उद्धरेदात्मनाऽऽत्मानं नात्मानमवसादयेत्।आत्मैव ह्यात्मनो बन्धुरात्मैव रिपुरात्मनः॥
uddhared ātmanātmānaṃ nātmānam avasādayetātmaiva hyātmano bandhur ātmaiva ripur ātmanaḥ
Word by word
The verse says
Lift yourself by yourself. Do not let yourself sink. You alone are your own friend, and you alone are your own enemy.
In plain words
This is the most practical verse in the Gita, and the least comforting.
Krishna is not offering help here. He is pointing out that the help has to come from inside the same person who needs it. The one doing the lifting and the one being lifted are not two people. They are you, on two different days.
And he says it both ways round, which is the part that stings. The same capacity that can pull you out is the one that holds you under. Nobody is better placed to wreck your life than you are. Nobody else is going to do the work either.
Where you've felt this · in health
It is six in the morning and the alarm has gone off for the swim you promised yourself. Nobody is waiting for you and nobody would ever know. There is exactly one person in the room who decides whether it happens, and he is also the one making the case for going back to sleep.
Going deeper
You are the only one who can lift you, and you are also the thing most reliably holding you down. Krishna makes that point by using a single word six times in two lines - ātman. Lift the ātman by the ātman. Do not let it sink. The ātman is the friend of the ātman, and the ātman is its own enemy.
This is not clumsy writing. The repetition is the argument. In Sanskrit the word can mean the deepest self, but it can also mean the mind, or simply serve as the ordinary word for oneself. Krishna is playing across that range on purpose, describing one thing standing in two relations to itself.
That is why the usual picture of a higher self battling a lower self misses it. There is no second entity in the verse. There is one self, and the only question is which way it is currently facing. A friend and an enemy are not two substances. They are two stances.
There is a hard edge here worth naming. The Gita is a deeply devotional book, and Krishna spends much of it promising to carry those who turn to him. Yet here, in the middle of the chapter on practice, he says the lifting is yours. Both things are held at once and neither is softened. Grace does not do your sitting for you.
And he is not saying it from a comfortable distance. A few verses later Arjuna protests that the mind is as hard to hold as the wind, and Krishna agrees with him outright. This is not a demand from someone who thinks it is easy.