Transforming Our Experiences of Blame and Praise

In the previous post, I mentioned having a week in which I experienced instances of both blame and praise regarding myself and my work. There, I mentioned the fact that time spent in Nature helps facilitate the dissolving of these two seeming opposites into a vast spaciousness and seamless flow of Love.
However, I've discovered that there are other lessons to be learned as well from experiences of both blame and praise.

Whenever we experience blame, we have an opportunity both to learn from our mistakes (and take responsibility for them), AND to practice realizing that there actually exists NO separate self to shoulder the blame. Here, I find advice from the Dalai Lama incredibly helpful. "Guilt," he explains, "does not exist in Buddhist terminology. With the Buddha nature all negative things can be purified. Guilt is incompatible with our thinking as you are part of an action but not fully responsible for it. You are just part of the contributing factor." In other words, our mistake is part of a whole mosaic of mishaps, many of which have nothing to do with us. Here, we take responsibility for our part, and then let it lead us into the larger network of contributing causes to which it is connected. 

We can also use our experience of blame to practice compassion for others, especially when we realize that we are participating in the sense of self-hatred that is experienced by every other person on this Earth. When we work to heal our own instances of self-castigation, we are simultaneously helping heal a similar experience IN EVERYONE ELSE. From a theistic perspective, we are also given an opportunity to practice the maxim which states: "God writes straight with CROOKED lines." In other words, we begin to transform our mistake by looking for the amazing good that can come from it.

Similarly, with praise, we are invited to go deeper. Rather than getting hooked on the compliments we receive from others, we are invited instead to see them as a mere window or mirror through to a deeper sense of goodness that is much vaster than our own individual self. Here, I appreciate the term that Tibetan Rinpoche Chogyam Trungpa and his son Sakyong Mipham use: "basic goodness." They never refer to it as OUR basic goodness, as though it is a quality we can possess within our own individual self. Rather, it is a larger Reality - which they call "Buddha-Nature," or which a Christian might call "the Christ-self" - in which everything on Earth participates.
 

In this way, we can use both blame and praise to deepen our spiritual awareness and connect us to all other beings inhabiting this Earth.

Photos: (Top) A golden Cottonwood tree points us to the vast landscape beyond, with Greyrock looming on the horizon, Larimer County, CO, October 23, 2014; (Middle) A mosaic of ice patterns covers Lewis Lake, Snowy Range, WY, October 31, 2014;  (Bottom) Golden Cottonwoods are mirrored in Watson Lake, Bellvue, CO, October 28, 2014