According to Osho, growth is painful because it forces you to encounter the pains you’ve long repressed; avoidance only stores them up. Society teaches suppression—of pain and even pleasure—flattening life’s peaks and valleys. Real growth embraces this polarity: accept pain directly (“be hot, be cold”), not bypass it. Facing wounds dissolves suffering and deepens your capacity for joy—roots in the dark valley raise the tree to higher peaks.
Growing hurts because you stop running from hurt, feel it fully, and that makes room for more real happiness.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
Osho, why is growth painful?
Growth is painful because you have been avoiding a thousand and one pains in your life. By avoiding you cannot destroy them -- they go on accumulating. You go on swallowing your pains; they remain in your system. That's why growth is painful -- when you start growing, when you decide to grow, you have to face all the pains that you have repressed. You cannot just bypass them. You have been brought up in a wrong way. Unfortunately, until now, not a single society has existed on the earth which has not been repressive of pain. All societies depend on repression. Two things they repress: one is pain, another is pleasure. And they repress pleasure also because of pain. Their reasoning is that if you are not too happy you will never become too unhappy; if joy is destroyed you will never be deep in pain. To avoid pain…
Beloved Osho, the growth movement has been called the "new narcissism" by many, due to its emphasis on assertiveness and valuing one's own personal ego. How does your way differ?
There is no way. It is impossible to have a way, because you are already there. You have never left home. This whole search for the way is driving you crazy; you cannot find it because you are already there. Wherever you go, you will go against your being, farther and farther away. You have gone already too far. It is time to drop the idea of the way. Life is not a becoming, not some kind of process. It is being. You cannot ask me how my way differs from the growth movement, because I have no way. I am not teaching you a way -- really, I am taking you away from all the ways. But the question has some significance. The growth movement was egoistic. It was the assertion of the ego repressed for centuries. Just by being assertive and egoistic you don't start growing. Or worse,…
Growth means growing into heaven and hell together. If somebody wants to remain always in heaven he will never grow; he will remain juvenile, stuck, dependent. His life will be very shallow. He will not know anything of value. His life will be non-essential. He will live in the non-essential; he will never come across the essential. So risking is very important; risking is sannyas. It means dropping the known, the well-founded, the well-acquainted, for something one knows not how it is going to turn out, dropping the house in which you have lived long, and in which you have known many beautiful moments, and the security, and the safety and the shelter... dropping that house and going into the open, under the sky, becoming a vagabond, a gypsy. That is risky, but through that risking, integration arises. And because I force you to risk, the mind resists.
Osho, I feel that as awareness grows, sensitivity grows too—and I simply cannot bear it. Please guide me. Guide this blind one, Osho; I keep stumbling as I walk!
Certainly, as awareness grows, sensitivity will grow. Ordinarily we live in a kind of fog—unconscious, stupefied. Like a man drunk, lying in a gutter—he doesn’t smell the stench. You think, “Poor fellow, lying in a drain.” But he’s enjoying himself. He may be dreaming he’s resting in a palace, that he’s become president and is holding court! You see mud, filth, the gutter running past his nose. You imagine a terrible stink must be assailing him. But he’s unconscious. For stench to be felt, a little awareness is needed. In the morning when he wakes up and comes to, he’ll dust himself off and run home, bathe, put on sandalwood paste, do his prayers, dress up and sit in the living room. Then if you tell him, “Just go and lie down in that gutter again,” it will be impossible—now all the senses are alert. Just so it happens. As…
Is there any pain worse than this? You have touched my secret: all my sources are poisoned and yet I manage to go on living and it is not possible -- that is what I want to hide from everyone. You put the finger on my deepest wounds, and make me scream out in pain and then you lead me to the only life-giving source -- acceptance.
Neerjo, ecstasy is only out of agony -- and the deeper the agony, the deeper the ecstasy will be; total the agony, total will be the ecstasy. Everything has to be paid for. For ecstasy, we have to pay in agony. One has to go through deep pain to get rid of pain. Pain is cleansing. Pain is a fire; it burns the rubbish in you, it destroys the unessential. Just as we purify gold through fire, consciousness is purified through pain. Pain has something to deliver to you. Don't avoid pain! If you avoid pain, you are avoiding pleasure. Don't avoid the world! If you avoid the world, you have avoided God. Don't avoid darkness. If you avoid darkness, dawn will never come. It is out of the dark night that the morning is born. And when the night is darkest, the sunrise is closest. Remember this fundamental law…