One thing that helped me a great deal in the early days of my teaching was to reflect that the Buddha, even though he was perfect got blamed. So even if I was perfect as a teacher I would still get blamed. That was very interesting for me. It helped me direct my efforts towards having a good intention and not being concerned about the result. Just doing the best that I could with the best of intentions.
This is how we can deal with most blame in our life. If we get blamed rather than just letting the ego get hurt by it, we can investigate, "Ok, what are they blaming me for?" If we did an action and someone blames us, we can look at the action, look and see, "Oh, with what intention did I do this action?" If we investigate and see that our action was based in a good intention, then we can feel happy with that good intention. If we investigate and we see that we did it with a good intention, but we had some ignorance in the mind and we could learn from this blame, then we see it is an opportunity to learn, especially to develop in wisdom. It is an opportunity for us, to develop the Wisdom Parami. Especially if we use the Four Noble Truths.
This is what Steve and I do a lot in any difficulties that arise, we look into the Four Noble Truths, it is very practical. We look into the Dukkha, try to see how it came to be, and try to see how we can avoid it in the future. We bring up the effort to prevent, the effort to prevent difficulties. So blame is an opportunity, it is an opportunity to develop more wisdom.
If we investigate into our actions and see we that we had both wisdom and right intention guiding our actions, then we do not have to take the blame personally, we can reflect on Kamma, they are the owner of their own blame. We don't have to take it, a gift, we can refuse a gift. And we can see it as an opportunity to develop more equanimity - another Parami, these are all opportunities! Rather than seeing it as Dukkha, we can see it as an opportunity, a wonderful way to transform something that most people don't like to have - blame.
And then we can reflect, "Actually it is safer than praise..." - Oh, what do I mean by that?
You know when we get praised it is a very nice feeling and so we can get really high on this feeling and then we want it again. But, if we don't know how it came to be, we may be just longing for it and not sowing the causes for it to come again. If we just soak in the pleasant feeling, we are not investigating and seeing whether our actions were worthy of praise or not. If a person praises us when we have done an unskillful action it is very dangerous, because we may want to get more praise and we do the unskillful action again, and we make more bad Kamma for ourselves. So actually praise can be dangerous if we don't use it wisely.
If we investigate into the praise and see that it was deserved, that we had a good intention and we had Wisdom, then we can use it as Sympathetic Joy, "Oh wonderful a person recognizes what is worthy of praise." We can feel happiness for them and we can have Sympathetic Joy for ourselves. And if they praise us for something that the Buddha helped us understand, then we can pass it on to the Buddha, and that keeps us safe, "I wouldn't receive this praise if it wasn't for the Buddha."
This is true for all the 8 worldly dhammas, they are very dangerous unless we learn how to use our wisdom to investigate into them wisely. Praise and blame, gain and loss, pleasure and pain, fame and obscurity. Most people develop a good self-image on receiving praise, gain, pleasure and fame, and base their negative self-image on meeting with the other four. But many of these things are beyond our power to control. So it is much more important to learn how to investigate into our own intentions and do things from a compassionate intention.