अद्वेष्टा सर्वभूतानां मैत्रः करुण एव च।निर्ममो निरहङ्कारः समदुःखसुखः क्षमी॥
adveṣṭā sarva-bhūtānāṃ maitraḥ karuṇa eva canirmamo nirahankāraḥ sama-duḥkha-sukhaḥ kṣamī
Word by word
The verse says
Hating no living being, friendly and kind, free of "mine" and free of "I", the same in pain and in pleasure, patient —
In plain words
Arjuna has just asked a practical question: who actually reaches you? This is the beginning of the answer, and it runs on for several verses.
It reads like a list of virtues, so it is easy to skim as one. It is worth slowing down, because these are not separate items. They all follow from one thing, and that thing sits in the middle of the line: free of "mine," free of "I."
Once those two go, the rest is not effort. You do not have to work at not hating people when there is no position left to defend. The kindness is what is left over, not something added on top.
Where you've felt this · in family life
Think of the one person in a family who everybody, including the difficult relatives, somehow trusts. They are not the cleverest. They are rarely the loudest. What you notice is that they have no side. Conversations change shape around them, because there is nothing to win. People tell them things they have not told anyone.
Going deeper
The two words at the centre are nirmama and nirahaṅkāra. Without-mine, and without the I-maker.
Ahaṅkāra is worth knowing properly, because English has no clean equivalent. It is usually translated as "ego," which drags in a lot of baggage the Sanskrit does not carry. Literally it is the I-maker — the faculty that takes raw experience and stamps ownership on it. Not "there is pain" but "my pain." Not "the work went well" but "I did that." It is an activity, not a thing. Something the mind keeps doing, moment by moment.
Once you see the list that way, it stops being a checklist and turns into a description of consequences. Why is this person the same in pain and pleasure? Not through gritted teeth. Because sama-duḥkha-sukha follows once experience stops being sorted into what happens to me and what happens to them. Why are they patient — kṣamī? Because patience is mostly the absence of a self that is being kept waiting.
This matters for how you use the verse. Read as instructions, it is crushing: be kind, be selfless, be even-tempered, be patient, all at once, starting now. Read as a description, it is something else entirely. It tells you what happens downstream when the I-maker loosens its grip, which means you have one thing to work on rather than nine.
And notice Krishna's order. He does not open with devotion or ritual, which is what the chapter is nominally about. He opens with how you are with other beings. In a chapter on loving God, the first test is how you treat everything that is not God.