The Gecko Pose

Right foot forward at the edge of the mat. Both hands to the right of the foot, flat to the mat, arms straight. Left leg stretched back, knee to the floor if you prefer, but if you want an extra challenge, lift the knee. You are now in the gecko pose. Sprawled out like a lizard frozen mid-run. If you want to make the position stronger, try putting your forearms down to the mat. I can't get that far, I don't have the stretchiness in my hamstrings quite yet. Beside me, Hannah has made it into the full pose. Remember to breathe - inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale. Feel the strength in every muscle, let your body find its natural balance. Then from gecko back to downward dog and later we'll ease into cat, then cow, then butterfly and we might even squeeze in a scorpion. But at least that's the gecko done and out of the way. I've always disliked the gecko.

I was a yoga skeptic for many years, put off by the mysticism and all the 'OMMM'ming, and that you apparently have to be as lithe and bendy as a pipe cleaner rather than stiff and sinewy like old blu-tack (me). But about a year ago dearest Hannah persuaded me to have a try. She'd found, she assured me, a very good yoga teacher who tempers down all the mystical stuff in favour of a focus on muscle groups and balancing, combined with a gentle approach to mindfulness and meditation. I was persuaded that I was leading quite a sedentary life contorted on various chairs while either reading or writing, and so decided some controlled stretching might at least stave off lurking back pains and the like. Now, I've not fallen head-over-heels for yoga - I'm not about to disappear to Nepal for a six month retreat of smoothies and chakras - but I've certainly come to feel the benefits of a regular-ish practice. Our teacher, Mike, is exactly as Hannah described him; unfussy, unpretentious, patient, and always careful to suggest softer and easier variations of trickier poses. We're currently signed up to regular sessions on Sunday evenings which is the perfect time as they help to ease out the end-of-weekend tensions and steady the mind a little for the week ahead.

Mike has a meditation technique that I enjoy. It's just a matter of sitting quietly and comfortably and just allowing whatever thoughts you have in your head to zing around doing whatever they do. That's it. There's no concerted attempt to 'clear your mind' because, as Mike points out, when you try to clear away your mind all you're thinking about is clearing your mind and you end up twisted in some very unmindful Inception-style mental knots. Instead, this is about recognizing the mind as a frantic place and just being OK with that. Like sitting down in a busy public square and just people-watching for a while. Thoughts come and go, and others replace them, and that's fine. It works for me because I've never been particularly able to shut my brain up or calm it down, and I've a sneaking suspicion that such a thing is not actually fully possible anyway. I've therefore come to treat yoga as a way of letting my body move into various precise locations while my mind freely trips and dances and boogies through whatever wild moves it needs to get out of its system. I then find that it tires itself out on its own accord and mutes down anyway. By the time we reach gecko pose, I am mostly tendon and ligament.

Last night, knowing that I was going to write this post, I let my giddy brain ponder the animals of the yoga poses for a while before it receded. The classic is the downward-facing dog - hands and feet to the mat, head down, bum up, 'inverted V-shape' - although I never feel particularly dog-like. This one actually strikes me as a very human position. It's opposite is the upward-facing dog - you're lying face-down but then push your chest up, your arms straight - but again, there's not much canine here. This, surely, should be the sea lion. There's also the nicely soft butterfly - sitting up, feet together, knees out to the sides and then fold forward - and, yes, with some contortion I can see how the legs form wing shapes, while it might also feel somewhat like you're emerging from a cocoon. The best is scorpion. Get into downward dog then lift a leg and curl it over like a stinging tail.

Despite it all, I must admit that these animal connections do succeed in reaching me towards a certain mystical and mysterious resonance. I can get on board with a certain level of animism and animal-human ancient mystical bond, as our fellow fauna are our oldest and most profound companions. Also, anything that exposes how human beings place their supposedly superior minds in a hierarchical relationship above the supposedly inferior body is good with me. Contorting ourselves rather ridiculously into shapes that approximate animals does, at the very least, serve to remind us of our own animalian nature. And along with that comes all the frailty and strength that such a recognition brings. The three other classic yoga poses that non-yoga people may have heard of are Warrior 1, Warrior 2, and Warrior 3. These feel profoundly more human, as the names suggest, and are perhaps designed to make you feel like an ancient soldier rushing into battle. But we are not soldiers, we're statues, rooted to our plinths, fixed in Vitruvian positions, pretending that we are more than we are. All of which is soon undercut by a smooth return to downward-facing dog and the ever-looming threat of gecko. 

So, now I might think of yoga as my regular respectful nod to kingdom animalia. For an hour or so of a Sunday evening, I'll cast out the fidgeting, set my fussy, zippy mind aside in its own little chamber, and cycle through this very human invention to indulge in a fantasy of communing with fauna. And one day, I might even manage to go full gecko. Perhaps I will reach a lizardly apotheosis, shed my human skin and scuttle off to live under some desert rock. I can think of worse places to be at the moment.