Welcome to Day 20 of the 21-Day Consciousness Cleanse. To attain the inner and outer goals you identified on Day 1 of this process and to truly walk your soul's path, you must invoke today's agent of change, called compassion. Compassion is the key to living outside the confines of your lower self. Compassion is the healing agent that will support you every day in releasing the past and experiencing a calm and certainty born of kindness. Compassion doesn't say, "What can the world do for me?" but rather, "How can I serve the world?" It is the feeling you access when looking at the world through the eyes of the divine heart.

A compassionate heart will lift you out of the pain and suffering of your own world, because it knows that everyone is doing the best they can, given their state of consciousness and the histories they're dragging behind them. The divine heart knows that people don't decide at age 3 to grow up and be an abusive parent, a bullying neighbor or a mediocre couch potato, so it forgives easily. Compassion knows that choosing the higher road in any situation is the most loving option for you.

So when this agent of change is activated in your awareness, you are finally free to stop taking everything so personally and look beyond the myopic view of your individual self. Compassion enables you to reach to the heavens and look through the heart of God. What an astonishing view...and what a profound relief.

It is here that you will finally find the peace you are looking for. It is here that you will be free to surrender your judgments. And it is here that you will experience the liberation of your soul.

Cleansing Ritual

Identify a place where you've been hard on yourself. Looking through the eyes of compassion, what would you say to yourself? How could you be gentler with yourself in that area? Write it out and make a commitment to treat yourself like a million pounds of gold today. Then find one person to whom you could extend compassion and choose one compassionate act to take.

Soulful Action

Your Outer Goal: What compassionate act will bring you to the doorstep of your outer goal today? Is it for yourself or another? Take that action today.

Your Inner Goal: To what aspect of yourself could you bring compassion today that will allow the feeling you most want to experience this year to enter your consciousness?

Soul Food:
God's eyes are my eyes.

Debbie Ford is the national best-selling author of The Dark Side of the Light Chasers, The Secret of the Shadow, Spiritual Divorce, The Right Questions, The Best Year of Your Life and Why Good People Do Bad Things. Her new book is The 21-Day Consciousness Cleanse (Harper Collins). She conducts workshops across the country. She lives in California with her family.

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