How to Do Teshuva

Admitting and Confronting Your Sins

Admit that you’ve committed wrong acts. This is when you consider your past actions and develop a mental list of your sins. Then, you tell God that you recognize that these actions were harmful and not in accordance with God’s plan. You can try to catalog any sins that you can recount or you can focus on a particular wrong act. For example, you might admit that you drink too much and it's negatively impacting your career and family life.

Investigate the deeper cause of any sins. Most people act out negatively due to something deeper that is going on inside of them. Give yourself some time to just sit back and honestly explore why you are behaving a certain way. What connection does it have to your past? What are you getting out of it? Knowing these undercurrents makes it easier to direct them to a positive outcome. For example, if you are constantly fighting with your roommate, it could be because you are an only child and used to a degree of privacy.

Watch out for trivializing or projecting out your sins. If you trivialize your sins or treat them as minor, then you’ll never be able to truly achieve remorse or redemption for them. If you find yourself thinking with an “everyone else does this” mentality, then step back and reassess. The same goes for projecting out or blaming your negative behaviors on the actions of another person. For example, if you say something like, “She angered me first,” then you are playing a blame game.

Feel remorse about your negative actions. After you’ve recognized what you’ve done that is sinful or harmful, try to connect with your feelings for how your actions have impacted other people. You might feel a deep sorrow or anger that you’ve behaved in a certain way. Go ahead and acknowledge these feelings. However, it’s important that you do not stay paralyzed by your feelings of remorse. Instead, use them to push you into redemptive action.

Be honest and realistic about your teshuva goals. It’s admirable to want to completely eliminate a sinful behavior overnight, but it may not be realistic. Try to break down your sin into pieces and then address each piece individually. If you’ve decided to no longer drink alcohol, your first step might be to remove all alcohol from your home.

Post your written resolutions in an obvious spot. To keep yourself on the straight-and-narrow, write down your goals on a piece of paper in order of difficulty. To keep it simple, just include 5 main objectives. Then, place this paper in a place that you’ll see on a regular basis, such as on your refrigerator. This will remind you to keep your positive changes as a part of your daily life. You could also tape this list to the top of your wall or desk calendar. A potential resolution statement might be, “I will no longer drink alcohol.”

Allow certain steps of the teshuva process to develop naturally. As you progress through analysis, remorse, and restitution, you may feel more connected to certain parts of the process than others. You might embrace the process of apologizing, but feel less certain about discerning the root causes of your actions. This is natural and it’s okay to circle back around to your weaker points and spend more time on them.

Sharing Your Teshuva Journey

Offer an apology to anyone you’ve harmed. If a sin only impacts you directly, then it’s okay to skip this step. But, most sins have some sort of collateral damage to others. If you’ve injured other people, then approach them and confess your remorse as part of teshuva. This then gives them an opportunity to forgive you. If they don’t forgive you, accept their decision. However, keep working to earn their potential forgiveness in the future.

Talk to God in whichever manner you choose. There is no exact right or wrong time to speak with God or to address your need for improvement. You can write a letter to God. You can speak out loud. You can talk with others as an indirect way of communicating to God. You can even think about your sins and how to change. It often helps to express your regrets out loud. For example, you might sit down and say to God, “I’m deeply sorry for what I’ve done.”

Talk with your religious leaders. Seek them out for a private meeting. Ask any questions that you have about the teshuva process and request their guidance. Remember that these advisors want you to have a closer relationship with God, so they will help you however they can. Being honest about your concerns will gain you their admiration.

Building from Your Teshuva Experience

Stay committed to improvement beyond the teshuva period. Embracing the true spirit of teshuva means attempting to rein in and acknowledge your behaviors throughout the year, not just for a few days. When you agree not to commit those same sins again, this is a promise that extends for the rest of your lifetime, even when it may not be convenient.

Hold yourself accountable for slip ups. If you fall back into bad behaviors for a day, then start over on the following one. Expect that you’ll make a few mistakes along the way and don’t give up. You can view these moments as tests of your personal determination, instead of failures. Ask your friends and family to help keep you on track, too. For example, if you’ve decided to keep up a particular fitness regimen and you miss a work-out, perhaps do a bit more the next day.

Practice forgiveness as well. After you’ve admitted your sins and committed to avoid them in the future, God forgives your past actions. However, this forgiveness must be earned over time through your dedication to improvement. Similarly, if you are wronged, teshuva illustrates that you should consider and practice forgiveness as well.

Achieve teshuva gemura by resisting the exact same sin. Not everyone has this opportunity, but purposefully avoiding a sin that you’ve admitted to in the past is a sign of great strength and something to be proud of. If you are tempted, but maintain your promises to God, then you have achieved “teshuva gemura” or “complete teshuva.” Many people who’ve experienced teshuva gemura will talk about it with others, so that they can serve as a model.