Readers, please enjoy this guest blog post by Catherine Dowling, author of Radical Awareness. Compassion flows from spiritual experiences. When our awareness expands into the realm of spirit and we experience union with life/the universe, we can feel bathed and held in unconditional love. That love is unconditional because criticism has given way to compassion. And it feels amazing. It can be hard to sustain that level of self-compassion in daily life. We can become accustomed to thinking that being stern and self-critical will make us perform better, achieve more, even be better people. Sometimes we think a good dose of self-criticism will make us kinder to others. The opposite is