Growing up I was never the athletic type and I always balked at the idea of school sports. It just wasn't for me.

A trip to California at 14 years old changed something about that forever; it was there when I had my very first surfing lesson. The second I stood on the board, I was hooked. It's a feeling like nothing else. Experiencing the power of the ocean and becoming one with its movement, everything else just drops off you.

Being on the water became an obsession. I spent a summer as a deckhand on tall ships. Being exposed to the incomparable forces of the ocean once again, I knew for certain I wanted to spend my life dedicated to the sea.

I headed to university to study Marine Geography, which I imagined would eventually bring me right back to those days out on the ocean. From meteorology to coastal protection and pollution, the topics of the study spoke to my heart.

Graduating university without a clue what to do next is hard. But there was one industry in particular that was interested in my skillset. A nervous graduate, I ended up taking a job for the money, not for the heart. As a hydrographic surveyor I worked on ships for huge oil and gas companies like Shell and BP.

It was everything I didn't want, so I quit. From offshore surveying to marketing grunt work, I quickly fell into another job that I wasn't made for. The 9-to-5, smart/casual, Linked-In life required me to store my soul away, pretending to be a person I wasn't.

So I quit, again. Marked from my experiences in the employed world, I started a business as an employee happiness consultant. I wanted so badly to make the lives of people who maybe were as miserable as I was in office jobs better. Needless to say it didn't work out. I wasn't corporate enough, or even at all and it became a difficult sell.

It had been during my miserable time in front of the computers offshore that I was dipping my toe into the idea of dating. Just a day before I left for a job in The North Sea I met Darren.

After I quit working offshore, he supported the efforts I made with my business. But seeing me miserable made him sad in return, and that was not ok. I made the decision to change my life and finally care for myself.

Ever since I had started yoga there was this tiny idea inside of me of maybe one day teaching it myself. But for years I couldn't even afford to take the teacher training necessary to get qualified.

After working multiple jobs, I finally found enough cash and I went to Bali for 5 weeks. Along with yoga classes every day we were also taught to reflect on ourselves. We were asked what our mission is in life. Not an easy one to answer for someone who has been struggling to find her own happiness! But this struggle was what eventually led me to the answer.

Back home in York I started building my new life. I began teaching regular classes and founded my brand, The Yoga Revolution. I wanted to build a space where people could feel comfortable with themselves, with their bodies, however they were. I'm as little the typical yogi girl as I am the typical surfer girl. My body isn't able to bend into every pose, and that's completely ok. That's the amazing thing about yoga: It's not a competition. It has the power to do so much good regardless of how fancy it looks. You can make yoga yours. And that's what I wanted people to feel. I made it my mission to facilitate authentic happiness.

My path has taken a completely different direction than I'd ever planned. Teaching yoga I feel like I've arrived where I was always meant to be, and it's exciting knowing I'm doing something I'm good at.

But something was still missing. The initial struggle in the working world had carried me away from my original dream. But the ocean kept drawing me and I returned often to surf. What I encountered opened my eyes to something else I needed to do.

Let's be honest - there was probably waste lying around on the beach back when I had my very first lesson. But things have gotten really bad since.

Whenever I went out for a surf I was just struck. You can't walk along a single coastline without passing a piece of trash. I couldn't ignore it any longer, something needed to happen. A former friend from university introduced me to Surfers Against Sewage, a charity committed to tackling the ocean pollution problem. That's how I became a regional representative of SAS in my spot along Yorkshire's coastline; hosting beach cleans and doing educational work.

SAS activists will have cleaned up 100,000kg of trash off the coastlines in the UK by the end of the year. In terms of actual clean up, that's a drop in the ocean (pardon the pun).

But what does happen is a change in mindset. If you get a bunch of people to literally sieve through the sand to find plastic, something in their head switches and they become more conscious about their impact as a whole. In the same way, when it's a busy beach the people observing start to wonder. I think beach cleans are a gesture really, but it's all about educating and enlightening people so we can start an upward spiral of people giving a shit about what impact they have on our planet.

No-one can do everything, but everyone can do something. Compared to surfing, this isn't what gets you the fancy pictures, of course. But, to me, taking care of our planet is part of being a surfer. Let's leave our oceans a little better than we found them.

Things didn't go for me as I envisioned them, but I ended up at places I never could have imagined. There's always another way of living out your dream. Changing my route led me to pure fulfillment and eventually to truly making an impact instead of just living for myself.

I still suck at surfing. But that doesn't matter, I love it still as much.
After all, that's what made me a yoga teacher. And that's what made me an activist.