I did something I regret, and I can't stop punishing myself for it.

Look at how deliberately the wording is stacked. Not "even sinners may try" — even the most sinful of all sinners. Not "some of it can be forgiven" — you will cross over all of it. The verse is engineered so that no reader can stand outside it and say, yes, but not me. Whatever the thing you did was, you have just been included by name.

And the commentary tradition on this verse is precise about what qualifies a person to cross. It is not a clean past — the verse has already given up on requiring one. It is a firm resolve, made now: the decision that from this moment you are turned toward truth, toward the person you intend to be. The tradition reaches for a beautiful image here: a room that has been dark for a hundred years does not need a hundred years of lamplight to brighten. The moment the lamp is lit, the darkness goes. Darkness has no seniority. Neither does regret.

Self-punishment feels like justice. It has the shape of an instalment plan: every night of guilt is a payment against the debt, and giving it up early would feel like letting yourself off. But notice two things about this plan. The payments never end — there is no receipt, no moment where the prosecutor stands up and says paid in full. And the currency is wrong. Nowhere does the pain travel to the person you hurt, or to the person you were. It just circulates inside you, keeping the deed vivid and current, replaying it in high definition — which is not accounting. It is rehearsal.

The very next verse of the Gita names the mechanism that actually clears the account: as a blazing fire turns fuel to ashes, the fire of knowledge turns all karma to ashes (Bhagavad Gita 4.37). Fire does not negotiate with the wood, does not burn it a little each night for years. It consumes it, and what remains cannot be reassembled. Knowledge, here, is not information — you already have the information; you replay it nightly. Knowledge is seeing the whole of it steadily: what you did, what it cost, what in you drove it, and the fact that the person resolving now is not condemned to be the person who acted then. Guilt keeps circling the deed precisely so it never has to look at it that directly.

First, write it down once, in plain words. What you did, who it cost, what it cost them. No softening, and no self-flagellation either — both are ways of not seeing. This is the lamp being lit: you cannot burn what you will not look at.

Second, if repair exists, make one act of it. An apology not yet given, an amount not yet returned, a changed behaviour the person can actually feel. Repair moves in the present; punishment only paces the past. One concrete act of repair is worth ten thousand laps of guilt.

Third, make the resolve — one sentence, beginning: from today, I am someone who... The replay will still come; old films do. When it does, treat it as the old darkness asking whether the lamp is still lit — and answer with the resolve, not another round of the lash. The verse's image is exact. You do not cross an ocean by drinking it, or by drowning in it a little each night as tribute. You cross by building something that floats, and getting in.