A Soft Black Tiger

On Tuesday I went to a ‘Receive and Restore’ Yoga class, in contrast to my usual ‘Vibrant Vinyasa.’ It was helpful- to kneel in the semi-darkness, lean forwards, a bolster under my belly, a sand bag on my back. I wept a little, feeling how difficult it is for me to do this - to rest, to receive.

The thing is even if I battle my illness in the goodnatured way of the Gauls, whom I wrote about earlier this week, battling isn’t the whole story. The story never ends mid-fight. It ends with a feast. Or a ceremony. Or a home-coming. A return. A rest.

Even if your combatant turns out to be an angel, even if you battle the whole night with them, dawn will still come, and at that point - if you are like Jacob - you receive an injury to the hip, a new name and a blessing. You can biff, baff, boff, with a magic potion, or just with your bare arms and your brave heart, but the point is this - either way there comes a time when you have to stop battling, and start receiving. There’s the rub. I am pretty good at battling, but receiving - which sounds like it should be the easy part - is not my forte.

It can’t be. It can’t be anybody’s forte. Because it is about taking down the fort. Being open - and that is hard. Being soft is hard. Very hard.

It is almost a cliche by now to say that our culture- and my son would shout out “our economy!” - doesn’t help. We know we live in a world that is skewed towards output - the Yang energy of assertion, doing, getting, growing. The problem is that the opposite - the Yin - is swept up in the force of this relentless productivity, and so becomes yet another thing to do. Retreats, treatments, trainings, creams and oils, pills and powders, may be wonderful, but they are also packaged, also sold - which is not the same as a hip injury, a name, a blessing, given freely, accepted gladly.

So, after my yoga class, I came home and did what I do when I am thinking something over - I looked up the etymology of the word ‘receive’. It comes from those Romans again (not the Gauls): the Latin ‘re,’ meaning ‘back,’ and ‘capere,’ meaning ‘take.’ Take back. This doesn’t solve my predicament - it actually articulates the problem, makes it sound like yet another thing I can do, whereas if I am truly going to receive at the end of the battle, I don’t think I can do it, buy it, make it, or take it back.

The Germanic etymology is more promising (I don’t know about the Gallic). In German ‘to receive’ is ‘bekommen’ from ‘bikwemana’, meaning “to come around, come by, or come across.” In English this evolved into the word ‘become’ - ‘to begin to be.’ Now, that’s nearer the mark. Because when you truly receive something, you don’t ‘take it back,’ add it to your stash of stuff - you take it in, and it changes you. A hip injury, a new name, a blessing - they make you become someone else, someone different to who you were before.

It is like this when improvising on stage, the way I have learnt with Improbable. Your fellow player makes you an offer - they give you a suggestion, an idea. “Look at that tiger!” they say. You receive this, agree to it, and - how Lee and Phelim teach it - you ‘let it run right through you.’ You say ‘yes’ to the tiger that has been summoned onto the stage with every cell in your body, and that means you change. Spell-binding for an audience. Terrifying in practice - like facing an actual tiger - the risk of annihilation.

Notably, I have struggled with this twice before in my life, and both times life was at stake: when I was in labour with my son, and when I wanted to conceive my daughter. In each case I tried to make it happen, to hold on to who I was, and push life into being, will it to be. Both times I had to give up. To become different. To receive. When I finally (after four days and nights) got to the point of actually pushing in my son’s labour, it wasn't like any other kind of pushing I have ever done. It was more like a surrender.

It’s a curious state though. Because it isn’t passive. I feel at the edge of language in trying to explain it- even the etymologies don’t quite suffice. But it feels important right now. Key in healing - for me, or for any of us. If you can’t receive, the battle is futile - a pointless display of power. We don’t have to look too far to find that in this world.

But how to do undoing? How to become soft, after or even in battle? I think I have to practice the things I’ve been writing about - training in aerial with a quality of ease, becoming a round, replete caterpillar, feasting like a Gaul, not a Roman. Not ‘I came, I saw, I conquered.’ I need a new motto. ‘I came, I saw, I softened?!’ I don’t know whether I have to soften as much as the caterpillar- turning into soup inside the cocoon, before I transform. A bit of slow yoga in the dark is a good start. My daughter’s cat helps too - she knows how to rest better than any of us in this house. A small black tiger of softness. I can say ‘yes’ to her.