Dr Margaretha Montagu – described as a “game changer”, “gifted healer”, “guiding light” and “life-enriching author” – is a certified transformational retreat leader who guides her clients towards their most meaningful and fulfilling lives, particularly when navigating life transitions – virtually, or with the assistance of her Friesian Horses, at their home in the southwest of France.
Why bother figuring out your life purpose at all? Because a life without one runs on autopilot. Every decision, from which job to take to how to spend a Tuesday, starts to feel arbitrary, and that’s exhausting in a way that’s hard to pinpoint. You end up making the same choices over and over, not because they’re right, but because deciding anything else feels like too much effort.
Purpose doesn’t necessarily mean discovering one grand, lifelong mission. It can simply mean becoming clearer about what makes your life feel worthwhile and where you want to direct your time, energy and attention.
Some of the most meaningful benefits are:
Greater clarity about what matters Purpose gives you a way of distinguishing between what is genuinely important to you and what you’ve simply been conditioned to pursue.
Better decisions When you know what matters, decisions become easier. You can ask, “Does this move me towards the life I want, or away from it?” That can be particularly valuable during major life transitions.
A stronger sense of direction Purpose provides a kind of internal compass. You may not know exactly where you’re going, but you have a better idea of which direction feels right.
More motivation We tend to have more energy for things that feel meaningful. Purpose can turn “I have to” into “I want to.”
Greater resilience Having something that matters to you can make difficulties easier to navigate. It doesn’t remove adversity, but it can give you a reason to keep going through it.
Less susceptibility to other people’s expectations A clear sense of purpose can help you stop measuring your life primarily by conventional markers such as status, income, achievement or other people’s approval.
A greater sense of meaning Purpose connects the everyday things you do with something larger than the immediate task. Even ordinary activities can feel more satisfying when you understand why they matter to you.
More satisfying use of your time Once you know what you value, it becomes easier to notice how much of your life is being spent on things that don’t actually matter to you—and to make different choices.
A stronger sense of identity Particularly after retirement, divorce, burnout, children leaving home, career changes or other major transitions, purpose can help answer the uncomfortable question: “Who am I now?”
Greater wellbeing Research generally associates having a strong sense of purpose in life with better psychological wellbeing and, in many studies, better physical health outcomes as well. The important caveat is that purpose is associated with these outcomes; it isn’t a magic prescription for health.
How purposeful and meaningful is your life, right now? Take the quiz.
Perhaps the biggest benefitof finding your life purpose
I would put coherence at the heart of it.
A purposeful life tends to make more sense to the person living it. Your values, choices, relationships, work and use of time begin to fit together rather than feeling like a collection of unrelated obligations.
And purpose doesn’t have to be grandiose.
It might be:
I want to make the second half of my life quieter, more meaningful and more fulfilling.
Or:
I want to create a life in which there is time for the people Ilove and the places I still want to see.
That can be every bit as much a purpose as “I want to change the world.”
In fact, for people who have spent years achieving, performing and meeting expectations, finding purpose can sometimes be less about discovering what more they should do and more about discovering what is actually worth doing now.
The Life Purpose Pivot Challenge
Unlike your grandparents, nobody’s handing you a purpose anymore. No village, no tribe, no fixed role waiting for you at forty, fifty, sixty. You have to construct it yourself, from scratch, in the middle of a life that’s already fully underway. That’s either terrifying or the most freeing thing you’ll ever do, depending entirely on whether you have a map.
My Purpose Pivot Challenge is such a map, and it doesn’t stop at insight. Seven modules, structured on the same path that’s carried pilgrims for a thousand years, walking you from acknowledging where you actually are, through processing what’s ending, finding your own inner compass, rebuilding your relationships around who you’re becoming, surviving the doubt that shows up right on schedule, and finally translating all of it into a concrete blueprint you can actually live. Twenty-one journaling prompts. Seven practical exercises. Real stories from people who’ve done exactly this, from a former COO to a former elite triathlete rebuilding a shattered identity. Optional 1:1 mentoring if you want a hand to hold along the way. All of it, self-paced, for a one-time €39.
A year from now, time will have passed either way. The only real question is whether you’ll be further along the path, or still standing at the same crossroads, asking the same question.
The Purpose Pivot Challenge – drawing inspiration from the Camino de Santiago, this transformative course guides you through a proven framework to recalibrate your authentic purpose and create a meaningful and fulfilling next act. Get immediate access
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.
If you love walking, you may have come across the term walking retreat and wondered how on earth it differs from an organised walking holiday. After all, both involve beautiful countryside, well-worn walking shoes, fresh air and a few days away from everyday life. There may even be a backpack involved, although hopefully not one containing the entire contents of your bathroom cabinet.
So what is the difference?
The simplest answer is this: an organised walking holiday is primarily about the walking, while a walking retreat is about what the walking gives you the opportunity to discover.
A walking holiday might take you through spectacular landscapes, historic villages or famous long-distance trails. You may have a carefully planned itinerary, a guide, a group of fellow walkers and a target number of kilometres to cover each day.
A walking retreat can include some of those things, but its purpose is different. The walking becomes a way of slowing down, creating mental space and reconnecting with yourself.
And sometimes, when life has become complicated, that is exactly what you need.
What is a walking retreat?
A walking retreat combines walking with time for rest, reflection and personal renewal. Rather than simply travelling somewhere because you want to walk through a beautiful landscape, you are deliberately stepping away from your normal routine to create some time for yourself.
That might mean walking through vineyards and woodland in southwest France, following a section of the Camino de Santiago, practising walking meditation, journaling, reading, sitting quietly or simply allowing your mind to wander.
There is no requirement to arrive with a five-year plan for your life. You don’t need to have a dramatic crisis, either. And you certainly don’t have to leave as a completely transformed human being who has discovered their life’s purpose somewhere between lunch and afternoon tea.
A walking retreat can be much quieter than that.
You might simply need time to think. Time to breathe. Time to sleep. Time to make a decision. Or simply time to hear yourself think without somebody asking what you’re doing next.
An organised walking holiday is usually designed around the experience of walking through a particular destination. The route and the places you visit are often the main attraction.
You might walk part of the Camino de Santiago, explore the French countryside, hike in the mountains or follow a coastal trail. Depending on the type of walking holiday you choose, your accommodation, meals, luggage transfers, transport and walking routes may all be organised for you.
There may be a guide or a group of other walkers, and there may be a satisfying sense of achievement involved in completing each day’s walk.
The emphasis is generally on exploring, experiencing and walking.
And there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. If your idea of bliss is discovering a new landscape, challenging yourself physically, completing a particular route or sharing an adventure with other people, an organised walking holiday could be exactly what you’re looking for.
A walking retreat simply has a different intention.
Walking holiday or walking retreat: which one is right for you?
The difference becomes much clearer when you think about what you actually want from your time away.
On an organised walking holiday, you may be thinking about the route, the destination and how many kilometres you are going to cover. On a walking retreat, the questions may be rather different: How am I feeling? What have I been avoiding thinking about? What do I actually want now? Why have I been saying yes to things I really want to say no to? And when did I last have a whole afternoon without somebody needing something from me?
One experience is not better than the other. They simply answer different needs.
If you want adventure, exploration and the satisfaction of covering a beautiful route, a walking holiday may be perfect.
If you are looking for rest, reflection and a little breathing room in which to work out what comes next, a walking retreat may be what you need.
Sometimes the difficulty is that we don’t realise which one we need until we arrive.
What if you don’t want to walk in a group?
This is one of the questions people sometimes hesitate to ask. Can you go on a walking retreat without having to interact with others?
Absolutely.
For some people, the idea of joining a walking group sounds delightful. They enjoy the conversation, the camaraderie and the shared experience.
For others, it sounds suspiciously like work.
They don’t want to spend five days making conversation with strangers. They don’t want to walk at somebody else’s pace. They don’t want to feel guilty because they’d rather eat their lunch quietly than participate in a lively discussion about where everyone comes from and what they did before breakfast.
And there is nothing wrong with that.
A solo walking retreat can offer something that is surprisingly difficult to find in ordinary life: genuine solitude.
You can walk alone. You can stop when you want. You can take photographs, sit beneath a tree, write in your journal, have a coffee, or simply stare at the landscape for ten minutes without feeling that you ought to be doing something more productive.
There can still be companionship and conversation when you want it. But solitude isn’t treated as a problem that needs fixing.
For many people, that is precisely what they came for.
There is something about walking that makes thinking easier.
Perhaps it’s the rhythm. One foot follows the other. The landscape changes slowly. Your breathing settles. Your attention gradually moves away from the endless stream of emails, notifications, responsibilities and decisions.
You aren’t sitting at a desk trying desperately to solve your life. You’re walking.
And somehow, thoughts that have been stubbornly stuck can begin to move.
You may start thinking about a conversation you’ve been avoiding, a decision you’ve been postponing, a career that no longer feels right or what you actually want now that your children have left home. You might be wondering what retirement is going to mean, what comes after divorce, how to begin again after bereavement or simply why your life no longer feels quite like yours.
A retreat isn’t a machine for producing answers. It is an opportunity to create enough space for the questions to become clearer.
Walking meditation: when the journey becomes the practice
Walking retreats can also incorporate mindful walking or walking meditation.
Unlike traditional meditation, you aren’t required to sit cross-legged in perfect stillness while attempting to empty your mind of every thought you’ve had since 1987.
You simply walk.
You notice your feet, your breathing, the movement of your body, the sounds around you, the landscape and the changing light. You notice the sensation of being outdoors. And when your mind wanders, you notice that too.
The point isn’t to stop thinking. It is to become more aware of what is happening while you are thinking.
That makes walking particularly valuable when you are feeling overwhelmed or when life has become so busy that you’ve lost touch with yourself.
There is something wonderfully simple about it. You don’t need special equipment, an app, a subscription or a mat that costs more than your first car.
You just need to walk.
Alistair thought he was coming on a walking holiday
One of my favourite examples of the difference between a walking holiday and a walking retreat came from a guest who arrived at the farmhouse thinking he was coming on a walking holiday.
He liked walking. He liked the idea of being in the French countryside. He liked the idea of several days away from home. So when he booked, that’s how he thought of it.
A walking holiday.
He was slightly surprised when I explained that he would be walking alone. He had a route, he had everything he needed, and he could stop whenever he liked. He could take as long as he wanted. There was no group waiting for him at the next turning and nobody keeping track of his progress.
He looked at me as though I had perhaps omitted a fairly important part of the itinerary.
“So I’m really walking on my own?”
“Yes.”
“For the whole walk?”
“Yes.”
And off he went.
When he returned several hours later, he was noticeably different. Not dramatically transformed. He hadn’t discovered the secret of eternal happiness somewhere between two French villages. He had simply had several hours without anyone asking anything of him.
Apparently, that was exactly what he needed.
Over the next few days, the walking became less important than the space it created. He thought. He noticed things. He considered decisions he had been putting off. He began to think about what he wanted the next chapter of his life to look like.
Towards the end of his stay, he laughed and admitted that he had arrived expecting a walking holiday.
He now realised that he hadn’t really come for the walking.
You don’t have to come for a life-changing experience
There is another misconception about retreats worth clearing up.
You don’t have to want to change your entire life. You don’t have to have a five-year plan. You don’t have to discover your purpose. You don’t have to make any major decisions at all.
Perhaps you simply need a few days away from your normal environment.
Perhaps you’re exhausted.
Perhaps you’ve spent years looking after everyone else and have forgotten what you actually enjoy.
Perhaps you’re approaching retirement and aren’t sure what comes next. Perhaps your children have left home and the house suddenly feels strangely quiet. Perhaps you’ve been through a divorce or another major life change and need some breathing space.
Or perhaps nothing is particularly wrong. You just know that something needs to be different.
A walking retreat gives you permission to explore that without pressure.
You don’t have to fix yourself.
You aren’t a broken appliance.
You simply need some time and space to listen to yourself again.
A walking retreat isn’t about how many kilometres you walk
One of the biggest differences between a walking holiday and a walking retreat is the relationship with achievement.
On a walking holiday, there can be a satisfying sense of accomplishment in completing a route. Ten kilometres. Fifteen kilometres. Twenty kilometres. Another stage completed. Another destination reached.
On a retreat, the number of kilometres may matter much less.
Perhaps you walk ten kilometres. Perhaps you stop halfway because you’ve found a beautiful place to sit. Perhaps you spend twenty minutes looking at a field of sunflowers. Perhaps you become absorbed in your thoughts and take a completely unhurried lunch.
The point isn’t to prove anything.
The point is to give yourself time.
Time that isn’t measured in emails answered, appointments attended, tasks completed or kilometres walked.
That can be the ultimate luxury.
You may not return transformed. You may simply return clearer.
I rather like the idea that a retreat doesn’t necessarily have to transform you.
Transformation is a rather grand word.
Sometimes clarity is enough.
You might return home knowing what you need to do next. Or knowing what you don’t want to do. You might realise that you need to say no more often. You might remember something you used to love. You might finally acknowledge that you’re tired.
You might make peace with the fact that you don’t yet know what comes next.
Or you might simply feel rested.
Sometimes that’s more valuable than another ten-point plan for reinventing your life.
So, what is the difference between a walking retreat and a walking holiday?
Ultimately, it comes down to intention.
A walking holiday asks:
Where shall we walk?
A walking retreat asks:
What might become possible if I give myself time to think while I walk?
A walking holiday takes you somewhere.
A walking retreat can help you find your way again.
And that can be particularly powerful when you are standing at one of life’s crossroads.
Perhaps you’re asking yourself, What now?
Perhaps the old version of your life no longer fits, but the new one hasn’t quite taken shape yet. Perhaps you don’t need advice. Perhaps you don’t need another book, podcast, productivity system or inspirational quote telling you to become the best version of yourself by Tuesday.
Perhaps you need to get away from the noise.
Put on your walking shoes.
Step outside.
And walk.
Not to escape your life. Not necessarily to change it. Just far enough away from the noise to see it clearly.
Because sometimes, somewhere between one footstep and the next, you begin to hear something you’ve been unable to hear for a very long time:
your own voice.
And perhaps that is what a walking retreat is really for.
Not to take you away from your life, but to give you enough space to decide where you want to take it next.
Ready to find your way again?
If you’re beginning to suspect that what you need isn’t another ordinary holiday but a few days in which to slow down, walk, think and reconnect with yourself, you may be ready for a different kind of Camino experience.
My Camino de Santiago Walking Retreats in southwest France combine sections of this ancient pilgrimage route with time and space for reflection, rest and perspective. They are deliberately small and intimate, with no forced bonding, no pressure to have a breakthrough and no requirement to prove how many kilometres you can conquer.
Just beautiful countryside, a little time away from ordinary life, and the opportunity to discover what becomes clearer when you stop rushing.
Perhaps you don’t need to walk all the way to Santiago.
Perhaps you simply need to walk far enough to find yourself again.
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.
“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
AI has revolutionised online learning in ways we could never have imagined.
These days, you can ask AI to create a course on almost anything—from astrophysics to how to keep your houseplants alive—and it will hand you a neatly structured programme in seconds. Want six modules? No problem. Learning objectives, worksheets, quizzes, reflection questions and suggested reading? Done.
The smarter your prompting skills, the slicker your course.
AI-generated courses are now popping up everywhere, at every price point imaginable. And, quite honestly, much of the information available in paid online courses can now be found—or generated—for free.
Which raises a perfectly reasonable question.
So then… why are people still buying online courses?
And, more specifically, why are my courses still selling?
The answer is surprisingly simple: I don’t just hand you information. I help you do something with it.
Because information, however brilliant, does not automatically change your life. Knowing what to do is not the same thing as actually doing it, and that is where most of us get stuck.
Welcome to the Digital Graveyard of Half-Finished Courses
I must confess.
I have bought online courses that I was absolutely convinced were going to change my life. I enrolled enthusiastically, downloaded the workbook and watched the welcome video. I may even have completed Module One.
And then life happened.
The course disappeared beneath emails, appointments, shopping lists, family responsibilities and whatever unexpected drama decided to arrive that week.
Sound familiar?
Most of us have a digital graveyard of half-finished courses gathering virtual dust somewhere. There are courses we meant to complete, courses we were genuinely excited about and courses containing perfectly useful information. Yet somehow, we never made it to the end.
It isn’t necessarily because the course was poor. It isn’t because we are lazy, and it certainly isn’t always because we didn’t want the outcome badly enough.
The problem is that information alone is rarely enough.
When you are trying to make significant changes in your life—particularly after a major disruption—you often need more than another video to watch. You may need encouragement when your motivation disappears, help working out how a general principle applies to your particular circumstances and somebody to ask the slightly uncomfortable question:
“That’s all very well, but what are you actually going to do about it this week?”
Sometimes, you simply need somebody in your corner.
AI Can Give You Answers, But It Cannot Live Your Life for You
Please don’t misunderstand me: I think AI is an extraordinary tool, and I use it myself. It can help us research, brainstorm, organise ideas, explain complicated concepts and generate possibilities at breathtaking speed.
But there is an important difference between having access to an answer and being able to integrate that answer into your life.
You can ask AI how to find your purpose and receive an excellent list of exercises. You can ask how to become more resilient and receive a thoughtful explanation of stress management, emotional regulation, boundaries and self-care. You can even ask how to reinvent yourself after a major life change and receive pages of useful suggestions within seconds.
But eventually, somebody has to close the laptop and ask what all this means for them.
What am I actually going to change? What am I ready to let go of? What am I afraid to admit? Which advice fits my particular life? What should I do first?
And perhaps most importantly, what am I going to do when my enthusiasm evaporates next Tuesday?
That is the point at which information has to become implementation. And implementation is where the real work begins.
The Missing Ingredient in Online Learning: Accountability
I recently did a little market research into how people are using AI and how this is changing the online learning industry. The picture is interesting.
More people are undoubtedly turning to AI instead of automatically purchasing an online course. After all, why pay for information when you can ask a question and receive an instant answer?
But there is something people still value enormously: human support, particularly when they are trying to complete something that requires sustained effort, personal reflection and meaningful change.
People may not need another person to tell them everything they could theoretically find on the internet. But they often appreciate someone who can help them stay focused on what matters, make sense of what they are learning, apply general ideas to their own circumstances and identify the obstacles that are getting in their way.
They also value accountability.
Most of us know considerably more about what we should be doing than we actually do. Knowing that exercise is good for us doesn’t necessarily get us out of bed on a cold morning. Understanding the importance of boundaries doesn’t automatically make it easier to say no. And buying a course about finding your purpose does not, unfortunately, mean that you wake up three weeks later with your entire life mapped out.
Sometimes we need somebody to help us keep moving, especially when our motivation disappears. We may need encouragement, perspective or simply somebody who notices that we have quietly abandoned the very thing we said was important to us.
And occasionally, we need someone to ask:
“That’s all very well, but what are you actually going to do about it this week?”
Which is exactly the kind of work I most enjoy doing.
Which Is Why I (Now) Call Them Challenges
The word course can sound rather passive. You enrol, consume the content, tick off the modules and, if you’re particularly diligent, make it to the end.
But that isn’t really what I want for the people who work with me.
I don’t want you simply to complete a course. I want you to engage with a challenge.
A challenge implies movement. It suggests that you are going somewhere and acknowledges that there may be obstacles along the way. More importantly, it implies that you are expected to do something rather than merely absorb information.
My challenges are designed to give you a structured pathway through a particular stage of change, but you don’t have to do all the work in isolation. When you enrol, you can add as many coaching conversations as you need. These are structured, supportive conversations designed to help you turn what you are learning into something useful in your real life.
Think of them as personalised guideposts. You may know where you want to go and even have a reasonably good map, but every now and then it helps to have somebody beside you who can say, “Yes, you’re still on the right road,” or perhaps, “I think we’ve discovered why you keep getting stuck here.”
And sometimes the most useful question is simply:
“Wonderful insight. Now what are you going to do with it?”
From Information Overload to Permanent Transformation
I have never been particularly interested in selling people vast quantities of information. The world already has plenty of information. What interests me is what happens when somebody takes an idea and begins to weave it into their everyday life.
That is the difference between knowing that boundaries are important and actually saying no to something you don’t want to do. It is the difference between understanding that stress affects your wellbeing and making meaningful changes to the way you organise your life. It is the difference between recognising that your old identity no longer fits and having the courage to begin creating a new one.
It is also the difference between buying a course about finding your purpose and actually making decisions that move you towards a more meaningful life.
Information may inspire transformation, but implementation is what makes transformation possible.
That is why the coaching element of my challenges matters so much to me. Sometimes you don’t need more content. You need space to think, somebody to listen and a little perspective. You may need encouragement, support and, occasionally, a gentle but unmistakable nudge.
Because there is an enormous difference between understanding something intellectually and actually changing the way you live.
The Radical Renaissance: A Structured Pathway Through Change
My online challenges form the backbone of my Radical Renaissance Program. They were previously known as the Post-Crisis ReConstruction Protocols, and although the name has evolved, the underlying philosophy remains the same.
Life can change suddenly.
A relationship ends. A career disappears or no longer feels meaningful. Your children leave home. You retire and discover that freedom is rather more complicated than you expected. You move country, experience a significant loss or find that your health has changed the way you see your future.
And sometimes nothing dramatic has happened at all.
You simply wake up one morning and think:
“Is this it?”
These moments can leave us feeling overwhelmed, disoriented and uncertain about who we are and what comes next.
A Radical Renaissance is not about pretending that the past never happened, nor is it about throwing your entire life into a skip and reinventing yourself as a yoga teacher in Bali. Although, naturally, if that is genuinely your dream, I am not here to stop you.
It is about taking what life has given you—the good, the difficult, the unexpected and the downright inconvenient—and asking where you go from here.
How can you weave your past and your future into a meaningful present? How can you use what you have learned rather than simply being defined by what happened to you? And how can you build a life that feels more purposeful, meaningful and fulfilling?
That is the journey these challenges are designed to support.
A Clear Pathway Through the Chaos
The Radical Renaissance ecosystem offers a structured, step-by-step pathway for people who are navigating significant change. It is designed to help you move from feeling overwhelmed and disoriented towards creating a life with greater clarity, purpose and fulfilment.
You don’t necessarily have to start at the beginning. Life is not a neatly organised curriculum, unfortunately.
You may already feel reasonably stable but have no idea what you want next. You may know exactly what you want but lack the resilience or confidence to pursue it. You may be ready to focus entirely on your future, or you may need help simply getting through a particularly turbulent period.
Each challenge can stand alone, but together they create a powerful pathway through the different stages of reconstruction and renewal.
Starting by Surviving the Storm
Sometimes the first task is not to discover your purpose or create a magnificent vision for the next ten years.
Sometimes the first task is simply to stop feeling as though your life has been turned upside down.
The Survive the Storm Challenge is designed for periods of major transition and upheaval. It helps you create greater stability, regain a sense of perspective and begin moving forward when everything feels uncertain.
When you are in the middle of a storm, you don’t necessarily need a detailed ten-year plan. You need to know where to put your next foot.
This is where you begin.
Finding or Refocusing Your Purpose
Once life begins to feel a little more stable, many people find themselves facing a different question:
Now what?
The purpose-focused challenges are about rediscovering what matters to you and deciding where you want to direct your energy.
Sometimes we lose our sense of purpose because life has changed. Sometimes the purpose we once had no longer fits, and sometimes we have spent so many years doing what was expected of us that we have forgotten to ask ourselves what we actually want.
Finding your purpose is not necessarily about discovering one magnificent sentence that explains your entire existence. It can be much more practical than that. It is about understanding what matters enough to you that you are willing to organise part of your life around it.
Purpose gives direction to your decisions. And direction can be extraordinarily helpful when you have spent a long time feeling lost.
Becoming Rooted in Resilience
Purpose is wonderful.
Unfortunately, purpose does not protect you from difficult people, unexpected bills, disappointing news or the occasional complete disaster.
That is where resilience comes in.
The Rooted in Resilience Challenge is about developing the inner resources that help you cope with stress, setbacks and uncertainty. Not by becoming invulnerable—none of us are—but by learning how to recover, adapt and continue.
Resilience is not necessarily about bouncing back into exactly the same life you had before. Sometimes the point is to bounce forward into something wiser.
Accelerating Your Growth
There are times when you don’t want to work through a process entirely on your own. You want individual attention. You want somebody to help you connect the dots between where you have been, where you are now and where you would like to go.
You want to be able to say:
“This is where I am. This is where I want to go. How do I get from one to the other?”
That is where more intensive mentoring and coaching can make a real difference.
The Radical Renaissance Program brings the various elements together into a more personalised journey. It allows us to look not only at what you are learning but also at how you are applying it to your particular circumstances.
Because your reconstruction will not look exactly like anybody else’s.
And it shouldn’t.
Building Firm Foundations for Your Future
Eventually, the emphasis shifts.
You stop asking only, “What happened to me?”, and begin asking, “What do I want to create next?”
The Firm Foundations for Your Future Challenge is future-focused. It is about creating a clearer picture of the person you are becoming and the life you want to build.
Not a fantasy life that looks fabulous on Instagram and collapses the moment reality intrudes. A life that actually fits you.
A life with stronger foundations, shaped by your values, your experiences and your evolving understanding of what matters.
Why Storytelling Is at the Heart of Everything I Do
I am a writer. I have written eight books so far, so perhaps it isn’t surprising that storytelling plays an important role in my work.
We human beings understand our lives through stories. We tell ourselves stories about who we are, what happened to us, what we are capable of and what is possible.
The difficulty is that some of these stories become rather limiting.
Perhaps you have begun to see yourself as the person whose marriage failed, the person who made the wrong career decision, the person who got ill, the person who was betrayed or the person who missed their chance.
But those are events.
They are chapters.
They are not necessarily the entire book.
One of the things I most enjoy doing is helping people look at their stories differently. Not by pretending that painful things were wonderful, and certainly not by putting a motivational quote on top of a tragedy and calling it healing.
Instead, I am interested in what happens when we place difficult experiences within a larger and more meaningful narrative.
What did you learn? What survived? What changed? What strengths did you discover? And who might you become next?
Your story is still being written.
You Don’t Need to Do It Perfectly
Another reason I prefer the idea of a challenge is that challenges acknowledge reality.
You may start enthusiastically and lose momentum. You may miss a week. You may discover that one particular exercise makes you uncomfortable. You may suddenly realise that the future you thought you wanted is not the future you want at all.
Excellent.
That is not necessarily failure. It is information.
The purpose of these challenges is not to turn you into the world’s most efficient personal-development student. You do not receive extra points for having colour-coded notes and completing every worksheet with military precision.
The purpose is to help you move forward.
Sometimes quickly. Sometimes slowly. Sometimes after taking two steps forward and one rather spectacular step sideways.
But forward nevertheless.
So, Yes, AI Can Create a Course
AI can create a course in seconds. It can give you ideas, explain concepts, generate worksheets and produce an impressive amount of information at extraordinary speed.
And I suspect it will continue to change online learning in ways we cannot yet imagine.
But I don’t think that means human-guided learning is disappearing. If anything, the sheer abundance of information may make discernment, support and accountability even more valuable.
Because the question is no longer simply:
Where can I find the information?
The question has become more complicated.
What information do I actually need? How does it apply to my life? What should I do with it? And how do I keep going long enough to create meaningful change?
That is where I come in.
I don’t want simply to sell you a collection of videos and hope you find them useful. I want to create challenges that help you engage with the ideas, think about them, question them, adapt them and, most importantly, use them.
Because sometimes you need more than content.
You may need somebody in your corner who can help you stay focused. Somebody who can help you see possibilities when you are stuck staring at the problems. Somebody who reminds you why you started.
And somebody who asks, with great kindness but absolutely no possibility of escape:
“So… what are you going to do next?”
Ready for Your Own Radical Renaissance?
The challenges that make up my Radical Renaissance ecosystem are designed for people who are navigating major change, questioning what comes next or simply feeling that the life they once knew no longer fits quite as comfortably as it used to.
You can choose an individual challenge that reflects where you are right now. Or, if you would like more personalised support, you can explore the Radical Renaissance Program and work through the process with mentoring and coaching along the way.
You don’t have to have everything figured out before you begin. You simply have to be willing to take the next step, and then the next one.
Sometimes that journey is easier when somebody is walking alongside you.
“Weave your past and your future into a meaningful present.” Margaretha Montagu
The Purpose Pursuit Challenge – if you want to discover your life purpose, this course will provide you with the clarity, motivation and direction you need to manifest your next chapter – in both your personal and professional life. Get immediate access
The Purpose Pivot Challenge – drawing inspiration from the Camino de Santiago, this transformative course guides you through a proven framework to recalibrate your authentic purpose and create a meaningful and fulfilling next act. Get immediate access
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.
If you’re feeling overwhelmed, exhausted, or on the edge of burnout, you need immediate support. The Road Map to Resilience: Burnout to Brilliance online course (with the option of adding coaching sessions) is designed for exactly that: a practical, step-by-step course to help you regain control, rebuild your energy, and find clarity in the chaos. This isn’t a quick fix—it’s about proven strategies to calm your nervous system, shift your mindset, and create sustainable resilience. No need to cope with this on your own—let’s get you back on track.
“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
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.
5-day/4-night “Press Pause” Camino de Santiago Walking Retreat– If your soul is craving fresh air, meaningful movement, and a chance to reconnect with nature and connect with horses, join me on a powerful, natural reboot for your body, mind, and spirit. Same content as the 3-day retreat, spread over 5 days. And an extra day of walking. No extreme fitness requirements. No forced bonding. No pressure to have a breakthrough. For one or two guests travelling together.
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
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.
.
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.
5-day/4-night “Press Pause” Camino de Santiago Walking Retreat– If your soul is craving fresh air, meaningful movement, and a chance to reconnect with nature and connect with horses, join me on a powerful, natural reboot for your body, mind, and spirit. Same content as the 3-day retreat, spread over 5 days. And an extra day of walking. No extreme fitness requirements. No forced bonding. No pressure to have a breakthrough. For one or two guests travelling together.
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.
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 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.
5-day/4-night “Press Pause” Camino de Santiago Walking Retreat– If your soul is craving fresh air, meaningful movement, and a chance to reconnect with nature and connect with horses, join me on a powerful, natural reboot for your body, mind, and spirit. Same content as the 3-day retreat, spread over 5 days. And an extra day of walking. No extreme fitness requirements. No forced bonding. No pressure to have a breakthrough. For one or two guests travelling together.
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
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 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.
5-day/4-night “Press Pause” Camino de Santiago Walking Retreat– If your soul is craving fresh air, meaningful movement, and a chance to reconnect with nature and connect with horses, join me on a powerful, natural reboot for your body, mind, and spirit. Same content as the 3-day retreat, spread over 5 days. And an extra day of walking. No extreme fitness requirements. No forced bonding. No pressure to have a breakthrough. For one or two guests travelling together.
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.
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.
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’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.
5-day/4-night “Press Pause” Camino de Santiago Walking Retreat– If your soul is craving fresh air, meaningful movement, and a chance to reconnect with nature and connect with horses, join me on a powerful, natural reboot for your body, mind, and spirit. Same content as the 3-day retreat, spread over 5 days. And an extra day of walking. No extreme fitness requirements. No forced bonding. No pressure to have a breakthrough. For one or two guests travelling together.
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
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.
.
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?
5-day/4-night “Press Pause” Camino de Santiago Walking Retreat– If your soul is craving fresh air, meaningful movement, and a chance to reconnect with nature and connect with horses, join me on a powerful, natural reboot for your body, mind, and spirit. Same content as the 3-day retreat, spread over 5 days. And an extra day of walking. No extreme fitness requirements. No forced bonding. No pressure to have a breakthrough. For one or two guests travelling together.
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
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.
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.
3-day/2-night Private “Press Pause” Retreat –this 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.
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
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.
5-day/4-night “Press Pause” Camino de Santiago Walking Retreat– If your soul is craving fresh air, meaningful movement, and a chance to reconnect with nature and connect with horses, join me on a powerful, natural reboot for your body, mind, and spirit. Same content as the 3-day retreat, spread over 5 days. And an extra day of walking. No extreme fitness requirements. No forced bonding. No pressure to have a breakthrough. For one or two guests travelling together.
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.
All content of this website is copyrighted. You cannot copy the content of this page
