Tag: CrossRoads Conversations

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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.

If your soul is craving fresh air, meaningful movement, and a chance to reconnect with nature and connect with horses, join me on a 5-day/4-night “You’ve Got This” Camino de Santiago Walking Retreat – a powerful, natural reboot for your body, mind, and spirit. No fitness requirements. No forced bonding. No pressure to have a breakthrough. Just one foot in front of the other, and finding your way to a brighter future.

Do you dream of escaping your stressful life to raise a herd of goats or grow sunflowers in the south of France? Then you may be ready for an Esprit Meraki retreat. Get access to this “very serious” quiz to help you figure out how urgent your need for a change of scenery is, when you subscribe to my monthly newsletter.

What Life Lessons Can You Learn While Walking the Camino de Santiago? – a free guide filled with 10 not just “quaint anecdotes” or Instagram-worthy moments (though there are plenty of those) but real transformations from real people who walked this insight-giving trail – Subscribe to my monthly newsletter to Download the Guide

“I am an experienced medical doctor – MBChB, MRCGP, NLP master pract cert, Transformational Life Coach (dip.) Life Story Coach (cert.) Stress Counselling (cert.) Med Hypnotherapy (dip.) and EAGALA (cert.) I may have an impressive number of letters after my name, and more than three decades of professional experience, but what qualifies me to excel at what I do is my intuitive understanding of my clients’ difficulties and my extensive personal experience of managing major life changes using strategies I developed over many years.” Dr M Montagu

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For years, I planned reflection exercises the way I imagine a nervous conference organiser plans icebreakers — carefully, a little anxiously, with a backup in case the first one fell flat. A guided journaling prompt after brunch. A short silent walk with a question to chew on. A candle, occasionally, if I’m honest, which in hindsight was probably one prop too many.

Then, one grey, misty morning between Eauze and Manciet on the Via Podensis, the weather did more emotional work in forty minutes than any exercise I’d ever written had managed in a week. And I had to admit, slightly grudgingly, that I’d been out-hosted.

The Morning That Changed My Mind

It wasn’t dramatic weather. No storm, nothing worth mentioning on a forecast. Just a low mist sitting over the vineyards, soft enough that the group ahead of me kept disappearing and reappearing like they were being gently erased and redrawn. Nobody had to be told to be quietly present in the moment. The mist did that on its own — it has a way of making conversation feel slightly out of place, as though you’d be talking into the void.

By the time we reached Manciet, one guest, a management consultant who’d spent the first two days rather effectively deflecting anything resembling introspection, said quietly that the walk had reminded him of a fog he used to watch from his grandmother’s kitchen window as a child, and that he hadn’t thought about that kitchen in decades. I hadn’t asked him a single question. The weather had done it for me.

Why the Weather Works Where My Exercises Sometimes Don’t

I think the honest answer is that a planned reflection exercise always carries a faint whiff of being asked to feel something, and most of us — sensible, self-protective creatures that we are — resist being asked to feel. We read the prompt already slightly bracing – or is that just us introverts?

A misty morning asks nothing of anyone. It simply changes the light, softens the edges of things, and quietly rearranges the inside of your head as a side effect, with no one watching to see whether you’re doing it “correctly.” There’s no wrong way to experience fog. There’s no journal page to fill in afterwards, proving you engaged with it sincerely. It just works on you, if you let it, and most people do.

Rain has its own effect, incidentally — a different one. Guests tend to walk closer together in rain, shoulders in, and conversation gets more practical and oddly more honest, the way conversation does when everyone’s slightly uncomfortable and no longer bothering to perform composure. Bright, cloudless mornings do something else again — they tend to loosen people rather than quiet them, more laughter, less confession. I’ve learned to read a forecast now the way I once read a guest list: as a fairly reliable clue about what kind of retreat day we’re about to have.

Learning to Get Out of the Way

The shift for me has mostly been about restraint. I still plan a loose shape for reflection during a retreat, because guests generally want some structure, and I don’t think I should abandon that entirely. But I’ve stopped scheduling it rigidly against the clock, and started watching the sky instead. If we wake to that particular soft grey mist over the Gers countryside, I quietly shelve whatever exercise I’d planned and simply let the walk do it instead.

It’s a strange thing to admit as someone who spent a career trusting careful planning over instinct, but the weather has turned out to be a better therapist than most of my prompts ever were. It just shows up as itself, and lets people meet it however they need to that morning.

If you’d like to walk a misty morning on the Via Podensis yourself — and see what comes to the surface — I’d love to hear from you. Write to me at MargarethaMontagu@gmail.com, and I’ll tell you honestly whether a walking retreat would be a good investment in YOU.

If your soul is craving fresh air, meaningful movement, and a chance to reconnect with nature and connect with horses, join me on a 5-day/4-night “You’ve Got This” Camino de Santiago Walking Retreat – a powerful, natural reboot for your body, mind, and spirit. No fitness requirements. No forced bonding. No pressure to have a breakthrough. Just one foot in front of the other, and finding your way to a brighter future.

Do you dream of escaping your stressful life to raise a herd of goats or grow sunflowers in the south of France? Then you may be ready for an Esprit Meraki retreat. Get access to this “very serious” quiz to help you figure out how urgent your need for a change of scenery is, when you subscribe to my monthly newsletter.

What Life Lessons Can You Learn While Walking the Camino de Santiago? – a free guide filled with 10 not just “quaint anecdotes” or Instagram-worthy moments (though there are plenty of those) but real transformations from real people who walked this insight-giving trail – Subscribe to my monthly newsletter to Download the Guide

Author Bio: Dr Margaretha Montagu – described as a “game changer”, “gifted healer”, “guiding light” and “life-enriching author” – is an experienced medical doctor, a certified NLP practitioner, a medical hypnotherapist, an equine-assisted psychotherapist (EAGALAcertified) and a transformational retreat leader who guides her clients through life transitions – virtually, or with the assistance of her Friesian and Falabella horses, at their home in the southwest of France.

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I used to believe the most meaningful conversations happened at dinner. Good food, candlelight, everyone finally relaxed after a day’s walking — surely that was where people opened up.

Sometimes, it is. But not always. Sometimes, the real conversations, the ones guests still mention to me months later, don’t happen at the table. They happen on the trail, mid-morning, somewhere unremarkable between two villages no one could point to on a map afterwards.

Why Facing Forward is less Challenging

There’s something about walking side by side that dinner simply can’t replicate, and it took me longer than I’d like to admit to work out what it was. At the table, you’re facing someone. Every spoken word involves eye contact. You watch their face receive what you’ve said in real time, and some instinctive, entirely sensible part of you edits accordingly.

On the trail, none of that applies. You’re both facing the same direction, toward the same stretch of path, and whatever you say simply goes out into the air rather than landing on someone’s face for immediate review. I’ve had guests tell me things walking that I’m quite certain they wouldn’t have said across a table — not because the trail is magic, but because it removes the one ingredient every confession has always needed a way around: being observed while you say it.

The Conversation I Still Think About

Years ago, walking a quiet stretch of the Voie du Puy with a guest — a retired headteacher, composed, the sort of person you’d never guess was carrying anything heavy — I asked an ordinary question about her plans after the retreat. She answered it, and then, several minutes later, apropos of nothing I’d asked, mentioned her husband had died the previous winter and she hadn’t told anyone on the trip.

I’ve thought about that exchange more than almost any other in years of hosting. Not because it was dramatic — it wasn’t, delivered quite plainly, eyes on the path ahead — but because I’m fairly certain it would never have surfaced at dinner. Something about the walking made the saying of it possible. Not easier, exactly. Just possible.

What This Means for How I Host

Although I no longer walk with my guests, and although I encourage them to walk as much of the Camino on their own, firmly believing that this is where most of the benefit lies, I stopped trying to engineer meaningful conversation around the table and trust that there will be moments of meaningful conversation on the way.

It also changed how I think about pacing the day; I now allow much longer for each day’s walk. A retreat with too much sitting — too many long lunches, too much scheduled reflection time on benches — is, I’ve come to believe, quietly working against itself. The walking isn’t just a means of transport between the beginning and the end point. Increasingly, I think walking is the most meaningful part, and the meals are simply where we recover from the effort.

Something Worth Trying, Even Off the Camino

You don’t need Gascony or a fortnight of walking to test this. Next time you need to have a conversation you’ve been avoiding, try having it while walking rather than seated across a table. Somewhere with no eye contact required, no chairs to fidget in, nothing to do but keep moving forward. I suspect you’ll find the words arrive more easily than you expected.

It’s a small thing to notice, but it’s changed how I think about hosting my Camino de Santiago walking retreats almost entirely. The retreat, in the end, isn’t really built around meals or lodging or even the route itself. It’s built around creating enough forward motion that people can finally confront the thing they came here — without quite admitting it to themselves — hoping to resolve.

If any of this sounds like the kind of break you’re after, I’d love to hear from you. Write to me at MargarethaMontagu@gmail.com, and tell me what you’re hoping to resolve, and I’ll tell you whether you’ll benefit from a walking retreat or not.

If your soul is craving fresh air, meaningful movement, and a chance to reconnect with nature and connect with horses, join me on a 5-day/4-night “You’ve Got This” Camino de Santiago Walking Retreat – a powerful, natural reboot for your body, mind, and spirit. No fitness requirements. No forced bonding. No pressure to have a breakthrough. Just one foot in front of the other, and finding your way to a brighter future.

Do you dream of escaping your stressful life to raise a herd of goats or grow sunflowers in the south of France? Then you may be ready for an Esprit Meraki retreat. Get access to this “very serious” quiz to help you figure out how urgent your need for a change of scenery is, when you subscribe to my monthly newsletter.

What Life Lessons Can You Learn While Walking the Camino de Santiago? – a free guide filled with 10 not just “quaint anecdotes” or Instagram-worthy moments (though there are plenty of those) but real transformations from real people who walked this insight-giving trail – Subscribe to my monthly newsletter to Download the Guide

Author Bio: Dr Margaretha Montagu – described as a “game changer”, “gifted healer”, “guiding light” and “life-enriching author” – is an experienced medical doctor, a certified NLP practitioner, a medical hypnotherapist, an equine-assisted psychotherapist (EAGALAcertified) and a transformational retreat leader who guides her clients through life transitions – virtually, or with the assistance of her Friesian and Falabella horses, at their home in the southwest of France.

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What years of hosting Camino de Santiago walking retreats in France taught me about connection on the trail

I’ve watched a lot of icebreakers fail in my time. Name games, “two truths and a lie,” the earnest go-round where everyone shares what they’re hoping to get from the retreat — I’ve tried most of them, back when I still believed conversation was the fastest route to connection. It isn’t. Not even close.

The fastest route, I’ve learned, is a hill. Preferably a slightly steep one, ideally somewhere between Eauze and Manciet, with the wind doing something unhelpful and everyone’s calves quietly registering complaints.

What Actually Happens on the Climb

Here’s the thing nobody tells you about shared physical effort: it strips away performance almost instantly. On day one, over dinner, guests are still curating themselves a little — the polished version of their job, their reason for coming, their opinions delivered with the faint carefulness of people who’ve just met. Entirely normal. Entirely human.

Then they hit a hill, and within about twenty minutes, all of that curation becomes logistically impossible. Nobody can maintain witty small talk while their lungs are working that hard. What replaces it is much better: short sentences, spontaneous laughter at nothing in particular, someone offering their water bottle to a stranger without a second thought. By the top, four people who were polite acquaintances at brunch have somehow become a small, slightly breathless unit.

I’ve come to think of it as the difference between telling someone who you are and being seen while you’re coping with a challenge. A dinner conversation is the former. An uphill stretch, taken together, is the latter — and it turns out the latter builds trust roughly ten times faster.

The Guest Who Surprised Me

I remember one retreat where a guest — a barrister, sharp, quite guarded on arrival — said almost nothing personal for the first day and a half. Then she hit a long, exposed stretch, not even particularly steep, and about halfway up she started laughing, apparently at her own expense, about how she’d trained for this “by walking briskly to meetings.” By the top, she was telling the group about her father, unprompted, the way you’d mention something to an old friend rather than three people you’d met the day before.

Nothing about that stretch was designed to produce that. It just made pretence too expensive to keep up.

Why I Stopped Over-Engineering the “Bonding”

In the early years, I tried to schedule connection — a reflective circle here, a shared journaling prompt there. Useful, some of it. But I’ve quietly learned to trust the terrain more than my own planning. The gentlest of hills do the work that my carefully worded prompts were only ever approximating. Struggle shared in silence, side by side, seems to build something that struggle discussed rarely manages on its own.

This is partly why I resist the urge to over-schedule our days. If guests spend an hour climbing together without a single planned “activity,” they usually leave that hour closer than they’d have gotten from an evening of structured conversation. The Camino, in this sense, does a fair bit of my job for me — which I’ve made peace with, mostly.

What I’d Tell Anyone Hosting a Retreat

If you’re building any kind of group experience, physical or otherwise, my honest advice is this: stop trying to talk people into closeness. Give them something moderately hard to do together instead, ideally something that makes conversation briefly impossible, and step back.

It won’t feel like it’s working, in the moment. It’ll just look like four people trudging up a hill, a little out of breath, not saying much.

If you’d like to know more about how walking sections of the Camino de Santiago together tends to unfold — hills included — I’d love to hear from you. Write to me directly at MargarethaMontagu@gmail.com and I’ll tell you honestly what to expect.

If your soul is craving fresh air, meaningful movement, and a chance to reconnect with nature and connect with horses, join me on a 5-day/4-night “You’ve Got This” Camino de Santiago Walking Retreat – a powerful, natural reboot for your body, mind, and spirit. No fitness requirements. No forced bonding. No pressure to have a breakthrough. Just one foot in front of the other, and finding your way to a brighter future.

Do you dream of escaping your stressful life to raise a herd of goats or grow sunflowers in the south of France? Then you may be ready for an Esprit Meraki retreat. Get access to this “very serious” quiz to help you figure out how urgent your need for a change of scenery is, when you subscribe to my monthly newsletter.

What Life Lessons Can You Learn While Walking the Camino de Santiago? – a free guide filled with 10 not just “quaint anecdotes” or Instagram-worthy moments (though there are plenty of those) but real transformations from real people who walked this insight-giving trail – Subscribe to my monthly newsletter to Download the Guide

“I am an experienced medical doctor – MBChB, MRCGP, NLP master pract cert, Transformational Life Coach (dip.) Life Story Coach (cert.) Stress Counselling (cert.) Med Hypnotherapy (dip.) and EAGALA (cert.) I may have an impressive number of letters after my name, and more than three decades of professional experience, but what qualifies me to excel at what I do is my intuitive understanding of my clients’ difficulties and my extensive personal experience of managing major life changes using strategies I developed over many years.” Dr M Montagu

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I used to think I was in the walking business.

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After enough Camino de Santiago walking retreats along the Voie du Puy, I’ve had to quietly revise that. I’m not in the walking business. I’m in the business of letting people be someone slightly different for a week — and the walking, as it turns out, is just how we get there.

I noticed this properly years ago when a former guest, Sandrine, wrote to ask about coming back. Not for a different route, mind you — the exact same stretch she’d already walked. When I gently pointed this out, half expecting her to have muddled the details, she said something I’ve never quite stopped thinking about: “I don’t want to see something new. I want to be her again.”

She meant the version of herself who existed for those five days. More intentional. Less apologetic. The one who ate brunch without checking her phone first.

What I Thought I Was Selling

For years, if you’d asked me what guests were paying for, I’d have said: a well-planned route, decent food, farmhouse comfort, good company, maybe a touch of gentle challenge on the hills outside Eauze. All true. All, it turns out, beside the point.

What I’ve come to understand — slowly, and mostly by watching who rebooks and who doesn’t — is that the itinerary is just the scaffolding. It’s necessary, but nobody’s paying for the scaffolding. They’re paying for what the scaffolding lets them become, briefly, without an audience watching them.

I think this is why so few of my guests can tell me, six months later, exactly which villages they passed through. They remember a conversation over taboulé al fresco. They remember Loki, our rather opinionated Falabella, wandering over during brunch as if he had somewhere better to be and had decided brunch looked more interesting. They remember one sentence someone said, unprompted, on a grey Tuesday somewhere between Manciet and Nogaro. They almost never remember the schedule.

The Person Who Shows Up on Day One

Here’s what I’ve learned to watch for now, and it’s changed how I host entirely: the guest who arrives on day one is rarely the guest who leaves on day five, and the gap between those two people is the actual product.

I don’t say that to sound mystical about it — I was a doctor for a long time before any of this, and I’m allergic to that kind of talk. I mean it quite literally. Something about the rhythm of walking, eating, resting, and repeating — with no decisions more complicated than which trail marker to follow — seems to loosen a grip that people have been holding for years without noticing. By the time they leave, they’re not transformed exactly. They’re just… less braced.

And that’s the thing they come back for. Not Manciet. Not Nogaro. Themselves, the unbraced version, briefly available again.

Why I Keep Doing This

I’ll admit there are easier businesses than one built on four farmhouse beds and a handful of dates a year. But I’ve stopped apologising for staying small, because I think this particular thing — the letting-people-be-someone-else-for-a-week thing — simply doesn’t survive in bigger groups.

So if you’ve read this far and something in it landed a little too accurately — if you recognised yourself in Sandrine, or in the version of you that exists mostly in memory now — I’d genuinely like to hear from you. No booking form, not a sales funnel. Just write to me directly at MargarethaMontagu@gmail.com and tell me what brought you here. I read every email myself, and I’ll write back myself too.

Sometimes the most useful thing I can offer before you even decide whether to come is simply to ask: who is it you’re hoping to be again?

If your soul is craving fresh air, meaningful movement, and a chance to reconnect with nature and connect with horses, join me on a 5-day/4-night “You’ve Got This” Camino de Santiago Walking Retreat – a powerful, natural reboot for your body, mind, and spirit. No fitness requirements. No forced bonding. No pressure to have a breakthrough. Just one foot in front of the other, and finding your way to a brighter future.

Do you dream of escaping your stressful life to raise a herd of goats or grow sunflowers in the south of France? Then you may be ready for an Esprit Meraki retreat. Get access to this “very serious” quiz to help you figure out how urgent your need for a change of scenery is, when you subscribe to my monthly newsletter.

What Life Lessons Can You Learn While Walking the Camino de Santiago? – a free guide filled with 10 not just “quaint anecdotes” or Instagram-worthy moments (though there are plenty of those) but real transformations from real people who walked this insight-giving trail – Subscribe to my monthly newsletter to Download the Guide

“I am an experienced medical doctor – MBChB, MRCGP, NLP master pract cert, Transformational Life Coach (dip.) Life Story Coach (cert.) Stress Counselling (cert.) Med Hypnotherapy (dip.) and EAGALA (cert.) I may have an impressive number of letters after my name, and more than three decades of professional experience, but what qualifies me to excel at what I do is my intuitive understanding of my clients’ difficulties and my extensive personal experience of managing major life changes using strategies I developed over many years.” Dr M Montagu

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There’s a number I’ve become slightly obsessive about, and it isn’t a step count.

It’s four.

After years of hosting small group Camino retreats from my farmhouse in Gascony, I’ve come to believe that somewhere between three guests and four, something magical happens. And somewhere between four and five, that same magical something quietly leaves the room.

I didn’t plan it this way, not really. When I started, “small group” was mostly a polite way of saying “I don’t have the budget for a minibus.” But over enough retreats along the Voie du Puy, I noticed a pattern too consistent to be accidental. With three or four people, the group is the experience. With five or more, the group starts managing the experience — schedules, seating, who walks with whom, who feels left out at dinner. You’ve gone from a shared journey to something closer to light committee work, and nobody signed up for that.

The Maths of Connection

Here’s the part that surprised me most: it’s not really about logistics. I could, if I were feeling ambitious, absolutely organise brunch for five. The farmhouse table is long enough, the coffee pot is large enough, and most mornings I have enough enthusiasm, too.

It’s about attention. Every guest I add divides the attention available to each person who’s already there. With four guests, I can notice who’s gone quiet at brunch, who’s favouring their left ankle, who mentioned their mother in passing on day one and might want to circle back to that on day four. With five, I’m noticing the group. I’m managing a shape rather than meeting three or four individual people exactly where they are.

And the guests notice this too, even if they couldn’t tell you why. They arrive expecting a walking holiday and leave, more often than not, surprised by how seen they felt. That doesn’t happen by accident, and it definitely doesn’t happen at scale.

What Five Actually Costs You

I want to be honest about what “five is a committee” really means in practice, because it sounds a bit unreal written down.

It means someone becomes the unofficial pace-setter, and someone else quietly resents them for it. It means the conversations — which are, frankly, where all the good stuff happens — start splitting into two smaller conversations instead of one shared one, and somebody’s always left slightly outside. It means dinner becomes a performance rather than a debrief, because five or more adults around a table naturally reorganise into an audience and a stage, whether they mean to or not.

None of this is dramatic. It’s subtle — a retreat that’s merely nice instead of one that quietly rearranges something in you.

Small By Design, Not By Accident

So when people ask why I cap my groups at three or four guests, the honest answer is: because five changes the chemistry, and I’m not willing to trade what happens at four for what fits in a minibus.

It also means, if I’m honest, that I’ve turned away bookings I could have taken. There’s a particular kind of ache in saying no to a lovely-sounding group of six because I know, deep down, they’d have a fine time — just not the time they’re actually hoping for.

If you’re the kind of person who reads “small group retreat” in a brochure and immediately wonders what “small” actually means — now you know, at least for me. It’s not marketing shorthand. It’s the whole design brief.

I keep the Camino de Santiago walking retreats at Maison Meraki small on purpose, walking sections of the Voie du Puy, with never more than three or four guests at a time. If that sounds like the kind of attention you’d like turned your way for a week, e-mail me at MargarethaMontagu@gmail.com.

If your soul is craving fresh air, meaningful movement, and a chance to reconnect with nature and connect with horses, join me on a 5-day/4-night “You’ve Got This” Camino de Santiago Walking Retreat – a powerful, natural reboot for your body, mind, and spirit. No fitness requirements. No forced bonding. No pressure to have a breakthrough. Just one foot in front of the other, and finding your way to a brighter future.

Do you dream of escaping your stressful life to raise a herd of goats or grow sunflowers in the south of France? Then you may be ready for an Esprit Meraki retreat. Get access to this “very serious” quiz to help you figure out how urgent your need for a change of scenery is, when you subscribe to my monthly newsletter.

What Life Lessons Can You Learn While Walking the Camino de Santiago? – a free guide filled with 10 not just “quaint anecdotes” or Instagram-worthy moments (though there are plenty of those) but real transformations from real people who walked this insight-giving trail – Subscribe to my monthly newsletter to Download the Guide

Author Bio: Dr Margaretha Montagu – described as a “game changer”, “gifted healer”, “guiding light” and “life-enriching author” – is an experienced medical doctor, a certified NLP practitioner, a medical hypnotherapist, an equine-assisted psychotherapist (EAGALAcertified) and a transformational retreat leader who guides her clients through life transitions – virtually, or with the assistance of her Friesian and Falabella horses, at their home in the southwest of France.

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A Camino de Santiago walking retreat host on the quiet exhaustion so many high-achievers mistake for normality

One of the questions I ask every guest when they arrive is, “How are you?”

Almost everyone gives roughly the same answer. “Oh, I’m fine.” Or perhaps, “A bit tired,” usually accompanied by a smile that suggests they’re apologising for even mentioning it.

What I’ve learned after hosting dozens of Camino de Santiago walking retreats is that almost nobody realises quite how tired they really are. I don’t mean the kind of tiredness that a good night’s sleep sorts out. I mean the more debilitating kind — the sort that creeps up so gradually we stop noticing it’s there at all, the way you stop noticing a low hum in a room until someone switches the fan off.

Life has a habit of demanding more than we realise it’s asking. Careers become more draining. Parents grow older. Children leave home — or don’t. Relationships need nurturing. The news gets scarier, the world less predictable than it once seemed, and we adapt, because that’s what human beings do rather well. We keep going, right up until the day we find ourselves standing in front of the fridge, unable to decide what to have for dinner, and wondering when small decisions started feeling quite so difficult.

Many of my guests are remarkably capable people. They’ve built careers, raised families, started businesses, cared for ageing parents, volunteered, and quietly held up friends going through hard times. They’re used to managing a great deal, and they’ve become so good at it that they no longer recognise how much coping they’re actually doing. Competence, it turns out, is an excellent disguise.

Then they arrive here — and for the first day or so, most of them continue at exactly the same pace. They check their phones. They apologise for taking a work call. They tell me they’ll “just quickly” answer a few emails before dinner. I’ve learned not to say very much at this stage. The Camino tends to take care of it without my interference.

My retreats include two or three days walking sections of the historic Le Puy route, alone, carrying little more than lunch, water and perhaps a notebook. On the first morning, many set off with real determination — some even tell me how quickly they expect to finish, as though the Camino were a to-do list of particularly scenic bullet points. I smile, not because they’re wrong exactly, but because they haven’t yet discovered that the Camino will no doubt have other ideas. It’s been here for over a thousand years. It’s not going to be rushed by someone’s Tuesday deadline.

After walking for a while, the pace will begin to slow as you grow physically tired, as will the constant mental commentary, the endless planning, and the invisible pressure to make full use of every single minute. Somewhere between the vineyards and the sunflower fields, the shady woodland paths and the hilltop stone villages, your nervous system seems to breathe out for what may be the first time in years. You’ll start noticing birdsong instead of notifications. The scent of wild mint and thyme replaces the smell of exhaust fumes. It sounds almost ridiculously simple. I rather think it is.

One of the things that fascinates me is how extraordinarily well people sleep during the retreat. They tell me they haven’t slept like that in years, and at first they assume it’s the walking. Walking certainly helps. So does fresh air, and so does good food. But I suspect something more important is going on underneath all that. For the first time in a long while, they stop being vigilant. They stop anticipating the next outrageous demand, stop wondering who desperately needs them, stop worrying about tomorrow before today has even finished. Their bodies finally get the message that, for now, it’s safe to rest.

As a doctor, I spent many years watching what prolonged stress does to people physically. As a retreat host, I’ve become just as interested in what it does emotionally. It shrinks our world. It convinces us that rushing is normal and that rest has to be earned. It whispers that if we stop, even for a moment, everything might quietly fall apart.

Do you know what I’ve noticed, though? It rarely does. Emails wait. Meetings happen without us, somehow. The world carries on spinning with a confidence that is, frankly, a little insulting given how essential we’d assumed we were. We, meanwhile, come home remembering what it feels like not to be running on empty.

The Camino doesn’t remove our responsibilities — they’re all still there when we get back, patiently queuing for attention. What it often removes is the illusion that we have to lug them around every waking moment of every day. Perhaps that’s why so many guests tell me they feel lighter when they leave. Not because their lives have become easier, but because they’ve remembered what it feels like not to be exhausted all the time.

I sometimes think emotional tiredness is rather like living next to a railway line. At first, every passing train keeps you awake. Eventually you stop hearing them altogether — until you spend a few quiet nights in the countryside and suddenly realise just how much noise you’d been living with the whole time, without clocking it.

The Camino offers that kind of quiet. And in it, many people discover something they hadn’t expected: they weren’t lazy, they weren’t unmotivated, and they certainly weren’t “just getting older.” They were simply far more tired than they’d ever allowed themselves to admit.

Could you be more exhausted than you realise?

If you’re longing for a few days to step away from the demands of everyday life, walk the Camino through the peaceful countryside of southwest France, and rediscover what genuine rest actually feels like, I’d love to tell you more about my small-group Camino de Santiago walking retreats.

Sometimes the greatest gift we can give ourselves isn’t another task completed. It’s permission to stop carrying the world on our shoulders for a little while.

You can email me at MargarethaMontagu@gmail.com.

If your soul is craving fresh air, meaningful movement, and a chance to reconnect with nature and connect with horses, join me on a 5-day/4-night “You’ve Got This” Camino de Santiago Walking Retreat – a powerful, natural reboot for your body, mind, and spirit. No fitness requirements. No forced bonding. No pressure to have a breakthrough. Just one foot in front of the other, and finding your way to a brighter future.

Do you dream of escaping your stressful life to raise a herd of goats or grow sunflowers in the south of France? Then you may be ready for an Esprit Meraki retreat. Get access to this “very serious” quiz to help you figure out how urgent your need for a change of scenery is, when you subscribe to my monthly newsletter.

What Life Lessons Can You Learn While Walking the Camino de Santiago? – a free guide filled with 10 not just “quaint anecdotes” or Instagram-worthy moments (though there are plenty of those) but real transformations from real people who walked this insight-giving trail – Subscribe to my monthly newsletter to Download the Guide

“I am an experienced medical doctor – MBChB, MRCGP, NLP master pract cert, Transformational Life Coach (dip.) Life Story Coach (cert.) Stress Counselling (cert.) Med Hypnotherapy (dip.) and EAGALA (cert.) I may have an impressive number of letters after my name, and more than three decades of professional experience, but what qualifies me to excel at what I do is my intuitive understanding of my clients’ difficulties and my extensive personal experience of managing major life changes using strategies I developed over many years.” Dr M Montagu