With great enthusiasm, I put the essence of who I am and everything I have experienced that makes me who I am into my medically-informed mentoring, retreats, courses, and books.
Dr Margaretha Montagu @ Esprit Meraki Retreats
Living my best Life in the southwest of France
After working for 20 years as a medical doctor in a variety of specialities, including psychiatry and general practice, I now live on a small farm in the rolling countryside of southwest France, in an ancient half-timbered farmhouse that has clearly seen several centuries of interesting human decisions. These days my little farm is home to a handful of horses, who occasionally look mildly curious about your life choices, a great deal of peaceful silence, and guests who arrive feeling slightly overworked and leave wondering why they don’t live like this all the time.
I host small retreats here for people who want to recharge their batteries and spend a few days reconnecting with nature. Guests walk short, breathtakingly beautiful sections of the Camino de Santiago that wind through this spectacular region of Gascony, then return to the farmhouse for generous Gascon meals and the kind of quiet evenings that modern life rarely provides. I simply provide the setting: the ancient paths, the countryside, and the famously excellent Gascon cuisine, and the horses occasionally supervise the day’s activities with great seriousness.
When people ask me what I do when I’m not hosting retreats, in the winter months, I tell them that I’m a cartographer, a map maker, a path lighter, a get-through-a-crisis guide. I help people manage stress, rewrite their life stories, and start new chapters, especially people struggling to find their way through life transitions like career changes, starting new businesses, moving to different countries, getting divorced, losing loved ones, and coping with empty nests, debilitating illnesses, retirement – any substantial change – planned or unplanned – in their circumstances.
We go through the same major life changes repeatedly, until we learn the lessons each change offers us. What I do best, is to help people learn that lesson with as little collateral damage as possible and move on.
Sometimes we go through more than one transition at the same time: after a relationship/situationship break-up, we may need to move house, change jobs, or even move to another country to find a new job. Other times, we realise that we are stagnating where we are, and decide to initiate the transition ourselves.
Without a map.
I’ve been there. I understand how challenging life transitions can be, especially transition pile-ups, both personally and professionally. I know what it feels like—the uncertainty, the insecurity, the overthinking, the gut-wrenching fear. In the last 30 years, I have been through several pile-ups, I can’t say it has gotten any easier, but I got better at coping with it, and at learning the life lessons faster, with the steadfast support of my friends and my horses.
Because I’m someone who’s been through a few storms myself, and now helps others read the weather.
So if you feel overwhelmed, stuck, exhausted or burnt out, I’d like to hear from you.
I reply personally to each one I receive.
Dr Margaretha Montagu (MBChB, MRCGP, NLP master pract (cert), Transformational Life Coach (dip), Life Story Coach (cert), Counselling (cert), LCCH Med Hyp Dip and EAGALA (cert) LinkedIn Profile
There’s a lot magic and inspiration in your own story and what you do, your love of your animal children especially, I hope you know that impacts people in the same way the film has. I felt you and this experience brought me peace and light, when I’ve been stuck in sadness and in a fog. So thank you! Maybe life may change but there will always be something better on the other side, the fear is worse than the actual thing, with this trip I felt that with that last day in Camino especially! I hope you continue to have courage for yourself as you help others with their own…Christina P 2025
My Story
I may have a fair number of letters after my name, but that is not what qualifies me to lead retreats, create courses or write books. It is my intuitive understanding of my clients’ difficulties and the strategies that I have developed to cope with what happened to me during the last 30 years that make me good at what I do.
In the last decade, the debilitating eye disease that threatens my sight got dramatically worse. Several unsuccessful operations have left me completely blind in one eye and with limited sight in the other eye.
Somewhere along the line, during the last ten years, I started writing.
Writing was my salvation. I started small, by keeping a journal. I wrote all the pain, doubt, fear and suffering out of my system and onto the pages of my journal. I somehow managed to find something to be grateful for every day. Eventually, I distilled the content of my journals into books: eight books so far, all equine-inspired, life-enriching and subtly French-flavoured.
I wrote these books because I felt an urgent urge to share with as many people as possible how I managed to survive these insufferable years, in case what I have learned can help others cope with equally difficult circumstances.
During the last 30 years, I have learned how to cope with the stress generated by insecurity. Working as a medical doctor already gave me a fair amount of insight, but it was the fear of going blind that was my most merciless instructor.
I developed a whole arsenal full of tried-and-tested strategies to cope with the challenges that came my way, challenges I often have to face with a severely limited number of resources.
In my books and courses, and during my retreats, my horses and I share these strategies with you. My business is called Eprit Meraki. In short, “meraki,” μεράκι, is a Greek word that means “made with love.” It is about putting the essence of who you are, joyfully, into your work – a true and pure labour of love.
Stepping into my New Chapter: Starting my Blog
As I mentioned, I discovered that I liked writing, so I started a blog. I intended the blog to be a shop window showcasing our region, my horses and my retreats. It quickly became much more. Browsing my blog is indeed a bit like visiting me virtually, but it is also a library filled with articles about stress management, confidence building, problem-solving, strengthening relationships, conflict resolution and much more.
Latest blog posts
- Yearning for a Simpler, Slower, Savoured Life
. Six years ago, I suddenly had a strong desire to stop the bus and simply get off. But not in a dramatic “sell everything I own and move to an isolated cabin with an open fireplace in the Pyrenées mountains” sort of way. Although admittedly, after one particularly absurd day recently involving bureaucracy, passwords, …Continue reading “Yearning for a Simpler, Slower, Savoured Life”
- Using The Camino As A Mirror: An Ancient Pilgrim Path Reveals An Uncomfortable Truth
A frank, funny, and surprisingly practical guide to using an ancient pilgrimage as a reset button for anxious, overwhelmed souls, helping them to reconnect with what actually matters What this is: A candid, warm, and occasionally cheeky article about what happens when stressed, switched-on people stop consuming the news and start walking ancient pilgrim roads. … - From Couch to Camino: Discovering Inner Peace, One Step (and One Insight) at a Time
How a Long Walk Can Short-Circuit Your Existential Crisis I’ve been wondering about two things. Firstly, why nearly all of my Camino de Santiago walking retreats guests, often weary from the demands of modern life when they arrive, within just two or three days of treading this ancient path, experience what I call “life-changing incidents … - Book Review: The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho
★★★★★ Reviewed by Margaretha Montagu, host of the Booklover’s Binge Reading and Camino de Santiago Walking Retreats There are books you read, and then there are books that read you. Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist belongs firmly, defiantly, and rather magically in the second category. Published in 1988 and since translated into more than 80 languages, …Continue reading “Book Review: The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho”
- The Camino de Santiago Effect: the Path IS the Teacher
How walking an ancient trail in southwest France can quiet the noise of a world that won’t stop shouting What this is: A thoughtful, grounded exploration of the Camino de Santiago effect, specifically the French routes through southwest France, remains one of the most quietly radical acts of self-renewal available to anyone carrying the weight …Continue reading “The Camino de Santiago Effect: the Path IS the Teacher”
Online Action – Meet me at…
Living here in deepest rural France is pure bliss, but one has to be careful not to become too isolated. Social media is my connection to the world beyond all these glorious sunflower fields, vineyards and woods. When I researched books, I collected a considerable number of quotes, articles and blog posts that I share on BlueSky (@MMontagu.bsky.social) and Instagram. Still, my favourite social media haunt is LinkedIn (MargarethaMontagu.) I’d love to connect there. My Amazon Author Page and Goodreads Author Page. I waste a LOT of time on Pinterest (Margaretha Montagu’s Retreats.)
If you decide to come to one of my potentially life-changing retreats, don’t forget your fur coat, your highest heels and your tiara! If it sounds as if I have lost the plot, click here.
There is one more thing I want you to know.
Despite all my experience, knowledge and qualifications, I am no different from you. I am far from perfect. I do not always practise what I preach. I do not have the answers to all my questions, and I do not have the solutions to all my problems. Like you, I sometimes feel confused and overwhelmed. I am, however, convinced that mindfulness, gratitude and generosity can make a massive difference in your life.
- Interview with Melissa Volpi
- Interview with Hélène T. Stelian downloadable pdf
- Interview with Liz Boulter from the Guardian Newspaper(UK)
- Featured in Cathy Pacific Magazine downloadable pdf
One of my favourite Quotes
“No matter how many scars we carry from what we have gone through and suffered in the past, our intrinsic wholeness is still here: what else contains the scars? None of us has to be a helpless victim of what was done to us or what was not done for us in the past, nor do we have to be helpless in the face of what we may be suffering now. We are also what was present before the scarring—our original wholeness, what was born whole. And we can reconnect with that intrinsic wholeness at any time because its very nature is that it is always present. It is who we truly are.” Jon Kabat-Zinn, Full Catastrophe Living
Ready for a retreat? 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.