This is a huge area: your reaction to other people’s praise and criticism, the respect or lack of respect they give you.

"So try to face the ways of the world with equanimity and not let yourself get sucked into the narratives or systems of values that people use to tie you in, to keep you going along with their view of the world. After all, they want to make sure that everyone around them shares the same values so that they can feel comfortable, so they don’t have to face the huge abyss inside their hearts, the huge emptiness, the huge void, when those values are exposed for what they are. Their way of avoiding that is to rest assured that everybody else believes the way they do, thinks the way they do, and acts the way they do. But you’re not performing them any service by playing along. They may not like it if you don’t play along, but they have to learn to accept that. Maybe they can learn from it. If they don’t learn from it, well, you can’t force them to learn. But you can’t allow their attitudes to run your life.

This is a huge area: your reaction to other people’s praise and criticism, the respect or lack of respect they give you. It’s so important that, as the Buddha said, one of the signs of a person who’s reached nibbana is that he or she doesn’t reverberate in response to criticism. He compares the awakened mind to a gong that’s been cracked. You hit the gong and there’s no sound. Or there may be little plunk, but it doesn’t reverberate, doesn’t continue ringing. The ability to train your mind so that it doesn’t keep ringing with the words of other people: That’s a really essential part of the practice."

~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "An Anthropologist from Mars"

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