Mind yours

It is how you treat those under your rule that tell real character. And the best way to treat them is by not treating them as underneath you. We deal with others the way in which we were dealt with. We may have forgotten the helplessness of childhood, the madness of adolescence: being under someone else's roof other than your parents, close family members with kids and needs of their own, in a different language, far removed from the place you called home. In time, you find that you will always be a stranger... to those you left behind and to the ones you've come assimilate. 

Selective acts of kindness will not leave you depleted. But the gesture won't go far, and it often goes unappreciated. To quiet your conscience, when hearing the shouting and turmoil desperate times call, do not answer your door, retrieve to that inner place where you're always a welcome guess. To come in your hour of need, or to go on unnoticed, unmoved, numb to all. Self-improvement has a dark side: it connotes the void we all carry within, it meddles, carved into our state of affairs like a fresh wound, a dizzy echo of a distant shock you feel like waves breaking against your body long after you left the ocean behind. A nagging entity, it stings like a mosquito bite. The mind, it reminisces over absurdities, the sense-making entity rushes in to pick up the pieces. In essence, when we look for help, we ignore the fact that the help we seek really lies within our reach and that a good therapist or voodoo man or witch or physician will not fix your mess. No roots, unless they spring from our core, will heal us now, no meds will cast th the illness away. any formative willing guide. Sleep will prove restorative, take advantage of it on a rainy day, take a nap, meditate to a higher state of being, cleanse the hurt with quietude and leisure. You can literally breath yourself back to sanity.

Self-improvement implies that we aren't enough somehow, that change is not only the order of the day but that it is a life commitment... basically, improving ourselves puts us face to face with the realization that something or someone in our life is lacking. And so, we go on searching for it. That someone/something is often revealed in the way we deal with ourselves. 
What is a void, if not the opportunity to fulfill that desire by denying yourself, self-reliance is the ability to withstand the passage of time without external stimuli? To grant the mind what it wants is to deny it; to be able to do without anything in our lives except the very essential, to not depend on any external substance or influence. Therefore, cutting off the proverbial umbilical cord to a meek dependency, or anything that seems either superfluous, unnecessary or simply ostentatious. It is how a character is built. 

It may be in the form of adventure, a love affair, a meeting of minds, taking on a path long forgotten or simply an unfulfilled task.  

It is harder to exercise compassion, even more, so temperance if you don't flex your muscle. Higher levels of testosterone will make us chase after all the things we fancy, or find worthy; in Tibet monks, acts of kindness. 
These are the qualities that come in short supply; in others, a lack of sorts is immediately recognized. Chairs should come with such warnings: Do not seat. Or sit a lot less and have a good reason for it: are you sitting after a long day of walking around? Are you writing while sitting? 
Meditating while you're sitting? And if so, maybe now it's a good time to, try closing your eyes, imagining your eyelids as heavy bricks that you can hardly lift. Focus on your breath as it enters and exits your body, the way it is held in, and exhale. Become your breath, as it travels within, imagine that it cleanses all inside, and exhale ever so slowly the waste. 
Pay attention to your cardiac rhythm as you slowly, deeply, gently breath in. Hold your breath in until discomfort sets in (everyone has their own limits: don't pass out holding your breath, hold it until it is comfortably to do so). Don't worry, we all have a built-in mechanism that prevents us from harming ourselves. Nature did not leave survival up to a meekly rational mechanism: you don't have to remember to breath; no one teaches an infant to reach out and suck on. You don't consciously choose to regulate your cardiac rhythm... but you can and should, perhaps as much as a must exercise, or even as essential as sleep... meditate. And I don't say that lightly.
Meditation, if done right, is the closest we'd ever get to witchcraft. It's mind-boggling that it isn't praised and taught everywhere, its praises sang at least as much as other less effective methods like religion, rivaling and surpassing those of medicine.
What if there were a drug with no side effects that simultaneously alleviated, even prevented, cases of cancer, depression, cardiovascular disease... to name a few of the big boys when it comes to humanity's most haunting predators. Heck, I've effectively used meditation for incurable ailments such as hangovers, heartache, constipation even.
It led me to blissful states, morphed right out of all the fears and stress of daily life. No matter how bad things get, out of all the funkiness life throws our way, we can make music. Finding the space between the notes is what differentiates melody from noise, and in time it is intuited that our personal shadows are nothing more than projections due to the light in our minds. Without light, there's no shadow, and brightness comes first. 

Sleeplessness, insomnia 

The reason why I have not spoken much in a while, is the same reason why I have not written much in a while: veneration of silence, not speaking more than you should. Of course, those around you may grow suspicious if you suddenly stop talking too much. Sure, you can talk and laugh and connect with others. But you never do so lively so as when you're mindful. People sense then that there's something going on. Have you lost weight? 

We're born with the same amount of fat cells we die with. You don't lose any fat cells.  They just shrink, go into remission, wait for a better time to make a comeback.

Now, a simple "Yeah, I have" will suffice. 

The less you say, the more you are. And so, it is not just about shutting up. It's not only about finding the strength to do so, but doing so because you already know the heights to which it soars. Nothing feels quite like disengaging from your inner voices and let turbulent waters settle. Nothing thrives on 

It's not such an easy task to untangle yourself from the world around and submerge into your own consciousness. 

Mind you: it is not that I spend an awful lot of time meditating, I always have; it's that now I am meditating, as I write, as I breathe... mindfully aware of the world around until it no longer revolves in its own egotistical axis and devolves into some backstage scenery that isn't [a part of]. 
We're adept at finding the way out of this thoroughfare and it lies within.