Margaretha Montagu - Dr Margaretha Montagu

24/07/202609/07/2026

Reinvention Isn’t Starting Over

If you’ve ever wandered through an old European town, you’ll know that some of the most beautiful buildings have lived several lives.

A medieval merchant’s house becomes a bookshop. A monastery becomes a hotel. An old barn, with weathered beams and stone walls polished by centuries of hands, becomes a family home. You can still see traces of what each building once was: an ancient doorway, worn stone steps, the outline of a fireplace that no longer exists.

These buildings have not been torn down and rebuilt.

They have simply been repurposed.

I’ve often thought people are much the same.

When life falls apart, we talk about “starting over”. Friends encourage us to make a fresh start, reinvent ourselves or turn over a new leaf, as though the years we’ve already lived have somehow become irrelevant.

I’m not sure that’s either possible or desirable.

After all, you can’t unlearn what you’ve learned. You can’t undo the mistakes that made you wiser or erase the heartbreaks that made you more compassionate. Every joyful moment and every painful one has become part of who you are.

Why would you want to dig it all out or sand it all away?

I think one of the reasons people fear change so much is that they imagine reinvention requires abandoning their old life, their old selves, completely. They picture selling the house, changing careers, moving to the coast or buying a campervan. (The campervan seems remarkably popular, although I’ve yet to establish why.)

Sometimes those dramatic changes ARE the right thing to do.

More often, they aren’t.

Reinvention is usually much less visible than that. It begins not with changing your postcode but with changing the story you tell yourself.

I’d prefer to go with reconstruction instead of reinvention.

Repurposing.

For years, perhaps decades, you’ve believed that your value lies in being indispensable at work. Then redundancy arrives and, with it, the unsettling discovery that you are still you, even without the job title.

Or perhaps you’ve always introduced yourself through your role as a parent, only to find that the children have grown up and no longer need you in quite the same way. The silence in the house feels unfamiliar. The kettle whistles in a kitchen that suddenly seems far too large, and you find yourself wondering what on earth you’re supposed to do now.

Nothing about the house has changed overnight.

Your identity has.

It’s tempting at moments like these to look backwards. We remember the person we used to be and imagine that happiness lies in somehow staying the same.

It doesn’t. I know from experience.

One of the unexpected gifts of getting older is that we become less interested in proving ourselves and more interested in understanding ourselves. We begin to realise that a meaningful life isn’t built by collecting achievements like souvenirs from places we’ve visited. It’s built by becoming increasingly aligned with the person we are.

That isn’t starting again.

No need to reinvent yourself. Reconstructing yourself, truer to the real you, will do.

I’ve noticed something similar in the garden. Every winter, the vines near my house look tired, twisted and completely lifeless. If you didn’t know better, you’d assume their best days were behind them.

Then spring arrives.

Almost overnight, tiny green buds appear on the old wood. By early summer the vines are reaching confidently towards the sun, and by autumn they’re heavy with grapes.

The new growth doesn’t appear despite the old vine.

It appears because of it.

Perhaps we expect too much drama from transformation.

We imagine lightning bolts and life-changing revelations when, in reality, change often happens almost unnoticed. One conversation lingers in your thoughts. A walk helps you see something differently. A book gives you language for feelings you couldn’t name till now. A quiet morning with a cup of coffee becomes the moment you finally admit that the life you’ve been living no longer fits the person you are now.

Perhaps that’s why I no longer like the starting over suggestion.

It suggests that everything before this moment has been wasted.

I prefer to think of life as a long conversation between all the people you’ve ever been. The hopeful young adult, the exhausted parent, the ambitious professional, the grieving widow, the enthusiastic beginner, the wiser older self—they all have something to contribute.

None of them needs to be disowned.

Each one has contributed to getting you this far.

So if you’re standing at the edge of a new chapter, don’t ask yourself how to become someone else.

Ask yourself how to become more authentically you.

Because reinvention isn’t about tearing up your story and beginning with a blank page.

It’s about picking up the pen again, with a steadier hand and a much better understanding of what really matters.

That’s not starting again. It’s reconstructing. Repurposing.

It’s writing a chapter that fits better than the last one did.

If your soul is craving fresh air, meaningful movement, and a chance to reconnect with nature, join us on a CrossRoads 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.

I put the essence of who I am, and everything I have experienced that makes me who I am, with great enthusiasm, into my retreats, courses and books. – Dr Margaretha Montagu (MBChB, MRCGP, NLP master pract (cert,) Transformational Life Coach (dip,) Life Story Coach (cert) Counselling (cert,) Med Hypnotherapy (dip) and EAGALA (cert)

23/07/202624/07/2026

On Not Earning Your Keep

What a herd of small horses taught me about my worth

There is a particular kind of guilt that only strikes you while doing absolutely nothing, and I would like to report that I have perfected it. Lying in a hammock. Reading a novel at two in the afternoon on a Tuesday. Watching Loki doze in the sun with one back leg cocked like he’s modelling for a statue. And then, some small bureaucrat in my brain starts tapping his clipboard and asks, gently but with real menace: and what, exactly, are you contributing at the moment to life in general and to your life specifically?

I used to think this voice was just mine — a personality quirk, like disliking coriander. It took me an embarrassingly long time, several decades and one very patient miniature horse, to realise it isn’t personal at all. It’s cultural. We’ve all been issued the same clipboard.

The script we didn’t know we’d memorised

What do you do? What have you achieved? What are you doing for your personal growth? We ask these as polite small talk, but they’re a worth assessment in a trench coat. Most of us quietly translated “what do you produce” into “what am I worth,” and then, with a tragic flourish, into “if I stop producing, I stop existing in any way that counts.” I didn’t notice I’d swallowed this whole until I got sick a few years ago and had to properly stop — no retreats, no writing, no relentless five-year-plan for becoming a better version of myself. The panic that arrived wasn’t about my health. It was about my usefulness. Who was I, horizontal on the sofa, contributing nothing to anyone’s spreadsheet?

It took a horse — and not even a particularly philosophical one, just a small, food-motivated Falabella called Zofía — to show me how mad that groundless panic actually was.

Zofía does not have a LinkedIn profile!

Zofía has never justified her existence to a single living soul. She doesn’t compete. She doesn’t breed. By any productivity metric you’d care to apply, she is doing precisely nothing with her one wild and precious little life. And yet watch her in a field for ten minutes and the CV writes itself. She’s fertilising the soil with every dropping, which is more than I can say for my own contribution to local biodiversity this week. She’s spreading seed through that same dropping, feeding the insects that feed the swallows that have decided the herd is a sort of all-day buffet with legs. She’s holding her place in a social order that keeps her daughters calm and oriented without a single memo being issued. None of this is intentional. She isn’t striving for impact. She’s simply being a horse, completely, and the value radiates outward as a side effect of her bothering to exist at all.

We do the same, if we’d only notice. You breathe, and somewhere a plant uses the carbon dioxide you just discarded for free, without filling in a feedback form. You are, at this very moment, a five-star hotel for trillions of microorganisms who never leave a review. Your smile, badly timed but well meant, can lower another person’s heart rate before either of you has said a word. Your friendship has rerouted the entire shape of someone else’s life, and no invoice was ever raised for it. Eventually, your body will feed the earth, which is the least glamorous and the most generous thing any of us ever does, depending on your mood that day. None of this appears on a CV. All of it is real, and most of it was happening long before you’d achieved a single thing worth listing.

The trouble with our measuring tape

I’ll spare you the lecture on capitalism, partly because better minds than mine have written it, and partly because — let’s be honest — I still need the wifi to work and the hay bill to clear. This isn’t an anti-business manifesto. It’s a smaller observation: our measuring tape is superb at counting some things and hopeless at others. We can track revenue to the cent and have no instrument whatsoever for “made someone feel less alone today.” We obsess over growth charts and have never once put a number on what it costs, or what it’s worth, to sit quietly with a frightened friend in a hospital corridor. Comforting the grieving. Raising a child through the long, undocumented hours of toddlerhood. Caring for an ageing parent. Listening without already drafting your reply. Inspiring someone without meaning to. Making a frightened animal feel safe enough to put its head down. These aren’t footnotes to a meaningful life — for most of us, they are the meaningful life, they simply don’t fit the ruler we’ve been handed. Which is rather like declaring the ocean doesn’t exist because your ruler only goes up to thirty centimetres.

Why do so many of us feel we’re “not enough?”

This is the part that gets personal, because I suspect it’s the actual root of my hammock-guilt, and probably yours too. We don’t feel inadequate because we contribute nothing. We feel inadequate because our real contributions are invisible on the only scoreboard we were taught to read. The retiree who built an entire identity around a job title now feels unmoored — not because the wisdom evaporated, but because nobody’s scoring wisdom. The mother three sleepless years into raising small children quietly wonders whether she’s “doing anything” with her life, while doing the one thing civilisation actually depends on. The artist who hasn’t sold a canvas this year starts to doubt whether the painting itself was worth making, as if a thing’s worth were decided retroactively by a stranger’s bank transfer. And — this one’s close to home — horse owners whose ponies will never see a competition ring sometimes apologise for them, as though hay must be earned with a rosette.

It doesn’t. It never did. Zofía has never won so much as a participation ribbon and remains, by every measure that actually matters, magnificent.

What horses are spared from knowing

The single most enviable thing about animals is that they never lie awake at 3 am wondering if they’re falling behind. A horse does not compare its mane to another horse’s mane. It feels no pull whatsoever to optimise its personal brand before the next full moon. It has never once thought I’m not successful enough or I should be doing more with my life, which is either the dumbest or the wisest position available to a living creature, and I increasingly suspect it’s the latter. It simply continues being a horse, with total, unbothered commitment — and that isn’t laziness. It’s a kind of integrity we pay small fortunes on retreats trying to recover.

I’m not proposing we all quit our jobs and take up grazing, tempting as that sounds most Mondays. I’m proposing that this farm has quietly taught me something I keep needing to relearn: existence doesn’t require a defence lawyer. A friendship doesn’t only matter once it’s useful to you. A horse doesn’t only matter once it’s “for” something. And a person — tired, resting, between jobs, recovering, ageing, simply being — doesn’t only matter once they’ve produced something to show for the day. Can we value a being for who it is, rather than for what we can extract from it? That question, once you start asking it about horses, has an inconvenient habit of turning around and asking itself about you.

Strengthening a different muscle

I think of this as training, in the same patient, repetitive way you’d train a young horse — not one grand insight but small, deliberate reps. Noticing someone who isn’t being “productive” and resisting the urge to quietly file them as less interesting. Watching a horse graze and not asking what it’s “for.” Letting yourself rest on a Tuesday without drafting a justification for it in your head. Honouring old age instead of managing it. It’s an odd muscle to build, given the entire surrounding culture is a gym with exactly one machine in it. But — and I say this as someone who is, by nature, allergic to a tidy moral — it does get easier with use.

The thing I actually believe

I believe this most clearly at dusk, standing in a field being thoroughly ignored by five horses who have never once asked what I’m worth. A newborn has value before achieving anything. So does someone with dementia, who has lost the thread of every achievement they ever had. So does the very old, the very tired, the very lost, and the horse who will never wear a rosette. So, on the days when the most ambitious item on your list was exist, do you.

Every time I watch Zofía stand in the sun doing, by any official metric, nothing at all, I’m reminded that my own worth was never something I had to earn in the first place. It came with the breathing and the heartbeat, free of charge, before I’d done a single useful thing. Everything since has just been extra.

Sometimes the most productive thing you can do is wander down a quiet path, breathe deeply, and remember who you were before life convinced you that your value had to be earned.

If that sounds like something your heart has been quietly asking for, I’d love to welcome you to one of my Camino de Santiago walking retreats in southwest France. There are no performance targets, no pressure to transform into a shinier version of yourself, and no expectation that you have it all figured out.

Just good company, beautiful walks, plenty of space to think, and the rare luxury of discovering that you are enough, exactly as you are.

You don’t have to earn your place here. You simply have to decide it’s time to come.

“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

22/07/202609/07/2026

The Silent Courage Nobody Applauds

When we think of courage, we tend to appreciate dramatic events.

We picture firefighters running into burning buildings. Mountain climbers battling the elements. Athletes pushing through pain. Explorers setting sail towards distant horizons.

Courage, we assume, is loud.

It arrives with fanfare, newspaper headlines and standing ovations.

Yet I suspect the greatest acts of courage are rarely witnessed by anyone at all.

Silent, invisible acts of immense courage.

The woman who gets out of bed the morning after her husband has told her he’s leaving.

The man who walks into a hospital for another round of treatment, smiling kindly at the receptionist because he knows she has probably had a difficult day too.

The widow who cooks dinner for one without falling apart because she set two places by mistake.

The father who admits to his children that he doesn’t have enough money to hold onto the house.

The friend who says, “I’m not all right,” instead of pretending everything is fine.

None of these moments will make the evening news.

They won’t attract medals or applause.

Yet I would argue they require every bit as much courage as climbing a mountain.

Perhaps more.

I’ve often wondered whether we’ve confused courage with confidence.

We imagine brave people as fearless people. We assume they stride purposefully into uncertainty, shoulders back, chin up, absolutely convinced everything will work out in the end.

Life has taught me otherwise.

Most courageous people are shaking in their boots.

They simply decide that fear isn’t going to make today’s decisions for them.

I’ve seen this countless times.

Someone whose life has been turned upside down still manages to put the kettle on because visitors are coming. Another person, exhausted by grief, feeds the dog before they feed themselves. Someone recovering from burnout takes their first tentative walk around the block, feeling slightly ridiculous because yesterday they could run a business, and today walking to the post box feels like a challenge.

It would be easy to dismiss these things as ordinary.

I don’t. Not anymore. I no longer take courage for granted.

When your world has been shaken, ordinary becomes extraordinary. Difficult. Exhausting. Unimaginable.

Making breakfast.

Answering the phone.

Opening the curtains.

Watering the plants.

Laughing at a joke and then feeling guilty because, for a fleeting moment, you’d forgotten your sadness.

These are not small, unimportant incidents.

They’re signs that life, stubbornly hopeful, is quietly raising its head again.

Our culture celebrates dramatic transformations. We admire the before-and-after photographs, the triumphant comeback stories and the overnight successes that almost always turn out to have taken fifteen years.

We rarely celebrate the slow work.

The months when nobody notices your progress.

The hundred tiny decisions to keep going when giving up would have felt much easier.

And yet, isn’t that where real courage lives?

In extraordinary moments, but also in ordinary ones that need repeating, over and over again.

I’ve always loved watching trees after a storm.

A violent wind can strip away branches, scatter leaves across the ground and leave the garden looking rather sorry for itself. At first glance, everything appears damaged or even destroyed.

Then, almost imperceptibly, life begins again.

New shoots emerge.

The tree never hurries the process.

It simply begins again, one small leaf at a time.

Perhaps we’re not so different.

After a big life change, a crisis or a huge challenge, we often expect ourselves to bounce back quickly, as though resilience were something we could summon by sheer force of will. We become impatient with our slow progress because it doesn’t look impressive enough.

But progress is a process.

One quiet conversation.

One gentle walk.

One good night’s sleep.

One unexpected laugh.

If you’re living through a difficult season, don’t underestimate those seemingly insignificant moments.

They may seem too small to matter.

They aren’t.

That is how you rebuild your life.

And while nobody else may applaud them, I hope you’ll allow yourself to recognise them for what they truly are.

Not signs that you’re merely getting through another day.

Signs that, quietly and courageously, you’re finding your way back to the light.

21/07/202615/07/2026

Anticipating the Start of a Retreat

Lessons I Learned as a Retreat Guest

When I think back to the retreats I’ve attended over the years, I remember the beautiful walks, the interesting conversations or the moments of quiet that somehow made the world feel a little less complicated.

But what I remember most vividly is how I felt before I arrived.

I remember opening an email that immediately made me feel at ease. It answered questions I hadn’t yet thought to ask. It reassured me without being patronising. It gave me the comforting sense that someone had already thought about my journey before I’d packed my suitcase.

I also remember the opposite.

The uncertainty of wondering whether I’d brought the right clothes. Whether I got the meeting point right. Whether I’ll get lost. Whether I’d somehow be the odd one out.

It’s remarkable how much emotional luggage we carry alongside the physical kind.

Few of us arrive at a retreat in a neutral state. We arrive after weeks—or months—of juggling responsibilities, making difficult decisions, looking after other people and trying to keep too many plates spinning. Even planning something that’s supposed to be restorative can become another item on an already overcrowded to-do list.

Then there are the quieter worries that rarely get spoken aloud.

Will I fit in?

Am I fit enough?

What if I don’t get on with the other guests?

Will it be worth the money?

Those questions are perfectly ordinary. In fact, I’d be surprised if they didn’t cross most people’s minds at least once.

Attending a retreat means stepping into the unknown. Even if it’s something you’ve looked forward to for months, there is still a small leap of faith involved. You’re leaving behind familiar routines and placing yourself in the hands of someone you’ve probably never met.

That trust deserves to be honoured long before the retreat itself begins.

It’s one of the reasons I now think of a retreat as starting the moment someone presses the “Book Now” button.

From that point onwards, every interaction matters. Every email, every message, every answer to a seemingly insignificant question becomes part of the experience.

Over the years, I’ve learned that a measured amount of information can be surprisingly comforting. Not pages and pages of instructions, but the sort of practical details that quietly remove unnecessary worry.

Where exactly do I park?

What happens if my train is delayed?

Do I really need walking poles?

Will there be time to read my book?

None of these questions is really about logistics.

They’re about reassurance.

They ask, in different ways, Will I be looked after?

Hospitality begins long before someone crosses your doorstep.

For me, it begins with making people feel expected rather than processed. Welcomed rather than managed.

That’s why I enjoy sending detailed information before guests arrive—not because I want to overwhelm them with instructions, but because I’d like them to stop thinking about practicalities altogether. The fewer decisions they have to make when they get here, the sooner their shoulders relax.

Perhaps that’s why I’ve become rather fond of what I think of as the “in-between” days. The days after someone books but before they set off are full of quiet anticipation. A retreat has a curious way of slipping into your thoughts long before your suitcase appears on the bed. You find yourself wondering which walking shoes to bring, choosing a book you’ve been saving for just the right occasion, imagining long brunches under blue skies or peaceful mornings with nothing more urgent than birdsong. Little by little, almost without noticing, your mind begins to loosen its desperate grip on everyday life. The retreat has already started its gentle work.

And that, I think, is one of the loveliest discoveries I’ve made as both a retreat guest and a retreat host. We often imagine that transformation begins with a grand moment—the first meditation, the first walk, the first meaningful conversation. More often, it begins quietly. It begins when someone feels expected rather than merely accommodated. When they know they’ll be welcomed by name. When they sense that, for a few precious days, they won’t have to organise, perform, solve problems or hold everything together. Sometimes the first gift a retreat offers isn’t insight at all. It’s reassurance. And once you’ve experienced that feeling yourself, it’s impossible not to want to offer it to others.

Anticipating the start of the retreat is an essential part of the retreat.

Receiving a friendly message a week beforehand, imagining the countryside, wondering which book to pack, looking forward to uninterrupted walks along the Camino de Santiago or quiet mornings with birdsong instead of traffic—these moments are not separate from the retreat. They are the opening chapter.

By the time guests arrive at my little farmhouse in Gascony, I hope they already feel they’ve begun to leave everyday life behind.

Sometimes, that journey starts with nothing more complicated than an email that says, “I’m looking forward to welcoming you here!”

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.

20/07/202609/07/2026

I’ve Made a Mess of My Life

One of the saddest sentences I hear, way too often, is:

“I think I’ve made a mess of my life.”

It’s rarely said for dramatic effect. More often, it arrives quietly over a cup of coffee that’s gone cold, while someone stares out of the window as though the answer might be hiding in the neighbour’s garden. Sometimes the story involves redundancy, divorce or retirement. Sometimes the children have all left home. Sometimes there’s no obvious crisis at all.

On paper, everything still looks perfectly respectable. The career is intact. The relationship survives. The mortgage gets paid. Friends describe them as “doing well”. Yet beneath the surface, there’s an uncomfortable feeling that’s surprisingly difficult to put into words.

“This life doesn’t feel like mine anymore.”

I don’t think that’s the same as having made a mess of one’s life.

I think it’s more like wearing a beautifully tailored jacket that fit perfectly ten years ago. You can still button it up. Technically, it still does the job. But you can’t move freely. You tug at the sleeves, roll your shoulders and find yourself longing to take it off.

The jacket hasn’t shrunk. It’s exactly the same as it always has been.

You’re not.

I wonder how many of us spend years trying to squeeze ourselves back into lives we’ve outgrown. We tell ourselves to be grateful, to stop complaining and to keep going because, after all, this is the life we worked so hard to own. Which makes it all the more confusing when it no longer fits.

The strange thing is that nothing has to be obviously wrong. A life can become too small without falling apart. There are no flashing warning lights and no dramatic collapse. Instead, there’s a quiet accumulation of uncomfortable moments. Every Monday morning feels a little bluer than the last. Conversations become annoyingly repetitive. This year’s New Year’s resolutions sound suspiciously like last year’s.

It’s rather like listening to your favourite song every single day for twenty years. Eventually, even the chorus loses its magic. Not because it was a bad song, but because you’ve changed since the first time you heard it.

Somewhere along the way, we’ve absorbed the curious idea that adulthood is about making one set of decisions and then sticking to them for the rest of our lives. Choose your career. Choose your partner. Choose where to live. Then carry on, preferably without ever changing your mind or causing anyone unnecessary inconvenience.

Real life, however, has always been much less predictable than that.

We grow. We lose people we love. We discover new interests. Our priorities shift. The ambitions that once propelled us out of bed each morning quietly lose their grip, while other dreams, long forgotten, start tapping us gently on the shoulder.

I’ve noticed that many people interpret this restlessness as having made a mistake, somewhere along the line.

I see it differently.

Trees don’t cling desperately to last year’s leaves. Rivers carve new paths. Vineyards that looked lifeless in January are heavy with fruit by early autumn.

Nature never confuses change with making mistakes.

We do it all the time.

Perhaps that’s because changing direction can feel like having to admit we were wrong. It can seem as though we’re betraying the younger version of ourselves who worked so hard to build this life.

I don’t believe that.

I think the person you were deserves your gratitude, your respect, your understanding – not your lifelong obeisance.

That person made the best decisions they could with the knowledge, responsibilities and resources they had at the time.

But you were never meant to become a prisoner of your past.

One of the unexpected gifts of growing older is that we begin to realise life isn’t a monument to preserve. It’s a garden to cultivate.

Gardens are always changing, always growing. They need pruning. They need weeding. Occasionally, something that once flourished has to be moved because it no longer thrives where it was first planted. Anyone who has ever gardened knows there is little point in scolding a rose because it has outgrown its spot.

You move it. Or you give it more room.

Perhaps we owe ourselves the same kindness.

So, if you’ve been carrying around the uneasy feeling that your life no longer fits, resist the temptation to look for mistakes you might have made. Instead, become curious.

What if that feeling isn’t telling you that your life is a mess?

What if it’s simply telling you that you’ve outgrown your old life?

Perhaps the goal isn’t to return to the life that once fit so comfortably.

Perhaps it’s to cultivate one that fits you now.

To me, that sounds less like starting over and more like coming home.

19/07/202612/07/2026

The Camino de Santiago Doesn’t Change People. It Creates the Conditions for Change.

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.

Spend any time reading about the Camino de Santiago, and you’ll soon come across stories of life-changing experiences.

People find themselves. They discover their purpose. They return home transformed.

Having hosted Camino de Santiago walking retreats in southwest France for many years, along the historic Le Puy route, I have no doubt that the Camino can be deeply transformative.

I simply don’t think the Camino deserves all the credit.

That may sound almost heretical coming from someone whose retreats include two or three days of walking the Camino, but hear me out.

If walking alone along an ancient pilgrimage route automatically changed people, every pilgrim would return home a different person. They don’t. Some finish with aching feet and wonderful memories. Others quietly begin making decisions that alter the course of the rest of their lives.

The difference isn’t the path beneath their boots.

It’s what the path makes possible.

When guests arrive at my farmhouse, they’re often standing at a crossroads, although they don’t always realise it immediately. Some are contemplating retirement and wondering who they will be without the career that has defined them for decades. Others are recovering from illness, divorce or bereavement. Some are simply exhausted by years of trying to keep every ball in the air. Increasingly, people arrive with worries about a world that feels so much less predictable than it once did. Global uncertainty, economic pressure and a relentless news cycle all have a way of weighing heavily on us.

Their circumstances are different, but the underlying question is often the same.

What now?

It’s a difficult question to answer while rushing from meeting to meeting, replying to emails or ticking yet another task off an endless to-do list.

The Camino removes many of those distractions.

For a few hours, life becomes wonderfully uncomplicated. You follow the arrows. You notice the changing light on the vineyards, the scent of warm pine, the chatter of birds hidden in the hedgerows. You stop for lunch on a weathered bench or beneath the shade of an ancient oak. Your mind, so accustomed to being occupied every waking minute, gradually begins to settle.

I don’t walk with my guests. That is a deliberate choice.

Over the years, I’ve discovered that people rarely need another person telling them what to think. What they actually need is enough uninterrupted time to process their own thoughts.

Walking the Camino on your own provides exactly that.

Answers are rarely dramatic. Nobody reaches the top of a hill and suddenly knows precisely what to do with the rest of their life. Change usually arrives much more quietly than that.

Someone realises they are more tired than they dare admit.

Someone else recognises that they’ve been trying to live up to other people’s expectations.

A retiree begins to see the next chapter as an invitation.

A business owner acknowledges that success has come at too high a price.

Not miraculous interventions.

Moments of clarity.

The Camino doesn’t create those insights. They were already there, waiting patiently in the background.

The Camino simply creates the conditions in which they can finally surface.

One of the greatest privileges of hosting retreats has been watching this happen again and again. I never know what each guest will discover, and neither do they. That’s precisely as it should be. There is no formula, no guarantee and certainly no one-size-fits-all transformation.

What there is, however, is time.

Time to breathe.

Time to think.

Time to notice.

Time to intentionally imagine a different future.

Perhaps that is why people return home speaking so enthusiastically about the Camino. They aren’t really talking about the footpath, the churches or even the beautiful countryside, wonderful though it is.

They’re talking about what they discovered when life finally grew quiet enough to listen.

Perhaps you’re standing at a crossroads yourself.

If you think you—or someone you care about—might benefit from a few days of slowing down, walking the Camino and creating the space for life’s next chapter to emerge, I’d love to tell you more about my small, self-guided Camino de Santiago walking retreats in southwest France.

You can email me at MargarethaMontagu@gmail.com.

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

17/07/202608/07/2026

The Lies Society Tells Us About Success

I don’t think success is the problem.

I think our definition of success is.

Most of us inherit our ideas about what a successful life looks like long before we’re old enough to question them. We absorb them from our parents, our teachers, advertising, social media and well-meaning friends.

Get good grades.

Find a respectable job.

Earn enough to buy a house.

Buy a bigger house.

Retire comfortably.

Somewhere along the way, many of us quietly conclude that if we follow the script, fulfilment will arrive as a reward for good behaviour.

It’s rather like collecting loyalty points at the supermarket. Surely if we tick enough boxes, life will eventually hand us a complimentary sense of purpose.

Unfortunately, life has a habit of changing the terms and conditions without warning.

One of the privileges of listening to hundreds of people’s life stories is that you begin to notice patterns. Over the years, I’ve met men and women who looked wonderfully successful from the outside yet felt profoundly disconnected from their own lives. I’ve also met people with modest incomes, ordinary homes and little public recognition who radiated an unwavering sense of contentment.

It made me wonder whether our definition of success might not need an update.

The first lie is that our value depends on our productivity.

This may be the most damaging lie of all.

From an early age, we’re praised for achieving, producing and performing. Before long, many of us begin to measure our worth by what we accomplish. We feel guilty when we rest and slightly uncomfortable if we spend an afternoon doing nothing more ambitious than reading a good book beneath a tree.

Then life intervenes.

Illness, redundancy, retirement or burnout suddenly make productivity difficult or impossible, and with it our sense of value seems to evaporate.

But if your worth can disappear because you lose your job or decide to work part-time, perhaps it was never worth calling it worth in the first place.

The second lie is that busier means better.

We’ve somehow turned exhaustion into a competitive sport.

“How are you?”

“Terribly busy.”

It’s almost become the socially acceptable answer, as though admitting to having an afternoon free is a sign of moral weakness.

I’ve yet to meet anyone on their deathbed wishing they’d answered more emails or attended one more meeting that could easily have been a memo.

The third lie is that success looks the same for everyone.

It doesn’t.

For one person, success might mean leading a global company. For another, it might mean finally having breakfast with their children every morning. One dreams of climbing the corporate ladder. Another dreams of growing vegetables, playing the piano and knowing all their neighbours by name.

Both of those dreams are equally worthy.

Our mistake is believing only the first one deserves applause.

The fourth lie is that life should unfold in a straight line.

School.

Career.

Marriage.

Promotion.

Retirement.

Neat.

Predictable.

Orderly.

Real life, however, has clearly never read the instruction manual.

People fall in love unexpectedly. Careers end without warning. Dreams evolve. Health deteriorates. Children leave home. New opportunities arrive disguised as disappointments. Looking back, many of the moments that changed our lives most profoundly weren’t part of the original plan at all.

Perhaps the detours weren’t detours.

Perhaps they were part of the path.

The fifth lie is that once you’ve arrived, you’ll finally be happy.

Sometimes you are, for a while.

Then the horizon quietly moves.

You get the promotion and start thinking about the next one. You buy the house and begin planning the extension. You retire and wonder why nobody mentioned that having unlimited free time also requires figuring out what it’s for.

Happiness built entirely on future achievements has an irritating habit of remaining just beyond our reach.

I’ve gradually come to believe that success has less to do with what fills your bank account and more to do with what fills your life with meaning.

Are you surrounded by people you love?

Do you have work that feels meaningful, whether anyone pays you for it or not?

Do you laugh often? Out loud?

Do you notice the seasons changing?

Do you experience moments of profound peace, intense joy or jaw-dropping awe?

Those questions won’t be asked in an interview, and the answers won’t appear on a CV.

I firmly believe a successful life isn’t one that impresses other people. It’s one that fits. It fits the person you are rather than the person the world expects you to be.

So if closing your front door at the end of the day feels a little like coming home to yourself, I’d say you’re already far more successful than you realise.

16/07/202613/07/2026

How Walking Helps Untangle Thoughts That Talking Never Did

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 things that has surprised me most since I began hosting Camino de Santiago walking retreats is how often people tell me, “I just needed some time out to think.”

Not advice.

Not answers.

Not someone to tell them what they should do next.

Just time out.

This might sound strange coming from someone who spent many years as a doctor and therapist, where conversations were central to helping people understand what was happening in their lives. Talking is a powerful tool. Sometimes saying something out loud for the first time can be incredibly liberating.

But over the years, both professionally and through hosting dozens of retreat guests, I’ve noticed something else.

Some of your thoughts won’t untangle themselves while you’re sitting in a chair.

Sometimes you need to move to make that happen.

When guests arrive at my farmhouse in southwest France for a Camino de Santiago walking retreat, many are carrying questions they have been trying to answer for months, sometimes years.

Should I retire?

If I do, what do I want the next chapter of my life to look like?

And why do I feel so exhausted when everything appears to be going well?

Is it too late to start over?

How do I find meaning now that my old identity no longer fits?

These are not simple questions. They are not problems to be solved by a quick internet search or a motivational quote popping up at exactly the right moment on social media.

Solving some of our problems takes time.

And sometimes, it takes a good pair of walking boots to see the light.

During my retreats, my guests spend two or three days walking sections of the historic Le Puy route of the Camino de Santiago. They walk alone, carrying only what they need for the day.

That is deliberate.

I don’t walk with my guests because I have learned that when they say they need time out, they mean they need time on their own.

To have a conversation with themselves.

At first, many people find this uncomfortable.

We are not very good at being alone with our own thoughts anymore. We fill every spare moment with podcasts, messages, news updates and the irresistible urge to check whether someone somewhere has replied to something we sent three days ago.

Modern technology has given us the extraordinary ability to be constantly connected.

Walking in nature creates a different kind of connection.

There is a rhythm to it.

Left foot.

Right foot.

Breathe.

Be present.

Repeat.

The mind, which was initially racing through unfinished tasks and old worries, gradually begins to settle. Thoughts that felt tangled and overwhelming often start arranging themselves, almost without conscious effort.

It reminds me of shaking a snow globe.

When you shake it, everything is cloudy and unclear. Let it settle for a while, and eventually you can see what is actually there.

The Camino does something similar.

It doesn’t magically provide answers.

The arrows don’t point towards your life purpose, unfortunately. (I’ve checked. It would certainly make my retreat brochures easier to write.)

But they do provide direction.

I’ve watched guests discover things during a day’s walking that they had been unable to access through weeks of thinking.

A realisation that they don’t actually want the promotion they have been chasing.

An acceptance that retirement is not an ending but a beginning.

The courage to have a conversation they’ve been avoiding.

The understanding that perhaps they don’t need to become someone new—they simply need to resussitate the person they were before life became so demanding.

These moments are rarely dramatic.

There are no Hollywood-style revelations with swelling music and a perfectly timed sunset.

More often, they arrive quietly somewhere along a country lane, while walking past a field of sunflowers beneath the shade of ancient trees.

Sometimes the harder we try to think our way out of a problem, the more tangled it becomes. Sometimes the answer appears when we stop staring at the knot and simply start walking.

The Camino has been teaching people this for centuries.

Perhaps you have thoughts that will need a little time out to untangle.

If you feel that a few days walking the Camino de Santiago through the peaceful countryside of southwest France could help you step away from all the noise and reconnect with what matters, I’d love to tell you more about my small-group walking retreats.

You can email me at MargarethaMontagu@gmail.com.

15/07/202607/07/2026

Stop trying to “Find Yourself.” You’re not lost

Everywhere you look, someone is promising to help you “find yourself.”

I’m so fed up with that.

It’s become one of those expressions we barely question. We say it after a divorce, before a career change, during a gap year or when someone announces they’re off travelling with a backpack and a vague itinerary.

“I just need to find myself.”

Honestly, I’ve always found that phrase seriously odd. Seriously.

Where exactly are we supposed to have left ourselves?

Did we misplace ourselves between the cereal aisle and the frozen peas? Did we accidentally leave our true identity in the back of a taxi?

The expression makes it sound as though somewhere in the world there is a finished version of you, patiently waiting to be discovered like buried treasure.

I’m not convinced that’s how life works.

Over the years, I’ve met people who believed they had lost themselves after redundancy, divorce, retirement, bereavement or burnout. They spoke longingly about getting back to the person they used to be.

At first glance, that sounds perfectly sensible.

Until you stop to think about it.

Should we really want to become the person we were ten or twenty years ago?

I hope not.

Life changes us.

Every friendship, every disappointment, every success, every mistake and every heartbreak leaves its mark. If we’re paying attention, we become a little wiser, a little kinder and, perhaps, a little more compassionate than we were before.

At least, that’s the idea.

The difficulty comes when a huge life change shakes the foundations of who we thought we were. Suddenly, we feel unfamiliar to ourselves. It’s tempting to assume we’ve lost our identity.

We haven’t lost it at all.

We’re simply outgrowing it.

Think about children for a moment.

No one expects a ten-year-old to become distressed because they no longer fit into the clothes they wore at the age of five. Outgrowing those clothes is a sign of healthy development.

Yet many adults become deeply unsettled when they outgrow old ambitions, old identities or even old dreams.

We assume something has gone wrong.

What if something has gone right?

One of the quiet privileges of growing older is that we gain permission to ask better questions.

Not, “How do I resuscitate the person I used to be?”

But, “Who am I evolving into now?”

That question opens entirely different possibilities.

It allows us to carry the best parts of our past without becoming trapped by them. It reminds us that our experiences are chapters in our story, not the whole book.

I’ve often noticed that people become anxious when they believe they should have everything figured out by now. As though adulthood comes with an invisible deadline by which all uncertainty should have disappeared.

I have some reassuring news.

It doesn’t.

I’ve met people in their seventies, eighties, and nineties who were still discovering new passions, new friendships and new ways of contributing to the world. I’ve also met people in their thirties who had quietly stopped growing because they believed they’d already realised their full potential.

What a waste!

Because the difference isn’t age.

It is, amongst other things, curiosity.

Curiosity keeps us open to growth.

Labels, on the other hand, can quietly imprison us.

“I’m an accountant.”

“I’m a doctor.”

“I’m a parent.”

“I’m retired.”

Those descriptions may all be true, but none of them captures the whole person. They’re roles we play, not the sum of who we are.

Life has an interesting habit of removing and replacing those labels from time to time. It can feel frightening when it happens, but perhaps it’s also an invitation.

An invitation to discover that your worth was never dependent on one specific role.

So, if you’ve been telling yourself that you need to “find yourself”, may I offer a gentler alternative?

Don’t go looking for the person you used to be.

That version of you has already done their job.

Instead, become curious about the person you’re growing into.

Give yourself permission to evolve.

Read widely.

Walk often.

Spend time in nature.

Have conversations that stretch your thinking. Write down your thoughts. Sit quietly every now and then without feeling the need to fill the silence.

After all, answers rarely arrive when we chase them.

They tend to appear when we create enough space for them to catch up with us.

And perhaps that’s the most exciting of all adventures.

14/07/202614/07/2026

Family Secrets and The Letter That Was Never Read

The Wordweavers, my writing group, meets tomorrow. This month’s prompt is “the letter that was never read/sent.” Definitely a prompt that I’m going to use during my next Writing and Walking the Camino de Santiago de Compostela retreats.

The letter turned up where all the best secrets do: behind a drawer that didn’t quite fit.

Odile had been renovating the old farmhouse for exactly eleven days, which was long enough to develop strong opinions about French carpentry from 1962 (“charming,” she’d told her sister, “in the way a dog with three legs is charming — you admire the effort”) and short enough to still be delighted, rather than defeated, by surprises. So when the bottom drawer of the study dresser refused to slide shut, she didn’t sigh. She got down on her knees, reached behind it, and pulled out an envelope, faded to the soft brown of old tea.

No stamp. No address. Just a name: Henri.

Odile did what any reasonable person would do, which is to say she made coffee first and opened it second, because some adventures require one’s favourite coffee, with just a nuage of milk, no sugar, as a companion.

4 June, 1943

Henri —

You will read this the day you come home, and not before, because I have written it four times already and burned the first three, and I am tired of my own handwriting looking so composed when I am not.

Here is what I could not say standing at the gate, with your mother watching from the window like a woman counting the silverware: I am carrying your child.

I am not sorry. I want to be clear about that. I am not sorry, and I am not asking anything of you except to come back so I can be furious with you properly, in person, the way it deserves to be done.

If it is a girl, I am going to call her after your mother, which you will hate, and if it is a boy, I am naming him after no one you know, because I have had quite enough of this family repeating itself.

Come home, Henri. I have decided several things in your absence and you are going to have opinions about all of them. I am ready.

— C.

Odile read it twice, then a third time with her coffee going cold, because there is a particular kind of stillness that arrives when a stranger’s life turns out to have a plot twist. She had expected pining. She had not expected pregnancy.

She spent the next two weeks doing what any sensible woman with wifi and no immediate deadline does: she fell down a rabbit hole. Parish records. A very patient archivist who clearly hadn’t had this much excitement since the mairie’s roof leaked. A Facebook group for local history buffs who argued about hedgerows with the ferocity most people reserve for politics.

She found Henri.

Or rather, she found where he’d ended up — a village forty minutes away, a long and, she felt strongly, unfair drive for a story with no confirmed ending. Henri had come home from the war in 1945, married a woman named Simone, had four children with her, and died in 1998 with, according to the archivist, “a magnificent moustache.”

Four children with Simone. Odile did the arithmetic. If Colette’s child had been born — and there was no if about a woman that certain, that furious, that ready — it would have arrived sometime in early 1944. Before Henri came home. Before Simone. Which meant that somewhere, possibly still breathing, possibly two villages over with grandchildren of her own, there might be a fifth child nobody in the official record had ever mentioned.

Odile tracked down Henri’s eldest daughter — the one who could still remember her father, seventies now, the sort of woman who answers the door already holding a teapot, as though hospitality were a reflex rather than a decision.

“My mother would want to know about this,” the daughter said, once Odile had explained — badly, over tea, with far too many anyway, so, the thing is — what she’d found. She read the letter slowly, then she went very quiet.

“My father used to send money every month,” she said. “My mother knew. She never said a word about it, not once, not even when he died. She just stopped the payments. We all assumed it was a debt. Or a mistress.” She looked up at Odile, and something had shifted behind her eyes, a woman doing the same arithmetic Odile had done in her kitchen a week earlier. “I need to find out where that money went.”

Odile opened her mouth to offer the archivist’s number, the parish records, the Facebook group with the hedgerow enthusiasts — and stopped.

Because the daughter had gone very still, staring at the letter’s last line — if it is a girl, I am going to call her after your mother — and then at Odile with an expression that had nothing to do with arithmetic anymore.

“My grandmother was named Marguerite,” she said. “My father’s mother — and so is my aunt. The aunt nobody talks about. The one my mother always said ‘isn’t really family.'”

She set her teacup down very carefully, the way people do when their hands are no longer entirely steady.

“I always thought that was just something mothers say about difficult in-laws.”

Join me in the sun-kissed southwest of France, where this unique Writing and Walking the Camino de Santiago Retreat is an antidote to creative stagnation, offering you a supportive environment where inspiration flows freely, where you’ll reignite your passion for storytelling and rediscover the joy of putting pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard). Say goodbye to writer’s block and immerse yourself in your writing without the distractions of modern life.

Surrounded by the serene beauty of the French countryside, you’ll cultivate a state of flow where words effortlessly pour onto the page, leading to unprecedented levels of productivity. You’ll gain valuable insights and perspective to propel your writing to new heights, and you’ll emerge from the retreat feeling empowered, inspired, and ready to share your story with the world.