In a retreat hall at San Damiano in March 2026, a participant named Miriam, joining from Arizona, opened her question with a set of handwritten notes and an admission. A year earlier, understanding had arrived for her "very suddenly," and seeking had stopped. Yet now she was asking whether she was fooling herself when she said she was at peace with physical pain. Rupert Spira's reply, captured in a fifteen-minute excerpt from that retreat, rests on one of the sharpest distinctions in his teaching: physical pain and emotional suffering are not the same thing, and suffering, by definition, is a form of seeking. The argument turns on a single question. Who is resisting, and what happens when you go looking for that someone?
Rupert's first move is to pull the two apart. Physical pain, in his account, belongs to the body and has no separate self behind it. Emotional suffering is different in kind. As he put it at the retreat:
"Physical pain doesn't arise on behalf of a separate self. It's instead it's the body. You should resist physical pain. That's why we have pain. It's supposed to be resisted. That's what helps you heal from it."
— Rupert Spira, San Damiano retreat, March 2026 (around 5:03)
This is a notable concession in a tradition often misread as indifferent to bodily experience. Rupert is not asking anyone to pretend a broken limb feels fine. Resistance to pain is the body's intelligence at work: it pulls the hand from the flame and guards the injury while it heals. What he questions is the extra layer that tends to gather around the sensation.
Miriam had put her finger on exactly that layer. She described being able to say "the pain is there, but I'm not suffering from it" at some moments, and being unable to say it at others. Rupert affirmed the observation directly. "We often add a layer of emotional suffering to physical pain," he said, and that added layer is the part that can be examined.
The working definition he gives in the video's description is compact: "emotional suffering is the apparently separate self's resistance to what is taking place." The word that carries the weight is resistance. Suffering, in this sense, is not the sensation itself but the inner refusal, the moment something rises up and says no to what is happening.
Here Rupert adds a qualification that keeps the teaching from becoming a blanket dismissal of feeling. Resistance that arises out of care is, in his words, a different thing. If you see someone in trouble and recoil from the situation, that recoil is not egoic. It "arises on behalf of your care, the care and well-being of the body, either your own or somebody else's or a group of people." He calls this "a legitimate resistance."
The useful test, then, is not whether you resist. It is on whose behalf the resistance arises. Care for a body, your own or another's, is one thing. Resistance that arises on behalf of a self that feels threatened, diminished, or deprived is another. The first moves you to help. The second keeps you circling the same grievance.
This is where the teaching becomes an practice rather than a concept. Rupert offers loneliness as the example. Take the feeling "I feel lonely." Ask whether the body feels lonely. His answer is no, except in the bodily sense of hunger or tiredness. Loneliness, if it is there, is a feeling that seems to belong to someone. So he asks the obvious next question: when you look for the self on whose behalf the loneliness arises, what do you find?
"I can't find it."
— Miriam, in reply to Rupert, San Damiano retreat, March 2026 (around 7:24)
Rupert's follow-up is simple. What happens to the loneliness when the self it belongs to cannot be found? Miriam answers that it dissipates. The feeling is not necessarily gone the instant you look, but its claim on you loosens, because the hook it depends on, a separate someone to whom the feeling happens, has not shown up.
This is the method he states outright in the video's description: "Instead of trying to relieve suffering through the acquisition of objects or substances, I investigate the one on whose behalf it arises. When I look for the hurt or lonely self, I find the feeling but cannot find the separate self. I trace my way back to my being, see that there is no sorrow there and abide in the peace of my true nature." Notice what is not being recommended. Rupert is not telling people to distract themselves, numb the feeling, or reach for the next consolation. He is asking them to turn the attention back toward the one who is supposedly suffering, and to report honestly what they find.
This was the heart of Miriam's worry. If she still suffered at times, did that mean she had not truly stopped seeking? Rupert's answer turns the logic around. "If I am suffering, I am by definition seeking," he states in the description. Suffering is itself a seeking, a wanting of what is not present and a resisting of what is.
That is why he treats a particular response as a contradiction in terms. Someone who says, while suffering, "There's nobody here and there's nothing to do" has, in Rupert's view, taken the language of non-seeking and used it to protect the suffering. As he told Miriam in the room:
"Suffering is by definition a state of seeking. So to to pretend that one is not seeking whilst one is suffering is just a contradiction of terms."
— Rupert Spira, San Damiano retreat, March 2026 (around 8:21)
He is careful to add that he was not accusing her. But the warning is precise. Saying there is no one here, while the resistance continues, does not dissolve the resistance. "Your suffering will continue," he said. The phrase "the pathless path," which Miriam had been reflecting on from the morning session, names the teaching that there is no route to be walked, no achievement to earn. Rupert's point is that the ego can seize that teaching and make it a place to hide.
His more honest alternative is a sentence any of us could say out loud: "Yes, I'm suffering. I don't like what is present. I'm seeking." Once that is admitted, there is something to do. Not a technique aimed at fixing the external situation, but an inquiry aimed at the seeker.
Rupert frames the question this way: "We are already doing something. We are already seeking if we're suffering. The question is, what should we seek and more importantly, where should we seek?" The "where" is the crux. Seeking outward, for objects, substances, or circumstances that will finally make the self feel whole, keeps the appropriation going. Seeking inward, toward the one on whose behalf the suffering arises, is where the process can end.
Miriam's own reply showed how alive this distinction is for a student who has already tasted understanding. "I know that I feel very comfortable saying there's no one here," she said, "but I do know there's something to do." She could not find the wanting self when she looked, yet she also could not simply dismiss the suffering she felt. Rupert's response was to name the dynamic without judgment: suffering is emotional resistance, something has said no to the present, and that no is the separate self, the entity on whose behalf the refusal arises.
The teaching, then, does not ask anyone to suppress pain or to fake a calm they do not have. It asks a more demanding honesty. Admit the suffering. Name it as seeking. Then investigate, gently and specifically, who is doing the wanting. Rupert's claim is that when that someone is sought honestly, the search does not find a sorrowful self at all. It finds the feeling and, behind it, the awareness in which the feeling appears, and that awareness is not troubled.
- Watch the full excerpt. The chapters run from Miriam's opening question through the loneliness example to the warning about the ego and the pathless path. Hearing the back-and-forth matters, because Rupert often refines a point in response to a participant's exact wording.
- Try the inquiry on a small feeling first. Pick a mild, specific emotion, such as mild loneliness or irritation, and ask on whose behalf it is arising. Note what you find, and what you do not find.
- Explore Rupert's upcoming retreats. The schedule at rupertspira.com/events lists in-person and online options, and many in-person retreats can be attended by livestream.
- Go deeper in the archive. Rupert's full video archive of teachings, guided meditations, and answers is available at rupertspira.com/subscriptions.
- Keep a daily anchor. The Luminous meditation app offers free daily meditations on the stillness of being, available on the Apple and Android stores at luminous.rupertspira.com.
The most useful thing about this exchange may be how little it asks you to believe in advance. It asks you to notice that suffering is a no, and then to look for the one who is saying it. What you find, Rupert suggests, is worth finding out for yourself.
