Never blame or seek praise, take 100% responsibility for your own mind

The blame game

Over twenty years ago when I started asking deeper questions about the meaning of life, I came across some spiritual teachings including Buddhism which I later embraced due to its rational, logical and undogmatic focus on practice and personal experience. I began reading as much as I could and later started studying it in a more directed way.

 

I always felt a general affinity with the essence of spiritual teachings that had some core ethical truth to them no matter where they came from. One of the hardest teachings to swallow was the one about not blaming others, and I'm quite a forgiving person. Lao Tzu of the Tao Te Ching states:

 

"Failure is an opportunity.

 If you blame someone else,

There is no end to the blame.

Therefore the Master

fulfills her own obligations

and corrects her own mistakes.

She does what she needs to do

and demands nothing of others.”

 

The following teaching originates from the Buddha himself:

 

"He abused me, he beat me, he defeated me, he robbed me", in those who harbour such thoughts hatred is not appeased.

 

"He abused me, he beat me, he defeated me, he robbed me", in those who do not harbour such thoughts hatred is appeased.

Hatreds never cease through hatred in this world; through love alone they cease. This is an eternal law.

 

Why would spiritual teachings be so concerned about the issues with being blame oriented? From the moment we are able to put out our hand and grab something, we are the expression of desire, of wants and dislikes. We will spend almost our entire life in the pursuit of these and what we believe will make us happy, or more accurately bring us pleasure and security.

 

Therefore, life is full of expectations and it’s guaranteed that they will not always be met.

When we don’t get what we want, there’s usually a reaction. No one likes the feeling of desires not being realised, of not being in control of their lives, feeling disempowered in some way. The unpleasant truth is that life will never stop disappointing us, taking from us what we desire, causing us hardship and pain.

 

Our usual response is to lash out, to blame someone or something, a group of people, the government, the price of oil, an entire country, you name it. There’s literally an inexhaustible supply of targets for us to unload our disappointment on. It’s understandable, the energy of anger can feel much more affirming and empowering than the despair or helplessness of missing out. Unfortunately, anger can also bring with it reactive and skewed thinking which doesn’t help one bit.

 

And why not blame people or conditions for our hardship? It seems reasonable right? Some people are to blame. There’s a lot of sub-par behavior out there, people who have no problem screwing others over to fulfil their own desires, some even enjoy it!.

 

Some have the power to affect the lives of thousands, even millions of people, those at the top of the food chain that have all the money and power. Aren’t they blameworthy, shouldn’t they be held accountable? Blame does have its place in regulating societal behavior, something we need as human beings living in community with each other. So what is the problem with blame?

 

The principle of not getting involved in blaming is about freeing oneself up from the complexity of negative thinking and emotions that come with it, and the attachment to what has caused the sense of loss.

 

If we aren’t able to calmly and clearly assess the truth of a situation, it means our ego is involved in some way and being triggered by our desire and attachment to outcomes. If we succumb to habitually offloading our sense of loss and pain to external parties or situations, we are giving our power away. We are saying ‘you have the power to disrupt my inner peace and I allow that’.

 

Letting others' actions have an effect upon us is allowing them to ‘live in our head rent free’, instead of controlling our reactions and addressing the situation, being affirmative and positively action oriented. This may not feel like a choice, but it is.

 

We can decide if we want a situation to colour our experience or not. Either be a passive victim of the circumstances that are unfolding or be a positive, action orientated affirmative part of the solution, you choose. It’s not easy at first, but with awareness and training it becomes second nature. Letting go of blame is releasing oneself from victimhood, and being proactive in its stead.

 

Our reactions to receiving blame is usually related to our own insecurities. It’s why we get so defensive when receiving painful feedback, when we’re being made to acknowledge that we’ve come up short. We don’t like to think that we harm others or don’t measure up, it can strongly challenge our self-view.

 

Most likely we’ll completely dismiss what people are saying and assure ourselves of our innocence or apparently justified reasons for our actions. It shows us that our sense of self is heavily reliant on the commentary of others, rather than trusting in getting to the facts and truth, an overall awareness of the situation, even if that reveals our fault in the matter. 

 

Part of being blame oriented also means that we can habitually pass the buck and fault find when things aren’t going our way. It creates a permanent idea that we are never to blame or responsible for anything that happens in our life that we don’t like, it’s always someone else’s fault.

 

This mindset is usually coupled with taking the credit for all the things that go right. It’s a pathological failure to take any responsibility whatsoever. This is a terrible state of existence and means that one is almost constantly disappointed and without a sense of personal empowerment and responsibility, it won’t change.  

 

If we can start to cultivate a sense of strength and comfort with the truth, a heroic attitude towards both blaming and receiving it, we immediately experience greater freedom of self. Desire for truth means we don’t just immediately dismiss critical feedback and get defensive.

 

We can be genuinely open minded and really listen to what’s being said. Is there something in the feedback? Can we learn something from this situation? If we start owning up, we can move forward and see things in a clearer light, without being invested in a certain outcome.

 

Praise versus self confidence

Why wouldn’t we want to receive praise? It’s nice, it’s affirming, it lets us know we're doing the right thing, that we’re on the right track. It also helps our self image, we feel better about ourselves when we receive compliments. It tells us when we’ve been helpful, that our work is good, that we're making a good account of ourselves.

 

Not seeking praise is not so much about rejecting praise, but not relying on it, seeking and needing it to shore up your sense of self. If we do that, we give our power away. If we are reliant on praise to inform our self worth, when the praise stops or doesn’t come at all, where will we be?

 

Relying on the comments and views of others to give us a sense of self, instead of being confident within oneself, trusting in our own goodness and qualities, our values and integrity, gives our power over to external conditions. Being reliant on praise can also make us particularly vulnerable to unscrupulous people who use compliments and praise to manipulate and control others.

 

A healthy sense of self and being attuned to the benefits of honesty can mean we’re conscious and confident of our strengths in a grounded way, and matter of fact about our shortcomings. This is a healthy balanced way to be and it means that we won’t be thrown by either praise or criticism, especially if it’s baseless. We can be calmly aware of its veracity and then wholeheartedly accept it without being reliant on it or attached to it.

 

Another vulnerability in relation to praise is when we have high praise for others. There is nothing wrong with admiring people who inspire us with their positive qualities or success in life, the problem arises when we put them on a pedestal and idealise them. We see them as perfect or flawless, ignoring anything to the contrary. This is a fantasy view, it’s a delusion we unconsciously create to fulfill some sort of emotional lack in ourselves. You can see where this is going right?

 

The moment this person doesn't live up to our delusional fantasy, we come crashing down. Yet again, this highlights the point of establishing our own healthy sense of self, relying on our own positively cultivated inner life with honesty, awareness and goodness. 

The freedom of responsibility

 

Letting go of the need to blame and receive praise is about deciding to take full ownership of our life, to take complete responsibility for our own mind. This is a transformative reorientation of our views and value system. It is one of the fundamental principles behind the life of personal evolution, practice and all the principles discussed on this website.

 

When we take this on fully, there’s a profound freedom that arises. Now that we accept full personal responsibility for our experience of reality, we know that we are the problem and the solution. There are no more obstacles to clear and definitive action, all doubt has been removed and in its place is a rigorous desire to do whatever needs to be done to transform our mind, actions, thinking and emotional responses.