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
Anyone who has come back from a long illness knows this one. The doctors do their part. The family does theirs. But at six in the morning, when the exercises hurt and no one is watching and no one would ever know, there is exactly one person in the room who decides whether it happens. That person is also the one making the case for going back to sleep.
Going deeper
The Sanskrit here is startling. The word ātman appears six times in two lines. Lift the ātman by the ātman. Do not let the ātman sink. The ātman is the friend of the ātman, and the ātman is the enemy of the ātman.
This is not clumsy writing. The repetition is the argument. In Sanskrit ātman 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. He is describing a single 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 to this that is 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.
It is also worth noticing where this verse sits. It comes just before the passage where Arjuna protests that the mind is as hard to hold as the wind — and Krishna agrees with him. So this is not a demand made by someone who thinks it is easy.