Praise and Blame are All the Same

Another lesson I come back to again and again: Praise and Blame are all the same. They are both about other people’s opinions of you. The tricky part of this is giving up both sides of the equation. When someone criticizes us we can easily say, “Don’t give that any merit or energy, it’s their opinion.” But in order for that to be true and in order to change how much we depend on the opinion of others we must also give up attaching any merit or energy to their praise or good opinion also.

To be free of feeling rocked by criticism we must also let go of being inflated or soothed by other people’s praise.