TrailTracers 1

10 Powerful Life Lessons My Retreat Guests Learned While Walking the Camino de Santiago

Email 1: Lives Changed: My Camino Epiphany

The Ripple Effect of Walking the Camino de Santiago – My Own Experience

The morning fog hung heavy on the outskirts of Eauze as I stood frozen at an unmarked fork in the path. My heart raced with the old familiar anxiety as I strained to make out any semblance of red-and-white arrows or scallop shell markers through the blur that is my visual reality.

“Not again,” I whispered, leaning heavily on my walking stick.

As someone with less-than-perfect sight, I’d grown accustomed to the unique challenges of walking the Camino de Santiago. The uneven terrain that other pilgrims merely glanced at required my full concentration. What many experienced as a meditative walk often became, for me, an exercise in hypervigilance—counting steps between landmarks I could see with difficulty, listening for subtle clues in the environment, and sometimes swallowing my pride to ask fellow pilgrims for guidance.

That particular morning marked my third day’s walk, and I was exhausted. Not just physically, but also emotionally and spiritually.

The weight pressing on my heart wasn’t just from the pack on my back. It was doubt, creeping in with each uncertain step.

“What difference am I really making?” I wondered, as I finally spotted a faint red-and-white blur indicating the correct path. “Four people. I’m pouring everything I have into just four people when thousands need help.”

My vision limitations had always felt like a metaphor for my reach, restricted, partial, and insufficient.

That evening, as we gathered in my kitchen, Maria, one of my retreat participants, asked if she could share something with the group. Her voice trembled slightly as she spoke.

“Before this journey, I hadn’t laughed in over a year,” she confessed. “After my divorce, I became the person everyone worried about. My daughter stopped telling me her troubles because she didn’t want to burden me further. My colleagues walked on eggshells.”

She looked directly at me, though I could only make out the blurry outline of her face.

“Yesterday, when you helped me find beauty in that field of wildflowers I would have walked past—pointing out colours I would have missed, teaching me to feel the different textures—something shifted. I called my daughter last night and truly listened to her for the first time in months. I realised I’ve been so consumed by my own troubles that I’d stopped seeing everyone else’s.”

One by one, others shared similar moments of clarity they’d experienced in just these few days.

Then Pablo, usually the quietest of the group, spoke up: “I manage a team of twenty-three people back home. What I’m learning here about perseverance and presence—it will transform how I lead them.”

Twenty-three people. Plus their families. Plus their colleagues.

That night, lying on a lounder staring at the stars, I had my own Camino epiphany. The mathematics of transformation isn’t linear—it’s exponential.

Each person who finds their way from trouble to triumph on these ancient paths becomes a lantern in their own world. They illuminate spaces I will never see, touch lives I will never know.

My limited vision on the trail had blinded me to the true reach of my work.

Now, with each small group I guide, I see beyond the people around the dinner table. I see the vast constellation of lives they’ll touch when they return home, bravely shining their Camino light.

Like the medieval pilgrims who each placed one small stone on the Cruz de Ferro, creating a mountain of intention over centuries, my contribution needn’t be massive to matter.

Sometimes the path with the greatest impact isn’t the widest one, that accommodates thousands, but the narrower one where transformation takes root so deeply that it cannot help but spread.

That’s the true miracle of the Camino—it teaches us that our perceived limitations often conceal our greatest gifts. My struggle to see clearly on the trail has given me unique insight into guiding others through their own moments of blindness and clarity.

What perceived limitation might be concealing your greatest gift? What small circle of influence might be waiting for exactly your light? Send me an email – to margarethamontagu@gmail.com – your story matters to me.

If you have not downloaded the 10 Life-changing Lessons from the Camino de Santiago, you can do so by clicking here.

Walking the Camino de Santiago can have a ripple effect that extends far beyond what any of us can see.

Buen Camino,

Dr Margaretha Montagu Who I am and what I do

MBChB, MRCGP, NLP master pract cert, Transformational Life Coach (dip.) Life Story Coach (cert.) Counselling (cert.) Med Hypnotherapy (dip.) and EAGALA (cert.) Published author of 8 books.

PS. This e-mail is part of a series I send to subscribers to my mailing list. If you would like to receive the free series, as well as the free 10 Powerful Lessons My Guests Learned While Walking the Camino de Santiago guide, you can subscribe by clicking here: Download the Guide.