Five times a week I teach yoga. In my classes I encourage everyone to pay conscious attention to their own body, mind and spirit and then to choose to act, move and speak from that basis. I emphasise the role of each person’s ‘internal teacher’. I tell them that I can offer suggestions for their yoga practice but only they know how each pose feels for them. Only they know what feels good, what brings balance where balance is needed, and what feels wrong.

I say all these things because I believe them. I believe that each of us has within us all the wisdom we need to make wise choices for ourselves. I believe that if each of us does the work – or play - to find our own unique balance, our own way of being in the world and our own brand of genius, we will all be serving each other in the best way we can.

I believe all this. I dedicate much of my life to teaching practices that can help people find their way to this place of integrity. But sometimes it takes a German backpacker in my garden to really show me what it means.

I’d just returned from teaching one of my yoga classes when I got one of those lessons. My boyfriend was out in the backyard with the two young Germans he had hired to help him get through a huge pile of heavy yard work.

He’d come across the first of the Germans through a mutual friend who had heard that we needed some help putting in a retaining wall. There was a young German backpacker in Wellington who had just qualified as a landscape gardener. He was looking for some work and we were looking for a worker. We got him out to the house and it was immediately apparent that he was perfect for the job. Not only did have great ideas to improve our plans for the wall, he was also obviously enjoying himself so much that when we took a break, he would be off in another corner of the garden finding a tree that needed pruning or a fence that needed repairing.

He mentioned that he was travelling with a friend and that she also needed work. We told him to bring her out as well and the next day they both arrived. As the day went on it became clear that gardening was not her passion. She got through the work, but did so slowly and, unlike her partner in grime, without the attention to detail that only comes from passion.

At the end of the day, as I arrived back from yoga – full of my theories about each person finding and standing in their unique place – I asked my boyfriend whether he was asking them both to come back the next day. I thought maybe he would let the reluctant gardener go. He said they were both invited back, of course, but he would have to find something different for her to do, something that she would love.

I suggested maybe she would like to do my housework for me, but sadly he didn’t think that would be the answer. He was sure that he could find a job in the yard that she would find enjoyable. It was, he said, his only management rule: Find what it is that people love doing and give them more of that to do.

In that one simple statement he showed me what all my theory about supporting people to find their unique place in the world really meant in the cut and thrust of daily life. For my boyfriend it meant letting go of his own ideas about what needed to be done and instead looking to see what would best serve this person who had showed up in his garden. He knew that what served her best would, in the end, also serve him.

So, once again, our garden and the man who tends it are teaching me what it really means to bring my yoga off the mat and out into my world.

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