Photo © Kathryn Faulkner

I entered advertising the summer I graduated, working as a trainee Strategic Planner at JWT. I worked my way to the top and was appointed to the board of three top ten agencies but, after more than a decade I decided that I’d had enough of debating what song sunflowers should sing and headed off to India on a yoga school pilgrimage, in search of life’s deeper meaning.

I would find a guru and return a Yoga Goddess – the embodiment of feminine perfection – peaceful, happy, loving, wise and endlessly compassionate towards a suffering world – and a magnetic babe attracting strong and sweaty, yet emotionally vulnerable men. Not only would my purpose in life be revealed but also a pretzel-like body – light on fat, flexible yet strong. I would sit in the lotus position, or stand on my head, effortlessly performing advanced postures in designer clothes for a Sunday Telegraph feature on Yoga Babes. Vogue would photograph me in my favourite organic juice bar and designer friends would choose me to model their size eight scented knickers. In these dreams the lack of money didn’t matter because I was beyond materialism, and anyway I got free holidays when Sting invited me to his Italian villa to give him personal tuition. Of course, I knew it might not turn out this way, but it had to be better than looking for meaning in a tub of marge.

On my return from India I went on an Arvon Foundation Travel Writing course where I met Chris Stewart and Ian Marchant, both published authors. They gave me the encouragement to develop the diary I had written whilst I was away and Yoga School Dropout was published by Ebury in 2005. To date the book has sold 25,000 copies.

In the summer of 2008 I got married to my ‘strong and sweaty, yet emotionally vulnerable man’ – a man who didn’t seem to mind that I couldn’t sit in the lotus position, or stand on my head, or effortlessly perform advanced postures in designer clothes. I freelanced in advertising and research while I wrote the follow up to Yoga School Dropout, about my quest for yogic serenity, babies and friendship in the windy reaches of Norfolk. It was published in August 2009. See Amazon to order! Currently I'm working on my third book - a novel. My heroine has been boxed in, stitched up and passed over at work. Is the answer a glamorous new job and a guru in Gucci or does she need to dig a little deeper to find what she's looking for?