Praise and blame, and fear of praise and blame and the Dukkha arising from fear of praise and blame. We need to understand that praise and blame are not happiness or suffering in themselves. Often we think that praise is happiness, and blame is Dukkha. But that is not correct. It is our reaction to praise and blame that determines whether it is happiness or Dukkha.
We need to have a wise reaction to these, otherwise we will be left in fear of receiving them. Praise in itself can't give us happiness; blame in itself doesn't mean that we necessarily have Dukkha. So in order to let go of fear, we have to understand what our intentions are for doing something. If we are not clear about our intentions, then we don't know whether we should accept another persons' opinion on us, whether it is deserved or undeserved, whether it is useful or not useful.
The Buddha said that Kamma is intention, so if we have a good intention to do something, and someone praises us, then we can look at our intention and see, "ah, the praise is deserved". Hopefully we will be able to have Sympathetic Joy with ourselves and also joy with the person who praises us, realizing they have the capacity to see beneficial things and take joy with them. However if we just get praised and we don't look at our intention and understand it's deserving, the pleasant feeling of praise may cause us to continually seek that praise from others and find our happiness in other people's attention. It can be dangerous, to not look at our intentions. Someone might praise you for doing something unbeneficial, and if you get attached to the pleasant feelings of praise in this instance, then you could repeat the unbeneficial action, thus making more negative Kamma for yourself.
So praise is dangerous if you don't have Wisdom.
Now consider blame. If you had a good intention and someone blames you, that is also dangerous. How is it dangerous? Well, you are doing a good thing, you had wisdom, you investigate and you see that the blame is undeserved and you can just leave the blame with them and say, "that is their Kamma". Right? Because people may blame beneficial things. But if you don't have this wisdom and you don't see that your action was skillful and based in a good intention, then the blame may cause you to stop doing beneficial things and making good Kamma for yourself.
So blame is dangerous in that way.
Rather than fearing praise and blame, we can try to use our Compassionate Understanding to investigate into praise and blame to see whether they are deserved or undeserved. By investigating in this way, we can get beyond fearing other people's opinions, because many people have lots of opinions about a lot of things. We have to decide what is skillful to ourselves and what we wish to do and how we wish to live. So it is very helpful to have some idea of what are correct and incorrect principles, so that we have no fear of what other people think of us. People can make mistakes, so if a person blames us unjustly, we can try to have compassion for them, they are making a mistake. We can use a type of universalizing Compassion/Lovingkindness meditation, thinking about other people in the world who get blame unjustly, so that we can let go of the feeling that often comes from this type of blame.
Certainly the most powerful way to let go of fear of blame is to strengthen our compassion and wise intentions. By Strengthening our compassion and trying to have a reason for doing things based on compassion for ourselves and others, this can give us a lot of confidence that we are doing good actions. And if other people don't appreciate us or blame us for it, then they are the owner of their own Kamma. Learning how to reflect that each of us are the owner of our own Kamma, helps to bring more Equanimity. So again it is Wise Reflection and the development of the Brahma Viharas that help to let go of fear.