Tikkun: Your Personal Correction

Have you noticed that your life has themes? The same type of boss, the same argument with a different partner, the same money trouble in a new city. Kabbalah has a word for this: tikkun, meaning "correction" or "repair."

Your soul's homework

In Rav Berg's teaching, every soul arrives with a particular correction to make – traits to transform, reactive patterns to break, and damage from the past to repair. Your tikkun is your personal curriculum. The situations that feel hardest are usually where it lives, which is why they keep coming back until you respond differently.

This is a hopeful idea. A recurring problem isn't bad luck or proof that you're broken. It's a lesson that is being offered again, and each time you choose proactively instead of reactively, you complete a little more of it.

Wheels of a soul

Rav Berg taught that the soul returns across many lifetimes to finish its correction, a process explored in his book Wheels of a Soul. From this view, some of what you face now carries over from before, and some of your natural gifts do too. Whether or not you accept reincarnation, the practical teaching stands: patterns are invitations.

Finding your tikkun

A few questions can point the way:

• What situation reliably makes you react?
• What do you criticize most in other people? (It often mirrors your own work.)
• Where do you feel most uncomfortable, most ashamed or most stuck?

The larger repair

Kabbalah also speaks of a collective tikkun: the repair of the whole world. Every personal correction contributes to it. When you transform one reaction, the teaching says, you add a little Light to everyone.