People who are afraid of blame need to strengthen their understanding of wise principles so they know how to judge their sense of self-worth, because fear of blame, not wanting a bad picture of ourselves, allows others to be in charge of our worth. It allows others to tell us whether we are worthy, whether we are a good person, whether we are a bad person, and this leaves us very, very vulnerable to under-confidence without an inner refuge and direction in our life. There are many people who like different things, and if we are always just afraid of people's blame and the unpleasant feeling that arises from it, then we really don't know where we are going in this life, we don't have a sense of refuge or inner direction, a way to judge good or bad or worthy or unworthy. It is very important for people who are trying to develop themselves to understand what is worthy of blame and what is not, what is skillful and what is not, etc.
So how do we do this? Since we have the Noble Eightfold Path leading out of suffering, we have something to refer our investigation to. When we get blamed instead of just reacting from our past conditioning, we try to remember to use our wise contemplation to see what is it they are blaming us for. Are they are blaming us for a certain action? We can look at our intention, what intention did we have to do that action? Was it was skillful or not? If we see that it was a good intention, then we can feel okay that we had a good intention. If we see that we lacked a bit of wisdom there, then we can see blame as an opportunity, rather then judge ourselves at that moment. This is an opportunity to gain more wisdom so we can prevent unbeneficial things in the future. We need to have a certain confidence in the person who blames us, too, because if a person is blaming us and we are not sure about their direction, we have to be careful to not just accept their blame.
We may want to seek out a spiritual friend to see what their opinions are. As we understand more, we can then maybe judge our own right or wrong view. If we see that we had a good intention and we had Right View, then we can leave the blame with the person who is blaming us. They don't have to define our worth or our actions. It is up for us to protect our own Kamma and to protect our own direction, our inner direction. To have Equanimity towards blame, we need to have some sort of inner direction and principles to refer ourselves to. Because if we do a good intention and we have a Right View, there is a possibility to make good Kamma from this action. But if a person blames, you there is a danger that you may stop doing good actions based in compassion, just because people blame you. They may not know your intentions, they may not know the reasons why you are doing it, it may be different or strange to them and therefore they blame you. But the action may not be worthy of blame.
In order to have confidence in ourselves, we need to reflect on our good actions, our good Kamma, so that we don't automatically believe that we are going to be wrong in everything. However if we do get blame and we look and see our intention was not very skillful, perhaps selfish, then actually that blame can help us to prevent doing more unbeneficial Kamma in the future. Instead of forming a negative self-image of ourselves, we can try to look and see the intention that we had was unskillful. Perhaps we investigate into how that came to be, perhaps we didn't have a right understanding, we lacked wisdom at that time, we were overcome by some hindrance at that time and we can try not to freeze ourselves in that moment. I don't know anybody in this world who has never made a mistake.
So learning how to have compassion for ourselves and learning how to forgive ourselves for having made a mistake is very helpful. This is so we don't form a solid image of ourselves as being incapable of knowing anything. It is not the case that because we made a mistake, therefore we are a bad person. We are just human, and we have the opportunity to correct that mistake at that moment by accepting responsibility, seeing how it came to be, seeing perhaps the wrong view, the wrong intention, having compassion for that person who made it and making a determination to try again to be careful in these situations in the future.
So blame itself is not the source of suffering, and it doesn't have to be totally the criteria where we judge ourselves worthy or unworthy, because, you know, if you are afraid of blame it may prevent you from fulfilling your human potential, through fear of making a mistake, through fear of people not liking us, and so we don't fulfill our potential, because we are afraid of doing anything. Anybody who tries to do good in this world is going to get blamed, even the Buddha got blamed. So we don't want to just hide out in obscurity because we are afraid of blame, we want to fulfill our potential, we want to fulfill our capability and we want to develop our Paramis. So overcoming the fear of blame, how you do that? You overcome you fear of blame by increasing your compassion for yourself and for others, so that you will be inspired to do beneficial things, even if other people may blame that.