An excerpt from The Fix Your Depression Handbook.

Most of us strive to be happy loving people. Our tendency to look outside ourselves to find acceptance, safety, love, and completion can misdirect our energies, and have us searching for the pathway to meaning in our lives in places where it cannot exist. It is so important to understand that we were born with everything we need to be happy and complete people. We simply need to learn how to access our internal power, define it, and learn how to use it.

Human beings are physical, intellectual, emotional, and spiritual beings. True happiness cannot exist until we understand that everything we need, we already have. Becoming balanced internally should be our most important goal. This is where the whole human spirit operates in unison. It is where peace and pure love exist, and where the connection to the spirit inside us, that internal power source, can be realized.

Internal balance is a state where one’s physical, intellectual, emotional, and spiritual attributes exist in balance, when worldly desires are diminished, and internal peace is realized. It does not rely on external sources that tend to interfere with internal equilibrium. Its focus is to strengthen you from the inside, that is, to have your physical, intellectual, emotional, and spiritual attributes operating synergistically, and in balance.

Internal balance is a lifelong process. No one achieves balance in a short period of time. So, here is what you can do to get the process started. The first step in the process is to slow your life down enough so that you can think about what you arere doing. Put as much conscious thought as you can into everything you do..

The next step is to reduce the influence of your emotions. Emotions, especially when they interfering with your ability to think clearly, can throw your whole world out of balance. I teach a concept called I over E (intellect over emotion). You want your intellect to have its say first. This aids you in sound decision making, and information gathering. Both are necessary to live life efficiently, and to be happy while you are doing so. Express you emotions after your brain has put everything in perspective.

The next step is to purge yourself of those unnecessary items in your life. It doesn’t mean you can’t buy a few things or do a few things you want to do. It just means that your primary focus should be on external items you absolutely need. Try not to interpret your desires as needs. When you do, you move away from the internally balanced person you can be, and you are focusing on external items to make you happy.

The next step is “brutal” honesty. We all like to be honest, or at least we say we do. However, when that honesty interferes with our desires and our agendas, honesty can take a back seat very quickly. Internal balance demands honesty. In any situation, as soon as we lie, misdirect others or, are not honest with ourselves, we quickly move to a position of internal imbalance.

Now with honesty as a growth ally, you begin gathering the facts that are related to any situation in your life. The facts always help you to define a healthy life, and they will bring you to solutions that are efficient, and can bring peace into your life.

These processes are the cornerstone of the movement from internal imbalance to internal balance. They are employed in all life situations. Additional processes include understanding your life as a journey, living in the moment, life on life terms and the natural flow, change as a route to growth, understanding forgiveness, increasing wisdom by reducing arrogance, warm conflict resolution, being in service of others, reducing fear and anger, working with gratitude, humility, faith, and pure love, the final goal of internal balance.

It is important to understand that internal balance does not suggest and ascension into higher forms of balance. By this, I mean that on a scale of one to ten, your body can be balanced at a two or three, or it can be a seven or eight. That does not matter. There is no destination in the program. You do not arrive, and the work is done. It is a continuous journey where the only goal is that internally all attributes operate in balance, which paves the way for pure spiritual love. It’s a loving life journey that never ends.

When you achieve internal balance, your world seems complete, external desires are reduced, and you are creating a world that is safe, peaceful, and loving. At that point, you can understand what it means to love yourself, to extend your love outward to other people, and to accept love from them.

Every human being was created with the capacity to be a warm, loving person. Becoming balanced internally creates that pathway to a warm and loving world, and to a true understanding of self-love.

Faust Ruggiero is a clinical psychologist and author of The Fix Your Depression Handbook.