Krishna has just told Arjuna that the self cannot be killed. Now he moves to the body's experience: yes, sensations come, yes they hurt, yes they please. Here is what to do with them.
mātrā-sparśās tu kaunteya śītoṣṇa-sukha-duḥkha-dāḥ | āgamāpāyino 'nityās tāṃs titikṣasva bhārata ||
The contacts of the senses with their objects, O Kaunteya, give rise to cold and heat, pleasure and pain. They come and go; they are impermanent. Bear them, O Bharata.
Arjuna is on the verge of collapse because he has filed his current experience under 'unbearable.' Krishna is not saying the pain is not real. He is pointing to a different filing system: this is impermanent contact-data, not a permanent verdict on reality. The shift is in how the mind categorizes what is arriving, not in what is arriving.
Most readers hear this verse as advice for hard times. But Krishna lists sukha (pleasure) alongside duḥkha (pain) as equally impermanent, equally not-yours-to-cling-to. The teaching is symmetric. The person attached to pleasant sensations is just as unstable as the person crushed by unpleasant ones. Both are being moved by weather.
Titikṣā is not emotional flatness. A numb person does not register the cold; a person practicing titikṣā registers it fully and stays steady. The goal is not to stop feeling. It is to feel without the feeling becoming the commander of your actions. The sensation arrives, is received, and passes. The center stays.
Krishna uses two different epithets here: Kaunteya (son of Kunti) and Bharata (descendant of Bharata). The first names Arjuna through his mother, his personal lineage. The second places him in a longer ancestral line. Together they frame him as both a particular person with a particular grief and a member of a much older human stream that has always had to deal with exactly this. The grief is real and personal; it is also ancient and shared.
Person A gets a piece of criticism in a performance review. The rest of the day collapses inward: replaying the comment, checking whether people like them, sleeping badly, making decisions colored by the bruise. The feedback is now running the system. Person B gets the same criticism. They feel the sting clearly, maybe sit with it for an hour. Then they ask: is it useful? They take what helps and let the rest pass. By the next morning they are back to baseline, not because they suppressed anything but because they did not build a house on top of the sensation while it was visiting.
Krishna uses both names in the same verse. Kaunteya calls on Arjuna's personal, embodied identity: you are a specific person with a specific mother and a specific grief. Bharata places that person inside a long lineage of humans who have faced exactly this. The verse is asking Arjuna to hold both at once: yes, this is your particular pain; and no, you are not the first person the cold has touched.
Verse 2.15 names the person who actually achieves this steadiness: the one not shaken by pain or pulled by pleasure, who is fit for the state Krishna calls amṛtatva. When ready, say: "2.15"