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Thank you for sharing that qoute and your thoughts to it. This post really helped me clarify what I mean by "Spiritual Growth" in relation to illness. 

To me accepting something does not mean being resigned to it, rather it means having a different realtionship to it.  

Can we learn to accept the presence of difficult circumstances (pain, depression, heartache) in our life without being resigned to their permenance? 

In my life - the times when I was able to fully accept a difficult condition as it was - I found that I often had a much easier time seeing the condition clearly and beginning to work with it in a constructive way.  

In contrast when I vowed to battle something to fight through, it seemed that my aversion to that thing actually kept me locked into a struggle with it.

Told from the perspective of the bipartiate brain, I think the story might look like this.

If we try to exert the will of the story-teller upon the unconscious brain and the body - without first really listening to the unconscious brain and the body we end up with a longer and more painful conflict.

If in contrast we take time and really allow all of the information from the unconscious brain to be processed in new ways we might have access to new and different stories that didn't exist before.

I am not suggesting that if you have a broken leg you sit around for months feeling the pain and trying to accept it and form a new relationship with it. However in the case of back pain - I think very often people struggle mightly against their bodies instead of learning to feel and understand the pain and learn from it.

With emotional pain, anxiety and depression, my sense is that our first instinct is to fight it, but sometimes we would do really well to start by first feeling it and then learning from it.