My mother has always been a very keen gardener, and luckily naturally green-fingered. As a child I would usually find her amongst her flowers and shrubs, constructing a new compost bin, pruning trees and bushes, or watering endless flowerpots and planters. Whilst her garden has been her passion, she has had other interests, although yoga has never been amongst them, and she’s shown little interest in my yoga teaching.

She is now 93 with dementia and reduced mobility, and is no longer able to dig, plant and prune. She has however, lost none of that passion for gardening. These days she has a gardener but always wants more doing. As we walk around her garden, my mother with her mobility walker, I act as her arms and hands planting, pruning, and watering wherever she spots a need or opportunity.  

Last week I found myself repotting dozens of geraniums cuttings and seedlings for her, as she sat on her mobility walker next to me to ‘supervise’…(she’s never had much faith in my gardening skills…), but they looked beautiful crammed onto window ledges around her house, garage and conservatory.

Then in a beautifully yogic spirit of kindness and acceptance she said, “Why don’t you take the geraniums and give them to your students when they graduate?”. Now whilst my students don’t actually graduate because what I teach is not an accredited qualification, she knew ‘student’ meant learning something and developing as a result.

I was overwhelmed with gratitude for her generosity but more so for her long-awaited acceptance of yoga as something important to me even though she understood little about it. She didn’t realise how her spontaneous act of sharing with others was community spirited and therefore at one with the philosophy of yoga.

What I learned was that even though she had dementia some of her neural pathways were still intact for her to make the new connection between her passion for plants and my passion for yoga. I felt blessed that she was able to reach out to me and my students from her heart and share what she still had and loved.