I am in a good place with me, I am more available to everyone and everything around me.

I become a pretty useful pot.

Not because the cracks disappeared.

Because I stopped believing they made me useless.

Soul Support, As Is

My work is still about connection.

I tune into what I experience as the wider field of consciousness and creation, while helping you tune more deeply into the field within yourself.

Sometimes that may include connection with loved ones in Spirit.

Sometimes soul guides.

Sometimes what you experience as your highest or deepest self.

But increasingly, I understand my role as helping you recognize the wisdom already moving within you.

My job is not to know your life better than you do.

My job is to be present with you.

To listen.

To help you settle.

To help you notice your intuition, your inner knowing, your relationship with yourself, and your relationship with the mystery and consciousness of life.

I may perceive something that helps illuminate the path.

But you are the one living your life.

And your soul belongs to you.

Spiritual and Human

I no longer see spirituality as something that lifts us above our humanity.

I believe it is woven directly through it.

As long as we are living in these bodies, we are having a human experience.

We hurt.

We get confused.

We love people and sometimes disappoint them.

We become sick.

We age.

We lose people.

We make mistakes.

We repair what we can.

We laugh unexpectedly.

We fall in love.

We change our minds.

We become people we never expected to become.

And through all of it, we remain what I understand as spiritual beings experiencing physical life.

I believe that when physical life eventually ends, consciousness continues and we carry something of this life—our knowing, our love, our experience—into another form of existence.

But we are not there yet.

We are here.

And here matters.

This body matters.

This strange chapter matters.

This imperfect relationship matters.

This ordinary Tuesday matters.

This unfinished version of you matters.

You do not need to become healed, younger, thinner, stronger, more successful, more enlightened, or more certain before your life becomes sacred.

You are alive.

You are here.

You belong.

And you have something to bring to this life exactly as you are today.

Perhaps tomorrow you will change.

I hope you do.

I hope I do too.

But growth does not have to begin with rejecting who we are.

Maybe it can begin here:

This is me.
As is.
Alive.
Sacred.
Still becoming.
And still wonderfully, imperfectly useful.