On the role of suffering in personal growth

Uros Cerar You live you learn, you love you learn
You cry you learn, you lose you learn
You bleed you learn, you scream you learn..

Alanis Morissette - You Learn Album Version

Pleasant experiences make life delightful. Painful experiences lead to growth. Pleasant experiences make life delightful, but they don’t lead to growth in themselves. What leads to growth is painful experiences. Suffering points up an area in you where you have not yet grown, where you need to grow and be transformed and change. If you knew how to use that suffering, oh, how you would grow.

The important thing is not to know who "I" is or what "I" is. You'll never succeed. There are no words for it.
The important thing is to drop the labels.
As the Japanese Zen masters say, "Don't seek the truth; just drop your opinions." Drop your theories; don't seek the truth. Truth isn't something you search for. If you stop being opinionated, you would know. Something similar happens here. If you drop your labels, you would know. What do I mean by labels? Every label you can conceive of except perhaps that of human being. I am a human being. Fair enough; doesn't say very much. But when you say, "I am successful," that's crazy. Success is not part of the "I".

Success is something that comes and goes; it could be here today and gone tomorrow. That's not "I". When you said, "I was a success," you were in error; you were plunged into darkness. You identified yourself with success. The same thing when you said, "I am a failure, a lawyer, a businessman." You know what's going to happen to you if you identify yourself with these things. You're going to cling to them, you're going to be worried that they may fall apart, and that's where your suffering comes in. That is what I meant earlier when I said to you, "If you're suffering, you're asleep." Do you want a sign that you're asleep? Here it is: You're suffering. Suffering is a sign that you're out of touch with the truth. Suffering is given to you that you might open your eyes to the truth, that you might understand that there's falsehood somewhere, just as physical pain is given to you so you will understand that there is disease or illness somewhere. Suffering points out that there is falsehood somewhere.
Suffering occurs when you clash with reality.
When your illusions clash with reality when your falsehoods clash with the truth, then you have suffering.
Otherwise there is no suffering.

Anthony De Mello

"Nobodys life is entirely free of pain and sorrow. Isnt it a question of learning to live with them rather than trying to avoid them?

The greater part of human pain is unnecessary. It is self-created as long as the unobserved mind runs your life.

''Relationships do not cause pain and unhappiness. They bring out the pain and unhappiness that is already in you."

"Whenever anything negative happens to you, there is a deep lesson concealed within it, although you may not see it at the time."

Tolle

“There is no coming to consciousness without pain.” Jung

Ali ni moral sam pričakovati enake usode? Ali ni njega čakala ista usoda? Ali ni to komedija, čudna in neumna stvar, to ponavljanje, to kolobarjenje usode?
Reka se je smejala. Da, tako je, vse se vrača, česar nisi dotrpel in razrešil do konca, vselej znova trpiš enako trpljenje.

Siddharta, Hesse