The Day I asked my Guests for Silence and got Performance Anxiety instead

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Crossroads Conversations

When I first started hosting Camino de Santiago walking retreats in rural Gascony, the French Tuscany, I assumed I would be the one doing most of the teaching.

I couldn’t have been more wrong.

Over the years, dozens of people have arrived at my farmhouse carrying backpacks, walking boots, and lives that had gradually become much too heavy. Some were still working. Some had retired. Some were rebuilding after loss, illness or divorce. Others simply couldn’t explain why they felt so restless.

They thought they had come to walk a couple of sections of the Camino.

In the end, they became MY teachers. The CrossRoads Conversations blog post series explores what my guests have taught me over the last twenty-odd years.

I assumed, in the early days, when I was still walking the Camino with my guests, that silence was simply the absence of talking — that if I stopped scheduling activities and left enough open space in the day, quiet would arrive on its own, the way it does when you finally turn off a noisy appliance.

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It doesn’t work like that. Not with a group of adults who’ve met three days ago and are now expected to walk beside each other, wordlessly, for an hour. Left unguided, that kind of silence doesn’t feel peaceful. It feels like a challenge.

The Silence That Backfired

I remember an early retreat where I simply announced, brightly, that we’d walk the next stretch in silence — no explanation beyond that, no framing, just an instruction. Within about ten minutes, I could feel the group’s collective discomfort building like static. People started walking oddly close to the person in front of them, as if proximity might substitute for conversation. Until one guest nervously started laughing, slightly too loudly, just to break the silence, and the whole exercise dissolved into relieved chatter.

I’d asked for quiet and gotten performance anxiety instead. It taught me something I probably should have already known: most of us have spent so long filling silence with small talk, laughter, the low background hum of “everything’s fine, we’re getting along,” that unstructured quiet doesn’t read as peaceful. It reads as a problem needing to be solved.

What Actually Makes Silence Feel Safe

The shift, when it came, was almost embarrassingly simple. I stopped announcing silence as an instruction and started framing it as an invitation with a purpose attached. “Let’s walk this next stretch without talking, and just notice what you’re aware of” does something entirely different to a group than “let’s be silent for a while.” The first gives people something to do with the quiet. The second removes sound and leaves a gap.

I also learned to seed it gradually rather than dropping it on a group cold. A few minutes of unstructured quiet on day one, extended slightly each day, works far better than announcing an hour of silence to guests who met each other at dinner the night before. By day three, the same group that once filled every gap with nervous chatter can walk together in comfortable quiet for the better part of an hour, and nobody reaches for their phone or their neighbour’s attention to fill it.

There’s a physical trick to it too, I’ve noticed — silence lands much more easily side by side than face to face. Guests sitting across from each other at a table rarely tolerate quiet for more than a few seconds before someone fills it. The same guests walking shoulder to shoulder, facing the same direction, can go twenty minutes without a word and barely notice.

Why This Matters More Than You May Realise

I think what surprised me most is how much guests come to crave this, once they’ve been taught it’s allowed. Several have told me, near the end of a retreat, that the quiet stretches were the part they didn’t know they needed — not because they dislike company, but because they’d forgotten, somewhere in the ordinary noise of daily life, that you can be fully present with other people without constantly narrating the experience to each other.

For the quieter guests especially — and I get a fair number of them, unsurprisingly — this is often the most quietly transformative part of the week. Not the big reflective conversations, but the permission to simply exist alongside other people without performing sociability. It’s a small thing to offer, and yet it seems to be one of the things people remember longest.

If a week of walking, gently taught silences included, sounds like something you’re after, I’d love to hear from you. Write to me at MargarethaMontagu@gmail.com, and I’ll tell you all about it.