Equally fear favor and disgrace.
Regard a great calamity as you do your own body.
What is meant by "Equally fear favor and disgrace?" Favor should be disparaged. Gained or lost it arouses apprehension. Hence it is said "Equally fear favor and disgrace."
What is meant by "Regard a great calamity as you do your own body?" Why have I any sense of misfortune? Because I am conscious of myself. Were I not conscious of my body, what distresses should I have?
Therefore, it is only they who value their persons because of their obligations, who may be entrusted with the empire. It is only they who love themselves on account of their responsibilities, who may be charged with the care of the state.
Translation: C. Spurgeon Medhurst, 1905 (public domain)
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Recall one piece of praise and one piece of criticism from this week. Can you feel how both knocked at the same door — and that you remain, unchanged underneath, now that each has passed?
A Practice
Tonight, write down one compliment and one slight from the day. Set them side by side, notice they touched the same place in you, then set the page down — and let yourself be the part that stays after both have faded.
The Path Beyond Favor and Fear: an adult storybook
A Guided Meditation
Read the transcript rolls with the audio
Take a moment to settle into a comfortable position.
Let your body soften.
Let your breath arrive just as it is.
There is nothing you need to change.
Nothing you need to fix.
Just begin by noticing the simple act of breathing.
Inhale…
and exhale…
slowly, gently, naturally.
Feel the weight of your body supported beneath you.
Feel the air around you.
Feel the quiet beginning to gather.
As you breathe, imagine you are standing in a wide, peaceful valley.
The air is soft.
The sky is open.
And you are safe here.
This valley has two winds.
One carries favor — praise, approval, admiration.
The other carries disgrace — criticism, judgment, misunderstanding.
Both winds move through the valley.
Both reach you.
Both touch your skin.
But here, in this meditation, you do not rise with one
and you do not fall with the other.
You simply stand.
Breathing.
Present.
Unmoved.
Let the wind of favor pass by you.
Feel how praise can lift you, excite you, pull you outward.
Notice how it creates a subtle tension —
a desire to hold onto it,
to keep it,
to protect it.
And now let it go.
Let the wind move past you without carrying you away.
Inhale…
exhale…
and return to yourself.
Now feel the wind of disgrace.
The moments when others misunderstand you,
criticize you,
or judge you.
Notice how this wind can make the body contract,
how it can create fear,
how it can make you doubt your own worth.
And now let this wind pass too.
Let it move around you without entering you.
Without defining you.
Both winds are simply movements of the world.
Neither is who you are.
As you breathe, imagine a soft light glowing in the center of your chest.
This is your inner steadiness.
Your quiet strength.
Your unshakable self.
With each breath, this light grows warmer.
Brighter.
More grounded.
Now bring your awareness to the idea of difficulty —
the challenges that rise in life,
the moments of uncertainty,
the worries about change or loss.
Notice how these experiences live in the body —
a tightening in the chest,
a heaviness in the stomach,
a subtle trembling in the limbs.
And gently, lovingly, breathe into those places.
Inhale…
exhale…
soften.
Difficulty feels frightening because we cling to our sense of self —
to our image,
our identity,
our expectations.
But in this valley, in this moment,
you are invited to loosen that grip.
Imagine your sense of self as a cloak resting on your shoulders.
You can wear it when you need it.
But you can also set it down.
Feel the lightness that comes when you stop protecting an image.
Feel the freedom that comes when you stop fearing its loss.
You are still here.
Still breathing.
Still whole.
Now, gently bring your attention to the idea of responsibility —
not the heavy kind,
not obligation born of pressure,
but the quiet responsibility that comes from love.
The responsibility to care for your own life
because your life touches others.
The responsibility to nurture your own heart
because your heart helps guide the world around you.
Feel how this kind of responsibility strengthens you.
How it roots you.
How it gives your life meaning without tying your worth to praise or blame.
Inhale…
exhale…
and let this sense of purpose settle into your body.
You are not defined by favor.
You are not diminished by disgrace.
You are not threatened by difficulty.
You are not limited by fear.
You are steady.
You are present.
You are whole.
Let the winds move around you.
Let the world shift and change.
Let praise come and go.
Let criticism come and go.
Let fear rise and fall.
And remain here —
in the quiet beneath the winds.
In the calm center of your being.
In the place where you return to yourself.
Take a final deep breath in…
and a long, gentle breath out.
Carry this steadiness with you.
Carry this softness.
Carry this clarity.
You are ready to return.
Western Commentary
The verse opens with something most of us feel constantly and rarely examine: that praise and criticism both land as a kind of shock. Favour lifts you; disgrace drops you; and the verse notices that you are jolted either way — startled to win it, startled to lose it — because in both cases your footing was never quite your own. Then Lao Tzu turns the question one layer deeper and asks where the whole trouble comes from. His answer is disarmingly plain: the reason I have such trouble is that I have a self to defend.
There is a part of most of us that runs a quiet, continuous scan for how we are landing with other people. It is not vanity, exactly; it is more like weather-sense. You send the message and re-read it once it is gone. A passing slight from someone whose opinion you would swear you do not care about lodges somewhere and hums for an afternoon. A bit of praise warms you more than it should, and then quietly raises the cost of the next moment that might take it away. None of this makes anyone shallow. It is just how much of our steadiness we have, without noticing, handed to the room to hold.
Set the praise and the criticism of this week side by side and something becomes visible: they knocked at the same door. The compliment and the slight both went looking for the same tender, managed place — the self that is forever being graded — and you are still here, underneath, now that each has come and gone. The verse is not asking you to stop caring what anyone thinks. It is offering the lightness that comes from holding the self a little less tightly, so that favour and disgrace can pass through you instead of rearranging you each time they visit.
It could be easy to mishear this as a call to erase yourself, to go cold or stop caring. The closing lines say the opposite. The one who can hold the whole world as gently as he holds his own person, the verse says, is exactly the one who can be trusted to care for it. Loosening the grip on the self is not the same as having none. It is what finally frees up the hands — for the world, and for the people in it.