Margaretha Montagu - Dr Margaretha Montagu

28/08/202608/08/2026

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

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.

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

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“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

26/08/202608/08/2026

I was Surprised to Discover that my Co-Host Doesn’t Want a Salary

Crosswords Conversation

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.

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.

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.

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.

24/08/202614/07/2026

What Years of Farmhouse Hospitality Taught Me About What Actually Matters to Guests

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.

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.

For the first year or two of hosting Camino de Santiago walking retreats, I worried about the wrong things.

I fretted over the towels. I agonised slightly over whether the guest rooms felt “smart” enough, whether the breakfast presentation looked sufficiently considered, whether I measured up to the polished retreat centres with their infinity pools and their perfectly folded linens. I was, in short, trying to compete in a game I were never going to win — and, as it turns out, never needed to.

I worked this out properly the morning a guest came to brunch, phone already half-raised for a photo of the coffee, and instead found Loki standing just outside the kitchen door, watching her with the mild, unbothered judgment only a Falabella can manage. She forgot about the coffee entirely.

What Guests Actually Talk About Afterwards

I’ve hosted enough retreats now to notice a pattern in what people mention when they write to me weeks or months later. It’s never the linens. Nobody has ever emailed to tell me the thread count moved them. What they mention, almost without fail, is Loki wandering over for a cuddle. Or Angelito’s particular disdain for being photographed – from his non-photogenic side. Or the morning Bianca and Valentino got into some minor dispute in the paddock that briefly upstaged everyone’s croissants.

They remember the farmhouse itself, too — but not for its polish. For its slight imperfections, if I’m honest. The uneven floor of the terrace. The kettle that takes a moment longer than you’d expect. These aren’t flaws I’ve fixed, and increasingly I don’t intend to. A hotel is designed to disappear into competence. A farmhouse, done properly, is designed to feel like somewhere specific — where a personality, an occasionally opinionated one, wanders around outside the kitchen window.

Polish Reassures. Character Connects.

I think what I’ve come to understand is that hotel polish does a very particular job: it reassures you that nothing will go wrong. That’s valuable, certainly, and I don’t begrudge anyone who wants it. But reassurance isn’t the same as connection, and a retreat, at its best, is entirely in the business of connection.

A perfectly pressed duvet doesn’t ask anything of a guest. A small, occasionally chaotic herd of miniature horses wandering past does, in its own quiet way — it invites you to notice something, to soften slightly, to put your phone down for reasons that have nothing to do with a scenic view. I can’t manufacture that kind of moment with better housekeeping. I can only make room for it and get out of the way.

The Charity Behind the Horses

There’s a practical thread running under all of this too, one I don’t always lead with but probably should: the horses guests fall for over dinner aren’t simply farmhouse décor. Loki, Angelito, Zofía, Estrella, Bianca, and Valentino are part of a rescue herd, and their care is supported through Sauvetage et Sérénité. So when a guest lingers at the fence a little longer than planned, or asks — as they almost always do — how they can help, that moment of unpolished, unplanned affection is doing quiet good well beyond the retreat itself.

What I’d Tell Anyone Creating a Retreat

If you’re weighing up whether to chase polish or lean into character, my honest advice, hard-won, is this: stop trying to out-hotel the hotels. Nobody comes to a farmhouse in Gascony for flawlessness. They come, whether they’d put it this way or not, for the specific, slightly imperfect, entirely authentic feeling of somewhere real — and for the small determined horse who’s decided breakfast is also, unofficially, his.

If you’d like to meet the herd for yourself, and see what a retreat at Maison Meraki actually looks like, I’d love to hear from you. Write to me at MargarethaMontagu@gmail.com — I’ll tell you honestly what to expect, horses included.

© MargarethaMontagu – I spend many hours each week happily writing these articles, although less since the advent of AI, hoping that someone will discover one at the exact right moment to make their life a bit easier. If that person is you, please consider donating to my charity Sauvetage et Sérénité, and make someone else’s life a bit easier in turn.

21/08/202608/08/2026

It’s Easier to Talk, Facing Forward, Walking Side by Side

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.

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 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.

19/08/202608/08/2026

Difficult Conversation Coming Up? Talk While Walking Together

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

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.

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’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.

17/08/202614/07/2026

Why Guests Come Back Again and Again: The Real Reason People Rebook a Retreat

I used to think I was in the walking business.

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.

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.

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?

16/08/202608/08/2026

What Horses Can Teach Us About Effective Stress Management

A strange thing happens when you lean your forehead against a horse’s shoulder. I didn’t fully appreciate the stress management effect until a guest, a cardiologist, of all people, told me she could feel her own heart rate drop within about ninety seconds of standing next to Valentino. She wasn’t being poetic. She was, quite literally, timing it.

I wish I could say I discovered this through careful research. I didn’t. For years I walked out to the paddock mid-meltdown, phone still buzzing in my pocket, jaw clenched from some email I hadn’t yet answered, and found that by the time I’d stood next to Valentino for a few minutes, the meltdown had, somewhat revealingly, lost its momentum. Revealing because it’s much harder to stay righteously stressed about something once your body has quietly decided to calm down without giving you advance notice.

The Slow Living Horse

Valentino has a stillness the other horses don’t quite have. He’s not serene, exactly. He’ll still trot the fence line if something interesting happens two fields over, but his baseline is calm in a way that seems to be contagious. Stand next to him for five minutes, and you’ll notice your shoulders relax around minute two, usually without your conscious involvement.

For a long time, I assumed this was just a good feeling, the sort of thing you’d call “grounding” without examining it too closely. But the research on this is more concrete than the wellness-industry language around it would suggest. A systematic review of equine-assisted therapeutic activities found that nearly all the studies reviewed reported a favourable effect on participant heart rate variability, with the activities encouraging a relaxed state by engaging the parasympathetic nervous system, the part of your nervous system responsible for calming you back down after stress, rather than keeping you braced for it. Separate research on veterans with PTSD found that heart rate measured lower during time spent interacting with horses, even when other stress markers didn’t move as dramatically.

Why We’re So Bad at Stress Management

Here’s the frustrating part: nothing about what Valentino does is complicated. He breathes slowly. He’s not rushing anywhere. He’s not holding three unfinished conversations in his head while pretending to be present for a fourth. And somehow, my own nervous system, sophisticated, evolved, allegedly in charge, takes its cues from his simple, unhurried breathing faster than it ever takes them from my own intention to “just relax.”

I think this is because most of us try to calm down using our minds, which is a bit like trying to fix a flooding bathroom by reasoning with the tap. We tell ourselves to relax, we recite the logic of why the stress isn’t warranted, we make lists of reasons everything is fine, and none of it touches the actual physiological alarm bell that’s ringing underneath. Conscious breathing works for the same reason standing next to Valentino works: it bypasses the argument entirely and goes straight to the body. A slow exhale, deliberately longer than the inhale, does mechanically what a calm horse does simply by existing near you: it nudges the nervous system out of alert mode without requiring you to first win an internal debate about whether you’re allowed to feel calm or not.

I spent two decades in medicine watching people, myself included, try to think their way out of a stress response. It was never going to work through. It only works through the body, through breath, through stillness, through something slower nearby that the nervous system can access.

Borrowing Someone Else’s Calm

You don’t need a horse for this, though I’ll admit having one helps enormously. What you need is the same principle: something outside your own frantic pace that your body can match itself to. A slow four-count breath. A walk with no destination. Five minutes near something, a person, a pet, a patch of quiet, that isn’t in a hurry.

The mistake most of us make is waiting until we’re already overwhelmed to try this, at which point it feels almost insulting, like being told to calm down mid-panic. It works far better as a small, repeated habit rather than an emergency measure, the same way Valentino isn’t calm because he practised being calm in a crisis. He’s calm because unhurried is simply his baseline, maintained daily, long before any particular stress arrives.

That’s really the whole practice. Not eliminating stress, which isn’t realistic for any of us with functioning lives. Just building in small, regular moments where your body gets to remember what unhurried feels like, so it has somewhere to return to when things do get loud.

Come and meet Valentino

If your version of stress management needs an update, it might not require becoming someone who meditates for an hour each morning before sunrise. A few days here, near horses who have absolutely no interest in your deadlines, tends to do more for a nervous system than most techniques I could describe to you in writing. Come find out for yourself. Valentino keeps his schedule refreshingly open.

Private “I don’t have time for this” Retreat –this 3-day/2-night, bespoke, one-on-one retreat on the Camino de Santiago in the sun-blessed southwest of France enables you to press pause, connect with a small herd of Friesian and Falabella horses, recalibrate your inner compass, and return to your life rested, rooted and realigned with who you are now.

© Dr. Margaretha Montagu, Esprit Meraki

Reference: The Effects of Equine Assisted Therapy on Plasma Cortisol and Oxytocin Concentrations and Heart Rate Variability in Horses and Measures of Symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder in Veterans. ScienceDirect (published Feb 2018). View

15/08/202609/08/2026

The Importance of Knowing the Difference Between Being Alone and Feeling Lonely

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.

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.

One of the questions I’m asked most often is whether my guests feel lonely walking the Camino on their own.

The answer surprises many people.

Almost never.

People often assume that solitude and loneliness are the same thing. They aren’t. In fact, after hosting dozens of Camino de Santiago walking retreats over the years, I’ve become convinced that they are almost opposites.

Loneliness is the painful feeling of being disconnected.

Solitude is the peaceful experience of being connected—to yourself.

Modern life doesn’t always make room for that distinction.

We spend much of our lives surrounded by people. We work in teams, attend meetings, answer messages, join family gatherings and dutifully keep up with social media. Ironically, we can be in constant contact with others while feeling increasingly disconnected from ourselves.

Then, when we’re finally alone, it can feel rather unfamiliar.

A little like discovering you’ve been introduced to someone you should have known all your life.

Yourself.

When guests arrive at my farmhouse in southwest France, some are slightly apprehensive about walking the Camino alone. They wonder whether they’ll become bored, lonely or perhaps a little anxious.

“What if I don’t know what to think about for all those hours?” someone asked me recently.

I smiled.

“I suspect you’ll find something.”

The Camino has been answering that question for centuries.

Please don’t misunderstand me. Human connection matters enormously. Some of the warmest moments of every retreat happen around the dinner table, where stories are shared over good food and in good company, laughter comes easily, and complete strangers somehow end up feeling like old friends. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve heard someone say, “I feel as though I’ve known you all for years.”

There is something about walking the Camino that strips away the need for small talk. After spending the day walking on your own, you’ll no longer feel the need to impress anyone or keep up appearances. Conversations will become gentler, deeper and, quite often, surprisingly funny. There is something wonderfully liberating about admitting that you’ve spent twenty minutes trying to identify a bird that turned out to be a scarecrow, or that you had an entire conversation with a cow because it was the only soul around for miles. The Camino has a marvellous way of restoring our sense of perspective—and occasionally our sense of humour.

I’ve also noticed that the guests who are most anxious about walking alone are often the very people who embrace it most wholeheartedly. They set off with a little apprehension, wondering whether they’ll become lonely, only to return glowing with the quiet satisfaction that comes from having enjoyed their own company.

Some even tell me, almost apologetically, that they wished the walk had been a little longer.

Not because they wanted to cover more kilometres, but because, somewhere along the path, they had rediscovered something precious. They had remembered that being alone isn’t the same as being lonely.

In fact, once the noise of everyday life begins to fade, solitude can feel unexpectedly nourishing.

Perhaps that is one of the Camino’s quietest gifts. It doesn’t remove loneliness from our lives—few things can—but it reminds us that we already possess the ability to enjoy our own company. That is an important distinction, particularly in a world that seems determined to fill every spare moment with noise, distraction or another glowing screen demanding our attention.

When guests return home, they often tell me that something has definitely changed. They find themselves taking walks without automatically reaching for their phone. They spend a quiet hour in the garden without feeling guilty. They begin to understand that silence isn’t something to be filled; sometimes it is something to be treasured.

I think my guests have taught me this lesson more clearly than anyone else ever could. Loneliness isn’t always the absence of other people. Quite often, it’s the absence of a meaningful relationship with ourselves.

Loneliness the absence of a meaningful relationship with ourselves. Dr Margaretha Montagu

The Camino, walked at an unhurried pace through the vineyards, forests and sleepy villages of southwest France, has a gentle way of helping us rediscover that relationship. And once we’ve found it again, we realise that walking alone can be one of the least lonely experiences in the world.

Could you do with a little more solitude and a little less noise?

If the thought of spending a few peaceful days walking the Camino de Santiago through the beautiful countryside of southwest France appeals to you, I’d love to tell you more about my small-group walking retreats.

You might discover that walking alone is one of the least lonely things you’ll ever do.

You can email me at MargarethaMontagu.com.

14/08/202614/07/2026

Small Group Retreats: Four Is a Group. Five Is a Committee.

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.

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.

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.

13/08/202609/08/2026

Walking Together Quotes – Why Some Are Meaningful and Others Less So

I love collecting meaningful quotes because I’m a hoarder at heart. Just collecting quotes for the sake of collecting them is no longer as satisfying as it used to be. These days, I tend to ponder the meaning of each quote before I add it to my collection. Must be something to do with getting older.

But what makes a quote meaningful? To me specifically, or in general? To find out, I took 9 “walking together” quotes, sticking to my Camino de Santiago walking theme, and explored their philosophical, psychological, spiritual, and evolutionary dimensions.

Some of them made it onto my list, and I’ll share these during my Camino de Santiago walking retreats; but most did not, though. Which ones do you think are worth remembering?

The metaphor of “walking together” is one of the most powerful and enduring motifs in human literature, philosophy, religion, and science. Across diverse domains – friendship, leadership, romance, spiritual community, peacemaking, and evolutionary history – walking side by side serves as a universal symbol for companionship, shared purpose, and mutual respect.

1. Albert Camus: Friendship and Equality

“Don’t walk in front of me; I may not follow. Don’t walk behind me, I may not lead. Just walk beside me and be my friend.” — Albert Camus [1]

Meaning and Analysis

Often attributed to Albert Camus (though occasionally to other literary figures like Elie Wiesel or Antoine de Saint-Exupéry), this quote redefines the traditional hierarchies inherent in human relationships. Hierarchical relationships are typically structured around dominance and subordination: leaders walk in front to guide or command subordinates who trail behind.

Camus rejects both ends of this hierarchy:

•Rejecting taking the Lead: Walking in front implies authority, prescription, and dependency. Camus notes, “I may not follow,” emphasising individual autonomy and freedom—a central pillar of his existentialist philosophy. An individual cannot be coerced or blindly led.

•Rejecting Subordination: Walking behind implies subservience, tracking, or imitation. Camus notes, “I may not lead,” refusing to place another person in a position of subservience where they must constantly look up to him for direction.

•The Egalitarian Ideal: True friendship, according to Camus, exists only in radical equality. Walking beside one another signifies mutual respect, shared pacing, and sovereign companionship. It implies that two individuals travel their respective paths in solidarity, neither demanding submission nor offering blind obedience, but simply sharing presence and mutual support.

Relevance to my Camino walking retreats: On the Camino, social hierarchies (job titles, wealth, status) tend to fall away. Everyone is simply a “pilgrim” (peregrino). This quote sets a beautiful tone for the first day, encouraging participants to see each other as equals and companions rather than leaders or followers. I often use this in my opening orientation to establish a “group culture” of mutual respect.

2. Ratan Tata: Speed versus Sustainability in Collaboration

“If you want to walk fast, walk alone. But if you want to walk far, walk together.” — Ratan Tata [2]

Meaning and Analysis

Rooted in African proverb tradition and popularised in modern leadership discourse by business leaders like Ratan Tata, this maxim contrasts short-term efficiency with long-term resilience and sustainability.

•The Solitary Sprint (Walking Fast): When an individual operates entirely alone, decision-making is frictionless. There is no need for consensus, compromise, or coordination. Consequently, initial progress can be remarkably rapid. However, solitary endurance is strictly limited by individual stamina, resources, and perspective.

•The Collective Journey (Walking Far): Conversely, collective enterprise requires negotiation, alignment, patience, and shared labour. This naturally slows down immediate progress. Yet, collaboration pools diverse skills, distributes emotional and physical burdens, and provides institutional endurance. To achieve monumental, generational goals—whether building a global enterprise, advancing scientific knowledge, or navigating life’s protracted crises—collective synergy is indispensable.

I am not entirely convinced; this statement seems oversimplified to me. As an introvert, I would prefer to do most of my walking alone, although not all. I am more productive on my own, but I do value interactions with others, of limited duration.

3. Virginia Alison: Solitude

“When you feel solitude is your only option, never be afraid to accept a gentle smile from a friend, and the warmth of another’s hand in yours. Walking together is a better option, than walking alone….” — Virginia Alison [3]

Meaning and Analysis

Virginia Alison’s reflection addresses the psychological landscape of isolation and the therapeutic power of human connection.

•The Trap of Solitude: Moments of profound grief, trauma, or existential crisis often trick the mind into believing that isolation is the only safe or authentic option. Suffering can lead to emotional withdrawal, where individuals erect barriers under the guise of independence.

•The Courage of Vulnerability: The quote highlights that accepting comfort is not a sign of weakness, but an act of courage. A “gentle smile” and the “warmth of another’s hand” require no grand gestures; they are subtle, grounding reminders of shared humanity.

•Redefining the Journey: Walking together does not instantly erase hardship, but it fundamentally alters how hardship is experienced. Shared burdens lose their crushing weight, proving that companionship is a sanctuary against despair.

Once again, since solitude is my favourite condition, I would prefer to process most of my grief and hardships on my own, but I do see the value of support from friends, colleagues and family, and of a therapist when needed.

4. Helen Keller: Shared Suffering

“Walking with a friend in the dark is better than walking alone in the light.” — Helen Keller [4]

Meaning and Analysis

Spoken by Helen Keller—who famously lost both her sight and hearing at an early age—this statement carries profound biographical and psychological weight.

•The Illusion of Solitary Light: “Walking alone in the light” represents favourable circumstances, clarity, and ease. Yet, an unshared journey in favourable conditions remains lonely and devoid of relational depth.

•The Power of Shared Darkness: “The dark” symbolises suffering, confusion, grief, and adversity. Navigating darkness alone is terrifying and disorienting. However, when accompanied by a trusted friend, the terror dissipates.

•The Supremacy of Connection over Circumstance: Keller asserts that emotional and relational intimacy supersedes external comfort. A difficult reality shared with someone who understands and cares is infinitely more valuable than effortless ease experienced in isolation.

5. Khalil Gibran: Romantic Partnership as a Shared Odyssey

“The most wonderful thing, Mary, is that you and I are always walking together, hand in hand, in a strangely beautiful world, unknown to other people. We both stretch one hand to receive from Life – and Life is generous indeed.” — Khalil Gibran [5]

Meaning and Analysis

Drawn from the correspondence of poet and philosopher Khalil Gibran to Mary Haskell, this quote captures the transcendent, intimate experience of profound romantic love and spiritual kinship.

•A Private Universe: Gibran describes intimacy as creating a shared reality. While the physical world is shared by billions, deep love constructs a “strangely beautiful world” accessible only to the couple. It is an internal landscape built on mutual understanding, shared aesthetic and spiritual appreciation, and emotional sanctuary.

•Joint Receptivity: The imagery of walking “hand in hand” while stretching out “one hand to receive from Life” emphasises harmonious partnership. They do not compete for life’s bounty; rather, they face existence as a unified front, mutually enriched by the generosity of lived experience.

6. Pope Francis: Complementarity in Marriage

“This is what marriage is all about – Man and woman walking together, wherein the husband helps his wife to become ever more a woman, and wherein the woman has the task of helping her husband to become ever more a man.” — Pope Francis [6]

Meaning and Analysis

Pope Francis frames marriage not merely as a legal contract or romantic arrangement, but as a dynamic, teleological journey of mutual moral and personal maturation.

•Dynamic Teleology: Becoming “ever more a woman” and “ever more a man” in Catholic theology refers to the realisation of one’s full human and spiritual potential through relational self-gift (donum sui).

•Mutual Sanctification: The journey requires active, intentional stewardship. Spouses are tasked with drawing out the virtues, strength, tenderness, and authenticity of one another. Walking together in marriage is an ongoing process of mutual refinement, where vulnerability and strength balance each other across a lifetime.

7. Anne Lamott: Communal Resilience Against Despair

“A whole lot of us believers, of all different religions, are ready to turn back the tide of madness by walking together, in both the dark and the light – in other words, through life – registering voters as we go, and keeping the faith.” — Anne Lamott [7]

Meaning and Analysis

Anne Lamott’s perspective grounds “walking together” in socio-political activism, interfaith solidarity, and civic duty.

•Confronting Societal Madness: The “tide of madness” represents political polarisation, injustice, cynicism, and social decay. Solitary resistance against systemic crises easily leads to burnout and despair.

•Interfaith and Civic Solidarity: Lamott emphasises coalition-building across diverse religious and ideological lines. By walking together “through life,” individuals pool moral authority and practical energy.

•Actionable Hope: Walking together is paired with concrete civic action (“registering voters as we go”) and spiritual resilience (“keeping the faith”). Hope is treated not as a passive sentiment, but as an active, communal discipline.

Relevance to my Camino walking retreats: The Camino attracts people of all faiths (and none). Lamott’s quote captures the “interfaith” and “spiritual but not necessarily religious” vibe of the modern Camino. It frames the walk as a way to find peace amidst the “madness” of the modern world. This one is excellent for a morning routine reflection or a moment of silence at a historic chapel or waypoint along the route.

8. Thich Nhat Hanh: Mindful Reconciliation and Peacemaking

“When we come to the table, we shouldn’t negotiate right away. We should spend time walking together, eating together, making acquaintance, telling each other about our own suffering, without blame or condemnation. It takes maybe one, two, three weeks to do that. And if communication and understanding are possible, negotiation will be easier. So if I am to organise a peace negotiation, I will organise it in that way.” — Thich Nhat Hanh [8]

Meaning and Analysis

Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh applies walking together as a foundational methodology for conflict resolution and peacebuilding.

•De-escalation Through Shared Humanity: Formal negotiations often fail because parties enter adversarial spaces entrenched in positions, suspicion, and hostility. By preceding negotiation with shared daily rituals—walking, eating, and storytelling—opponents humanise one another.

•Narrative Empathy: Sharing personal suffering “without blame or condemnation” shifts the paradigm from fault-finding to trauma-recognition. When adversaries realise each other’s pain and fear, the psychological barriers to compromise dissolve, making sustainable peace achievable.

Relevance to my Camino walking retreats: The Camino is famous for “Camino Magic”—the deep, vulnerable conversations that happen between strangers while walking. Nhat Hanh’s emphasis on walking and eating together as a precursor to understanding perfectly describes the rhythm of a retreat. I sometimes use this at the start of a communal dinner where participants talk about why they chose to walk the Camino.

9. Richard Dawkins: Evolutionary Deep Time and Shared Origins

“More poignant for us, at Laetoli in Tanzania are the companionable footprints of three real hominids, probably Australopithecus afarensis, walking together 3.6 million years ago in what was then fresh volcanic ash. Who does not wonder what these individuals were to each other, whether they held hands or even talked, and what forgotten errand they shared in a Pliocene dawn?” — Richard Dawkins [9]

Meaning and Analysis

Richard Dawkins shifts the lens from contemporary philosophy and sociology to evolutionary deep time, contemplating the fossilised footprints discovered at Laetoli.

•The Antiquity of Companionship: The Laetoli footprints demonstrate that bipedalism and social companionship are ancient, foundational traits of the hominid lineage. Long before recorded history, philosophy, or religion, our ancestors walked together.

•Existential Wonder: Dawkins evokes a profound sense of temporal kinship. The shared errand in a “Pliocene dawn” bridges a 3.6-million-year chasm. It reminds modern humans that the instinct to walk in company, share a journey, and forge bonds is written into our very biological heritage.

Relevance to my Camino walking retreats: The Camino is a path walked by millions over a thousand years. Dawkins’ quote expands that perspective to millions of years. It reminds pilgrims that walking together is the most fundamental human act. It adds a sense of “deep time” to the French landscape they are traversing. This quote is perfect when discussing the ancient history (1000 years!) of this pilgrimage route.

This is your invitation to leave the noise of the modern world behind and step onto a path that has been walked for a thousand years. My 3- or 5-day Camino de Santiago retreats in Southwest France offer more than just a scenic hike; it is a return to the fundamental rhythm of being present in the moment. In the spirit of the ancient peregrinos, my guests walk not as leaders or followers, but as equals—sharing the road, the table, and the quiet magic of the French countryside.

If you’re both constantly juggling responsibilities, and the conversations that used to come easily now feel like one more thing on the to-do list, this 5-day/4-night Camino de Santiago “Back in Sync” Couples Hiking Retreat is for you. It offers a complete escape from routine, giving you time to reconnect with each other and remember what drew you together in the first place.

Escape to a cosy 200-year-old farmhouse in the heart of Gascony for a blissful binge reading retreat where your only responsibilities are choosing your next book, enjoying delicious meals, and deciding whether to read by the fire or in a sunny corner. The Book Lovers’ Reading Retreat is your permission slip to slow down, switch off, and indulge in uninterrupted reading time — without cooking, cleaning, shopping, or anyone asking, “Have you finished that book yet?”

Escape the noise, the endless to-do lists, and the pressure to have everything figured out for 5-days and 4 nights with the Uncensored Journaling Retreat — a few precious days to slow down, pick up your pen, and finally sort out your thoughts. Surrounded by the peaceful beauty of Gascony, you’ll enjoy quiet mornings, delicious food, gentle Camino de Santiago walks, meaningful conversations, and the freedom to write without rules, expectations, or anyone peeking over your shoulder.

Summary Comparative Table

Quote Author	Primary Domain	Core Philosophical Message
Albert Camus	Friendship	True friendship requires radical equality, rejecting both dominance and subservience.
Ratan Tata	Leadership	Solitary efforts achieve speed, but collective collaboration achieves long-term endurance.
Virginia Alison	Psychology	Vulnerability and accepting human touch are essential antidotes to isolation.
Helen Keller	Resilience	Emotional connection in adversity outweighs solitary ease in favourable conditions.
Khalil Gibran	Romantic Love	Deep intimacy builds a private universe where partners face life’s generosity together.
Pope Francis	Marriage	Marriage is a lifelong journey of mutual spiritual formation and complementary growth.
Anne Lamott	Faith	Communal solidarity and active civic engagement turn back societal division and despair.
Thich Nhat Hanh	Ethics	Preceding negotiation with shared human experiences heals conflict and enables peace.
Richard Dawkins	Evolutionary Science	Walking together is an ancient, fundamental biological heritage rooted in deep time.

References

1.Camus, A. (Attributed). Philosophical Reflections on Friendship.

2.Tata, R. (Attributed). Business Leadership and Collective Endurance.

3.Alison, V. Reflections on Solitude and Human Connection.

4.Keller, H. The Story of My Life and Philosophical Musings.

5.Gibran, K. (1923). Letters to Mary Haskell.

6.Francis, Pope. Audiences and Teachings on the Theology of Marriage.

7.Lamott, A. Travelling Together Through Faith and Civic Action.

8.Nhat Hanh, T. (2003). Creating True Peace: Ending Conflict in Yourself, Your Family, Your World. Penguin Books.

9.Dawkins, R. (2004). The Ancestor’s Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Life. Houghton Mifflin.