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.
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.
One of the questions I’m asked most often is whether my guests feel lonely walking the Camino on their own.
The answer surprises many people.
Almost never.
People often assume that solitude and loneliness are the same thing. They aren’t. In fact, after hosting dozens of Camino de Santiago walking retreats over the years, I’ve become convinced that they are almost opposites.
Loneliness is the painful feeling of being disconnected.
Solitude is the peaceful experience of being connected—to yourself.
Modern life doesn’t always make room for that distinction.
We spend much of our lives surrounded by people. We work in teams, attend meetings, answer messages, join family gatherings and dutifully keep up with social media. Ironically, we can be in constant contact with others while feeling increasingly disconnected from ourselves.
Then, when we’re finally alone, it can feel rather unfamiliar.
A little like discovering you’ve been introduced to someone you should have known all your life.
Yourself.
When guests arrive at my farmhouse in southwest France, some are slightly apprehensive about walking the Camino alone. They wonder whether they’ll become bored, lonely or perhaps a little anxious.
“What if I don’t know what to think about for all those hours?” someone asked me recently.
I smiled.
“I suspect you’ll find something.”
The Camino has been answering that question for centuries.
Please don’t misunderstand me. Human connection matters enormously. Some of the warmest moments of every retreat happen around the dinner table, where stories are shared over good food and in good company, laughter comes easily, and complete strangers somehow end up feeling like old friends. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve heard someone say, “I feel as though I’ve known you all for years.”
There is something about walking the Camino that strips away the need for small talk. After spending the day walking on your own, you’ll no longer feel the need to impress anyone or keep up appearances. Conversations will become gentler, deeper and, quite often, surprisingly funny. There is something wonderfully liberating about admitting that you’ve spent twenty minutes trying to identify a bird that turned out to be a scarecrow, or that you had an entire conversation with a cow because it was the only soul around for miles. The Camino has a marvellous way of restoring our sense of perspective—and occasionally our sense of humour.
I’ve also noticed that the guests who are most anxious about walking alone are often the very people who embrace it most wholeheartedly. They set off with a little apprehension, wondering whether they’ll become lonely, only to return glowing with the quiet satisfaction that comes from having enjoyed their own company.
Some even tell me, almost apologetically, that they wished the walk had been a little longer.
Not because they wanted to cover more kilometres, but because, somewhere along the path, they had rediscovered something precious. They had remembered that being alone isn’t the same as being lonely.
In fact, once the noise of everyday life begins to fade, solitude can feel unexpectedly nourishing.
Perhaps that is one of the Camino’s quietest gifts. It doesn’t remove loneliness from our lives—few things can—but it reminds us that we already possess the ability to enjoy our own company. That is an important distinction, particularly in a world that seems determined to fill every spare moment with noise, distraction or another glowing screen demanding our attention.
When guests return home, they often tell me that something has definitely changed. They find themselves taking walks without automatically reaching for their phone. They spend a quiet hour in the garden without feeling guilty. They begin to understand that silence isn’t something to be filled; sometimes it is something to be treasured.
I think my guests have taught me this lesson more clearly than anyone else ever could. Loneliness isn’t always the absence of other people. Quite often, it’s the absence of a meaningful relationship with ourselves.
Loneliness the absence of a meaningful relationship with ourselves. Dr Margaretha Montagu
The Camino, walked at an unhurried pace through the vineyards, forests and sleepy villages of southwest France, has a gentle way of helping us rediscover that relationship. And once we’ve found it again, we realise that walking alone can be one of the least lonely experiences in the world.
Could you do with a little more solitude and a little less noise?
If the thought of spending a few peaceful days walking the Camino de Santiago through the beautiful countryside of southwest France appeals to you, I’d love to tell you more about my small-group walking retreats.
You might discover that walking alone is one of the least lonely things you’ll ever do.
You can email me at MargarethaMontagu.com.
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.
.
There’s a number I’ve become slightly obsessive about, and it isn’t a step count.
It’s four.
After years of hosting small group Camino retreats from my farmhouse in Gascony, I’ve come to believe that somewhere between three guests and four, something magical happens. And somewhere between four and five, that same magical something quietly leaves the room.
I didn’t plan it this way, not really. When I started, “small group” was mostly a polite way of saying “I don’t have the budget for a minibus.” But over enough retreats along the Voie du Puy, I noticed a pattern too consistent to be accidental. With three or four people, the group is the experience. With five or more, the group starts managing the experience — schedules, seating, who walks with whom, who feels left out at dinner. You’ve gone from a shared journey to something closer to light committee work, and nobody signed up for that.
The Maths of Connection
Here’s the part that surprised me most: it’s not really about logistics. I could, if I were feeling ambitious, absolutely organise brunch for five. The farmhouse table is long enough, the coffee pot is large enough, and most mornings I have enough enthusiasm, too.
It’s about attention. Every guest I add divides the attention available to each person who’s already there. With four guests, I can notice who’s gone quiet at brunch, who’s favouring their left ankle, who mentioned their mother in passing on day one and might want to circle back to that on day four. With five, I’m noticing the group. I’m managing a shape rather than meeting three or four individual people exactly where they are.
And the guests notice this too, even if they couldn’t tell you why. They arrive expecting a walking holiday and leave, more often than not, surprised by how seen they felt. That doesn’t happen by accident, and it definitely doesn’t happen at scale.
What Five Actually Costs You
I want to be honest about what “five is a committee” really means in practice, because it sounds a bit unreal written down.
It means someone becomes the unofficial pace-setter, and someone else quietly resents them for it. It means the conversations — which are, frankly, where all the good stuff happens — start splitting into two smaller conversations instead of one shared one, and somebody’s always left slightly outside. It means dinner becomes a performance rather than a debrief, because five or more adults around a table naturally reorganise into an audience and a stage, whether they mean to or not.
None of this is dramatic. It’s subtle — a retreat that’s merely nice instead of one that quietly rearranges something in you.
Small By Design, Not By Accident
So when people ask why I cap my groups at three or four guests, the honest answer is: because five changes the chemistry, and I’m not willing to trade what happens at four for what fits in a minibus.
It also means, if I’m honest, that I’ve turned away bookings I could have taken. There’s a particular kind of ache in saying no to a lovely-sounding group of six because I know, deep down, they’d have a fine time — just not the time they’re actually hoping for.
If you’re the kind of person who reads “small group retreat” in a brochure and immediately wonders what “small” actually means — now you know, at least for me. It’s not marketing shorthand. It’s the whole design brief.
I keep the Camino de Santiago walking retreats at Maison Meraki small on purpose, walking sections of the Voie du Puy, with never more than three or four guests at a time. If that sounds like the kind of attention you’d like turned your way for a week, e-mail me at MargarethaMontagu@gmail.com.
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.
I love collecting meaningful quotes because I’m a hoarder at heart. Just collecting quotes for the sake of collecting them is no longer as satisfying as it used to be. These days, I tend to ponder the meaning of each quote before I add it to my collection. Must be something to do with getting older.
But what makes a quote meaningful? To me specifically, or in general? To find out, I took 9 “walking together” quotes, sticking to my Camino de Santiago walking theme, and explored their philosophical, psychological, spiritual, and evolutionary dimensions.
Some of them made it onto my list, and I’ll share these during my Camino de Santiago walking retreats; but most did not, though. Which ones do you think are worth remembering?
The metaphor of “walking together” is one of the most powerful and enduring motifs in human literature, philosophy, religion, and science. Across diverse domains – friendship, leadership, romance, spiritual community, peacemaking, and evolutionary history – walking side by side serves as a universal symbol for companionship, shared purpose, and mutual respect.
1. Albert Camus: Friendship and Equality
“Don’t walk in front of me; I may not follow. Don’t walk behind me, I may not lead. Just walk beside me and be my friend.” — Albert Camus [1]
Meaning and Analysis
Often attributed to Albert Camus (though occasionally to other literary figures like Elie Wiesel or Antoine de Saint-Exupéry), this quote redefines the traditional hierarchies inherent in human relationships. Hierarchical relationships are typically structured around dominance and subordination: leaders walk in front to guide or command subordinates who trail behind.
Camus rejects both ends of this hierarchy:
•Rejecting taking the Lead: Walking in front implies authority, prescription, and dependency. Camus notes, “I may not follow,” emphasising individual autonomy and freedom—a central pillar of his existentialist philosophy. An individual cannot be coerced or blindly led.
•Rejecting Subordination: Walking behind implies subservience, tracking, or imitation. Camus notes, “I may not lead,” refusing to place another person in a position of subservience where they must constantly look up to him for direction.
•The Egalitarian Ideal: True friendship, according to Camus, exists only in radical equality. Walking beside one another signifies mutual respect, shared pacing, and sovereign companionship. It implies that two individuals travel their respective paths in solidarity, neither demanding submission nor offering blind obedience, but simply sharing presence and mutual support.
Relevance to my Camino walking retreats: On the Camino, social hierarchies (job titles, wealth, status) tend to fall away. Everyone is simply a “pilgrim” (peregrino). This quote sets a beautiful tone for the first day, encouraging participants to see each other as equals and companions rather than leaders or followers. I often use this in my opening orientation to establish a “group culture” of mutual respect.
2. Ratan Tata: Speed versus Sustainability in Collaboration
“If you want to walk fast, walk alone. But if you want to walk far, walk together.” — Ratan Tata [2]
Meaning and Analysis
Rooted in African proverb tradition and popularised in modern leadership discourse by business leaders like Ratan Tata, this maxim contrasts short-term efficiency with long-term resilience and sustainability.
•The Solitary Sprint (Walking Fast): When an individual operates entirely alone, decision-making is frictionless. There is no need for consensus, compromise, or coordination. Consequently, initial progress can be remarkably rapid. However, solitary endurance is strictly limited by individual stamina, resources, and perspective.
•The Collective Journey (Walking Far): Conversely, collective enterprise requires negotiation, alignment, patience, and shared labour. This naturally slows down immediate progress. Yet, collaboration pools diverse skills, distributes emotional and physical burdens, and provides institutional endurance. To achieve monumental, generational goals—whether building a global enterprise, advancing scientific knowledge, or navigating life’s protracted crises—collective synergy is indispensable.
I am not entirely convinced; this statement seems oversimplified to me. As an introvert, I would prefer to do most of my walking alone, although not all. I am more productive on my own, but I do value interactions with others, of limited duration.
3. Virginia Alison: Solitude
“When you feel solitude is your only option, never be afraid to accept a gentle smile from a friend, and the warmth of another’s hand in yours. Walking together is a better option, than walking alone….” — Virginia Alison [3]
Meaning and Analysis
Virginia Alison’s reflection addresses the psychological landscape of isolation and the therapeutic power of human connection.
•The Trap of Solitude: Moments of profound grief, trauma, or existential crisis often trick the mind into believing that isolation is the only safe or authentic option. Suffering can lead to emotional withdrawal, where individuals erect barriers under the guise of independence.
•The Courage of Vulnerability: The quote highlights that accepting comfort is not a sign of weakness, but an act of courage. A “gentle smile” and the “warmth of another’s hand” require no grand gestures; they are subtle, grounding reminders of shared humanity.
•Redefining the Journey: Walking together does not instantly erase hardship, but it fundamentally alters how hardship is experienced. Shared burdens lose their crushing weight, proving that companionship is a sanctuary against despair.
Once again, since solitude is my favourite condition, I would prefer to process most of my grief and hardships on my own, but I do see the value of support from friends, colleagues and family, and of a therapist when needed.
4. Helen Keller: Shared Suffering
“Walking with a friend in the dark is better than walking alone in the light.” — Helen Keller [4]
Meaning and Analysis
Spoken by Helen Keller—who famously lost both her sight and hearing at an early age—this statement carries profound biographical and psychological weight.
•The Illusion of Solitary Light: “Walking alone in the light” represents favourable circumstances, clarity, and ease. Yet, an unshared journey in favourable conditions remains lonely and devoid of relational depth.
•The Power of Shared Darkness: “The dark” symbolises suffering, confusion, grief, and adversity. Navigating darkness alone is terrifying and disorienting. However, when accompanied by a trusted friend, the terror dissipates.
•The Supremacy of Connection over Circumstance: Keller asserts that emotional and relational intimacy supersedes external comfort. A difficult reality shared with someone who understands and cares is infinitely more valuable than effortless ease experienced in isolation.
5. Khalil Gibran: Romantic Partnership as a Shared Odyssey
“The most wonderful thing, Mary, is that you and I are always walking together, hand in hand, in a strangely beautiful world, unknown to other people. We both stretch one hand to receive from Life – and Life is generous indeed.” — Khalil Gibran [5]
Meaning and Analysis
Drawn from the correspondence of poet and philosopher Khalil Gibran to Mary Haskell, this quote captures the transcendent, intimate experience of profound romantic love and spiritual kinship.
•A Private Universe: Gibran describes intimacy as creating a shared reality. While the physical world is shared by billions, deep love constructs a “strangely beautiful world” accessible only to the couple. It is an internal landscape built on mutual understanding, shared aesthetic and spiritual appreciation, and emotional sanctuary.
•Joint Receptivity: The imagery of walking “hand in hand” while stretching out “one hand to receive from Life” emphasises harmonious partnership. They do not compete for life’s bounty; rather, they face existence as a unified front, mutually enriched by the generosity of lived experience.
6. Pope Francis: Complementarity in Marriage
“This is what marriage is all about – Man and woman walking together, wherein the husband helps his wife to become ever more a woman, and wherein the woman has the task of helping her husband to become ever more a man.” — Pope Francis [6]
Meaning and Analysis
Pope Francis frames marriage not merely as a legal contract or romantic arrangement, but as a dynamic, teleological journey of mutual moral and personal maturation.
•Dynamic Teleology: Becoming “ever more a woman” and “ever more a man” in Catholic theology refers to the realisation of one’s full human and spiritual potential through relational self-gift (donum sui).
•Mutual Sanctification: The journey requires active, intentional stewardship. Spouses are tasked with drawing out the virtues, strength, tenderness, and authenticity of one another. Walking together in marriage is an ongoing process of mutual refinement, where vulnerability and strength balance each other across a lifetime.
7. Anne Lamott: Communal Resilience Against Despair
“A whole lot of us believers, of all different religions, are ready to turn back the tide of madness by walking together, in both the dark and the light – in other words, through life – registering voters as we go, and keeping the faith.” — Anne Lamott [7]
Meaning and Analysis
Anne Lamott’s perspective grounds “walking together” in socio-political activism, interfaith solidarity, and civic duty.
•Confronting Societal Madness: The “tide of madness” represents political polarisation, injustice, cynicism, and social decay. Solitary resistance against systemic crises easily leads to burnout and despair.
•Interfaith and Civic Solidarity: Lamott emphasises coalition-building across diverse religious and ideological lines. By walking together “through life,” individuals pool moral authority and practical energy.
•Actionable Hope: Walking together is paired with concrete civic action (“registering voters as we go”) and spiritual resilience (“keeping the faith”). Hope is treated not as a passive sentiment, but as an active, communal discipline.
Relevance to my Camino walking retreats: The Camino attracts people of all faiths (and none). Lamott’s quote captures the “interfaith” and “spiritual but not necessarily religious” vibe of the modern Camino. It frames the walk as a way to find peace amidst the “madness” of the modern world. This one is excellent for a morning routine reflection or a moment of silence at a historic chapel or waypoint along the route.
8. Thich Nhat Hanh: Mindful Reconciliation and Peacemaking
“When we come to the table, we shouldn’t negotiate right away. We should spend time walking together, eating together, making acquaintance, telling each other about our own suffering, without blame or condemnation. It takes maybe one, two, three weeks to do that. And if communication and understanding are possible, negotiation will be easier. So if I am to organise a peace negotiation, I will organise it in that way.” — Thich Nhat Hanh [8]
Meaning and Analysis
Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh applies walking together as a foundational methodology for conflict resolution and peacebuilding.
•De-escalation Through Shared Humanity: Formal negotiations often fail because parties enter adversarial spaces entrenched in positions, suspicion, and hostility. By preceding negotiation with shared daily rituals—walking, eating, and storytelling—opponents humanise one another.
•Narrative Empathy: Sharing personal suffering “without blame or condemnation” shifts the paradigm from fault-finding to trauma-recognition. When adversaries realise each other’s pain and fear, the psychological barriers to compromise dissolve, making sustainable peace achievable.
Relevance to my Camino walking retreats: The Camino is famous for “Camino Magic”—the deep, vulnerable conversations that happen between strangers while walking. Nhat Hanh’s emphasis on walking and eating together as a precursor to understanding perfectly describes the rhythm of a retreat. I sometimes use this at the start of a communal dinner where participants talk about why they chose to walk the Camino.
9. Richard Dawkins: Evolutionary Deep Time and Shared Origins
“More poignant for us, at Laetoli in Tanzania are the companionable footprints of three real hominids, probably Australopithecus afarensis, walking together 3.6 million years ago in what was then fresh volcanic ash. Who does not wonder what these individuals were to each other, whether they held hands or even talked, and what forgotten errand they shared in a Pliocene dawn?” — Richard Dawkins [9]
Meaning and Analysis
Richard Dawkins shifts the lens from contemporary philosophy and sociology to evolutionary deep time, contemplating the fossilised footprints discovered at Laetoli.
•The Antiquity of Companionship: The Laetoli footprints demonstrate that bipedalism and social companionship are ancient, foundational traits of the hominid lineage. Long before recorded history, philosophy, or religion, our ancestors walked together.
•Existential Wonder: Dawkins evokes a profound sense of temporal kinship. The shared errand in a “Pliocene dawn” bridges a 3.6-million-year chasm. It reminds modern humans that the instinct to walk in company, share a journey, and forge bonds is written into our very biological heritage.
Relevance to my Camino walking retreats: The Camino is a path walked by millions over a thousand years. Dawkins’ quote expands that perspective to millions of years. It reminds pilgrims that walking together is the most fundamental human act. It adds a sense of “deep time” to the French landscape they are traversing. This quote is perfect when discussing the ancient history (1000 years!) of this pilgrimage route.
This is your invitation to leave the noise of the modern world behind and step onto a path that has been walked for a thousand years. My 3- or 5-day Camino de Santiago retreats in Southwest France offer more than just a scenic hike; it is a return to the fundamental rhythm of being present in the moment. In the spirit of the ancient peregrinos, my guests walk not as leaders or followers, but as equals—sharing the road, the table, and the quiet magic of the French countryside.
If you’re both constantly juggling responsibilities, and the conversations that used to come easily now feel like one more thing on the to-do list, this 5-day/4-night Camino de Santiago “Back in Sync” Couples Hiking Retreat is for you. It offers a complete escape from routine, giving you time to reconnect with each other, and remember what drew you together in the first place.
Escape to a cosy 200-year-old farmhouse in the heart of Gascony for a blissful Men Only binge reading retreat where your only responsibilities are choosing your next book, enjoying delicious meals, and deciding whether to read by the fire or in a sunny corner. The Book Lovers’ Reading Retreat is your permission slip to slow down, switch off, and indulge in uninterrupted reading time — without cooking, cleaning, shopping, or anyone asking, “Have you finished that book yet?”
Escape the noise, the endless to-do lists, and the pressure to have everything figured out for 5-days and 4 nights with the Uncensored Journaling Retreat — a few precious days to slow down, pick up your pen, and finally sort out your thoughts. Surrounded by the peaceful beauty of Gascony, you’ll enjoy quiet mornings, delicious food, gentle Camino de Santiago walks, meaningful conversations, and the freedom to write without rules, expectations, or anyone peeking over your shoulder.
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.
Summary Comparative Table
Quote Author
Primary Domain
Core Philosophical Message
Albert Camus
Friendship
True friendship requires radical equality, rejecting both dominance and subservience.
Ratan Tata
Leadership
Solitary efforts achieve speed, but collective collaboration achieves long-term endurance.
Virginia Alison
Psychology
Vulnerability and accepting human touch are essential antidotes to isolation.
Helen Keller
Resilience
Emotional connection in adversity outweighs solitary ease in favourable conditions.
Khalil Gibran
Romantic Love
Deep intimacy builds a private universe where partners face life’s generosity together.
Pope Francis
Marriage
Marriage is a lifelong journey of mutual spiritual formation and complementary growth.
Anne Lamott
Faith
Communal solidarity and active civic engagement turn back societal division and despair.
Thich Nhat Hanh
Ethics
Preceding negotiation with shared human experiences heals conflict and enables peace.
Richard Dawkins
Evolutionary Science
Walking together is an ancient, fundamental biological heritage rooted in deep time.
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.
References
1.Camus, A. (Attributed). Philosophical Reflections on Friendship.
2.Tata, R. (Attributed). Business Leadership and Collective Endurance.
3.Alison, V. Reflections on Solitude and Human Connection.
4.Keller, H. The Story of My Life and Philosophical Musings.
5.Gibran, K. (1923). Letters to Mary Haskell.
6.Francis, Pope. Audiences and Teachings on the Theology of Marriage.
7.Lamott, A. Travelling Together Through Faith and Civic Action.
8.Nhat Hanh, T. (2003). Creating True Peace: Ending Conflict in Yourself, Your Family, Your World. Penguin Books.
9.Dawkins, R. (2004). The Ancestor’s Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Life. Houghton Mifflin.
Sometimes Standing Still Is the Most Courageous Step You Can Take
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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.
We tend to admire people who take decisive action.
The person who quits the corporate job to sail around the world.
The couple who sell everything and move to Tuscany.
The entrepreneur who launches a new business at sixty-five.
These are the stories that make the headlines. They fit neatly into our belief that courage always looks dramatic.
Sometimes the bravest thing a person can do isn’t to force an answer. It’s to let the real question surface first.
That isn’t a particularly fashionable message. We live in a culture that loves action plans, five-step strategies and making things happen. We celebrate momentum. We applaud people who have a clear vision of where they’re going next.
Uncertainty, on the other hand, tends to make us uncomfortable.
We want answers.
We want decisions.
Preferably by 6 am on Tuesday.
Many of my guests arrive hoping that somewhere during their retreat, they’ll finally decide what to do. Should they retire? Move house? Start a business? End a relationship? Say yes to a new opportunity? Say no to an old obligation?
They’re often disappointed when I don’t have the answers.
Actually, that’s not quite true.
They’re often surprised that I don’t pretend to have them.
One of the principles on which I built my retreats is that I don’t walk the Camino with my guests. Instead, they spend two or three days walking alone along the historic Le Puy route, following the familiar arrows through vineyards, woodland and sleepy villages.
People occasionally ask whether I worry about sending them off on their own.
Not really. The route is well-marked and well-trodden, and I’m never more than a phone call away. What I’d genuinely worry about is walking beside them, offering opinions every few hundred metres, and interrupting the most important conversation of all — the one quietly unfolding inside their own heads.
Something interesting happens when people stop trying quite so hard to force a decision.
As the kilometres pass, the urgency begins to lessen. The scent of wild mint drifts through the trees. Cicadas accompany the afternoon sunshine with all the enthusiasm of a choir that never seems to need a tea break. A breeze stirs the leaves in the vineyards, and for a little while, the only thing demanding your attention is the path beneath your boots.
It is astonishing how many problems become less intimidating when viewed at walking pace.
I’ve noticed that guests often return from their first day on the Camino saying something they didn’t expect to say.
“I’ve realised I’ve been asking myself the wrong question.”
Far from being a sign of avoidance, this is usually the beginning of clarity.
Sometimes we’ve been trying to solve for the wrong problem entirely.
Sometimes we haven’t gathered enough information.
Sometimes we’re simply exhausted, and exhaustion has a remarkable talent for making every crossroads feel overwhelming.
Would you trust yourself to make an important financial decision after being awake all night?
Probably not.
So why are we so willing to make life-changing decisions when we’re emotionally drained, overwhelmed or running on empty?
It’s hardly the stuff of bestselling productivity books, but I’ve watched it work time and again — not because it stops people from deciding, but because it changes what they end up deciding.
One guest arrived convinced she needed to decide whether to retire. By the final evening, she’d landed somewhere she hadn’t expected. Retirement wasn’t the real issue at all. She loved her work. What she no longer loved was working sixty-hour weeks. The decision she actually needed to make had nothing to do with her job title, and everything to do with giving herself rest she hadn’t felt entitled to.
She did not find her answer because she pushed harder.
She found it because she stopped chasing the question she’d started with, and let the real one catch up.
Perhaps that’s why I love the Camino so much.
It reminds us that progress and speed are not the same thing.
Sometimes the most meaningful journey begins the moment we stop rushing towards the next destination and become fully present where we are.
The vines surrounding my farmhouse understand this perfectly. They don’t produce grapes all year round. They grow, they flower, they fruit, and they rest. Nobody would call a dormant vine indecisive. It’s simply not yet time.
Nature has never confused rest with failure.
Perhaps we shouldn’t either.
Looking back over the dozens of guests who have walked the Camino during my retreats, I realise that very few returned home because they’d solved the problem they arrived with.
Most returned because they’d finally worked out which problem was actually theirs to solve.
That quiet shift in perspective often proved far more life-changing than any hurried decision could have been.
Sometimes courage isn’t taking the next step.
Sometimes it’s refusing to take the wrong one until you know where you want to go.
Are you standing at a crossroads?
If you’re facing questions that don’t have easy answers, perhaps what you need isn’t more pressure to decide, but a little space to reflect.
My small-group Camino de Santiago retreats in southwest France offer two or three days of walking, thinking and slowing down, without anyone telling you what your next steps should be.
Sometimes the bravest step is allowing yourself not to take one—at least until you’re ready.
If you’d like to know more, I’d love to hear from you. You can email me at MargarethaMontagu@gmail.com.
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
For years, whenever someone asked me about leadership, I gave the answer I thought I was supposed to give. I talked about vision. I talked about decisiveness. I talked about the importance of being the one in the room who makes the call. It was a perfectly serviceable answer, and it was also, I now think, mostly wrong. I didn’t understand what authentic leadership actually required until I watched a small, opinionated Falabella named Loki lead five other horses across a field.
Loki is not the biggest horse in the herd, and he is certainly not the loudest. He can be a little grumpy before breakfast. But when something in the field spooks the others, or when they need to move somewhere unfamiliar, he is the one they follow. Not because he pushes them. Not because he has any way of forcing them to. They follow him because, over time, he has proven himself calm when it counts, consistent in how he behaves, and safe to be near even when things feel uncertain. That is the entire mechanism. No hierarchy imposed from above, no authority claimed by size or noise. Just trust, earned repeatedly, in small, potentially dangerous moments.
I think about that a great deal now, mostly because it is the exact opposite of how most of us were taught to think about leading people.
The Ability to remain Calm is a skill, not a personality trait
We tend to treat calmness as something people either have or do not have, a fixed temperament rather than a practice. But the calm that horses respond to, and that people respond to too, is usually not the absence of stress. It is the visible management of it. A leader who can stay steady while things go wrong is not someone who feels nothing. They are someone who has learned not to transmit their own alarm to everyone around them. That is trainable, in horses and in humans alike, and it starts with noticing how much of your reaction other people absorb before you have said a single word.
Clarity is worth more than confidence
Confidence gets far more credit than it deserves. What actually builds trust is clarity, being specific about what you expect, what is happening, and what comes next. A horse does not need you to seem certain. It needs you to be legible. The same is true of the people you lead. Vague reassurance (“it’ll be fine”) tends to unsettle people more than plain information (“here is what we know, here is what we don’t, here is the next step”), because vagueness leaves too much room for imagination to fill the gaps with something worse.
Consistency is essential
You cannot demand trust, and you cannot rush it. It accumulates, slowly, through the boring repetition of doing what you said you would do. One inspiring speech will not outweigh a pattern of unpredictability, and one bad day will not undo months of reliability either, as long as it stays the exception rather than the rule. Horses have an almost comic disinterest in your intentions. They respond entirely to your patterns. People are more forgiving than horses, but not by as much as we would like to think.
Safety is not the same as comfort
This is the one people misunderstand most. Making people feel safe around you does not mean protecting them from difficulty, disagreement, or hard truths. It means they trust that you will not use your position against them, that you will not humiliate them for being wrong, and that you are steady enough to be told bad news. A herd will walk through discomfort with a leader it trusts. It will not walk two steps with one it does not.
Authority without force is slower to build and far more durable
The version of leadership built on force, whether that is fear, hierarchy, or sheer force of personality, can move people quickly in the short term. But it does not survive the leader’s absence, and it tends to collapse the moment real pressure arrives. The version built on respect and trust takes longer to establish. It also does not disappear when things get hard.
None of this is naturally intuitive for most of us. We are trained, from very early on, to associate leadership with volume, certainty, and control. It takes real, deliberate unlearning to lead the way Loki does, through calm, clarity, consistency, and safety rather than through pure authority. I did not learn that from an authentic leadership seminar. I learned it standing in a field in Gascony, watching a small, slightly stubborn horse prove, again and again, that trust is a far stronger tool than force will ever be.
If this is a pattern you recognise in yourself, whether you are leading a team, a family, or simply trying to be someone others feel steady around, it is worth working through properly rather than picking it apart alone. That kind of untangling is exactly what I help people do, one to one, over three unhurried days at my private Realignment Retreat. No audience, no agenda but yours, just time to think clearly about the kind of leader, and person, you actually want to be.
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.
What if you don’t want to discover your life purpose, reinvent yourself, release your limiting beliefs, become your best self or emerge from the Gascon countryside at dawn knowing exactly what you’re going to do with the next thirty years?
What if you would simply like to walk somewhere beautiful, eat something delicious, sleep properly and have nobody ask you what your five-year plan is?
Excellent. You may have just found the right kind of walking retreat.
We live in an age of relentless self-improvement. We are encouraged to optimise our sleep, our diet, our productivity, our relationships, our careers and, apparently, our entire personalities. Even holidays seem to have joined in. A retreat must now transform us, enlighten us, heal us, reconnect us with our authentic selves and preferably leave us with a colour-coded action plan for the rest of our lives.
Frankly, it can be a lot to live up to for a 5-day retreat.
And sometimes, particularly when life has already thrown a few things at you, the last thing you need is another project called You.
Perhaps you don’t need a major overhaul right now
There is a particular assumption behind much of the language surrounding retreats: that we arrive somehow incomplete and leave improved. We arrive stressed and leave serene. We arrive confused and leave with clarity. We arrive having lost our way and leave with a shiny new life purpose tucked neatly into our luggage.
It sounds wonderful. It can also feel like just another thing on your already-endless to-do list.
What if you are not looking for a transformation? What if you don’t want to become a different person at all? Perhaps you simply want to spend a few days somewhere beautiful without having to simulate wellness, achieve enlightenment or explain what you have learned about yourself over dinner.
There is nothing wrong with that.
Sometimes you don’t need to be transformed. You simply need to rest.
You need to wake up without immediately reaching for your phone. You need to drink your coffee slowly. You need to walk without rushing towards a destination. You need to notice the sound of your feet on the path, the warmth of the sun, the smell of the earth after rain. You need a proper lunch and perhaps a nap afterwards, because frankly, naps are underrated.
And you may need a little time in which nobody wants anything from you.
No-pressure Walking
One of the things I love about walking is its simplicity. You don’t have to be good at it. You don’t have to win. There is no leaderboard, no certificate at the end and certainly no PowerPoint presentation explaining what you achieved.
You put one foot in front of the other and keep going.
That simplicity can be surprisingly restorative when life has become complicated. During a period of change, we can spend enormous amounts of energy trying to work out what comes next. Should I stay? Should I go? What do I actually want? Who am I now? What happens if I make the wrong decision?
Those are worthwhile questions, but they don’t necessarily become easier because you spend twelve hours sitting at a desk staring determinedly at them.
Sometimes they become easier when you stop staring at them.
There is something about walking that gives thoughts room to move. You can think about something without having to solve it. You can allow a question to accompany you for a while rather than demanding an immediate answer. And occasionally, somewhere between one village and the next, an answer appears when you weren’t particularly looking for it.
That’s rather different from forcing a breakthrough.
You don’t have to have an epiphany a day
Perhaps this is the bit I most want people to know: nothing has to happen.
You don’t have to return from a walking retreat with a completely reconstructed identity. You don’t have to discover your purpose. You don’t have to make a major decision. You don’t have to have a meaningful conversation with every other person you meet. You don’t even have to decide that walking has changed your life.
You can simply enjoy it.
You can walk through the Gascon countryside, past vineyards and sunflowers, along a section of the Camino de Santiago, and let your mind wander wherever it wants to go. You can stop and look at something because it is beautiful. You can sit under a tree. You can write in your journal, or not write in it at all. You can have a conversation, or enjoy the luxury of not having one.
And if your biggest revelation is that you have forgotten what it feels like to be unhurried, I would consider that revelation quite sufficient.
Something interesting might happen
The irony is that when we stop trying so hard to change ourselves, change sometimes happens anyway.
You may find that a decision you’ve been wrestling with suddenly seems less complicated. You may realise that something you thought you desperately wanted no longer matters. You may notice that you’re sleeping better. You may remember something you used to enjoy. You may come home with an idea you’ve been unable to think clearly about for months.
Or you may come home feeling exactly the same person who left, only considerably more rested.
All of these are perfectly respectable outcomes.
Because the purpose of stepping away isn’t necessarily to return as somebody new, sometimes it is simply to return more fully yourself.
You don’t have to know where you’re going
This is perhaps why walking feels particularly appropriate during times of transition.
When something significant has changed — retirement, divorce, an empty nest, a move, a career change, the end of a relationship, or simply the dawning realisation that the life you built no longer quite fits — there can be enormous pressure to know what comes next.
But you don’t always need the whole map.
Sometimes you need the next step.
Walking teaches this rather beautifully. You don’t stand at the beginning of a path demanding to see exactly where you will be three hours from now. You simply follow the path in front of you. You notice where it bends. You stop when you need to. You look at the scenery. You keep going.
And eventually, you arrive somewhere.
So, what if you don’t want to be transformed?
Then don’t be.
Come as you are. Bring your tiredness, your uncertainty, your questions, your overactive mind, your completely reasonable desire for a nap and your refusal to produce a five-year plan on demand.
Walk. Eat. Sleep. Breathe. Notice things. Have a laugh. Write if you feel like writing. Think if you feel like thinking. Do absolutely nothing if that’s what you need.
And if, somewhere along the way, you find yourself seeing something differently, that’s lovely.
If you return home with a little more clarity, a little more energy or a better idea of which direction you might like to take next, that’s lovely too.
But there is no transformation quota.
You don’t have to become a new person.
You might simply need enough space to become aware of the one you already are.
And if that sounds rather more appealing than being transformed before Thursday, perhaps a Camino de Santiago walking retreat in Gascony in southwest France is exactly what you need.
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.
“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
From the Series: Questions You Might Be Too Embarrassed to Ask About a Walking Retreat
I was in the middle of one of the hardest weeks of my life when a friend of over a decade simply stopped being there for me. Not dramatically — there was no argument, no angry text, no falling out I could point to. She just went quiet exactly when I needed her most, and stayed quiet long enough that the message became impossible to misunderstand. I told myself she was busy. I told myself maybe she doesn’t realise how bad things were. Eventually I ran out of excuses.
It felt like a betrayal — not a lie, not a knife in the back, just an absence exactly where presence was needed. And I think it stings in a quieter but longer-lasting way. A dramatic betrayal at least gives you something to be angry about. Being abandoned gives you nothing to hold, just a friend-shaped space where support should have been, and a slow, creeping question about whether you were ever as close as you thought you were.
I spent two decades as a doctor before I started hosting retreats in a French farmhouse with a herd of rescued horses, and if there’s one thing both my careers have taught me, it’s that people are remarkably bad at processing betrayal. We tend to do one of two things: we either loop endlessly, replaying the moment until it’s worn meaningless, or we shove it to the back of our minds entirely and decide to “move on.” Neither one involves processing the betrayal. Both are delay tactics, just with different aesthetics.
I’ve learned a few things, painfully, from my own experiences, and from years of sitting across from people mid-way through theirs:
Name the feelings accurately
Before you can process betrayal, you have to stop calling it something less than it is. “I’m annoyed” when you mean “I’ll never trust this person again” is a very common way of protecting yourself from the extent of the betrayal. It doesn’t work. Vague feelings won’t help you resolve anything. Name it plainly, even if only to yourself: this was a betrayal, and it hurt, badly.
Expect your body to weigh in before your mind does
Betrayal tends to announce itself physically before it makes emotional sense: a tight chest, a bad night’s sleep, an inexplicable urge to reorganise your kitchen cupboards at 11pm. This isn’t drama. It’s a nervous system responding to a genuine threat: the loss of safety in a relationship you depended on. Give that reaction some room instead of talking yourself out of it.
Separate the story from the facts
This is the part I find myself repeating most often, to friends and to former patients alike. What actually happened is usually less dramatic and more specific than the story we build around it. The story includes every past slight reinterpreted in a darker light, every future conversation you’re dreading, every conclusion about your own worth that the betrayal seems to confirm. The facts are simple: this person did this specific thing. Untangling the essence doesn’t make the betrayal hurt less, but it stops it from metastasising into a damning verdict on your ability to choose trustworthy friends.
Grieve the version of the friendship you thought you had
This is SO important. Even should you eventually repair the relationship, the friendship you had before the betrayal is gone — not necessarily replaced by something worse, but definitely replaced by something different. That’s worth grieving on its own terms, separate from any decision about what comes next. Trying to skip straight to resolution, before you’ve let yourself mourn what was lost, tends to backfire later.
Decide what you need to rebuild trust after betrayal
There’s a difference between the apology you feel you’re owed and the resolution you actually need to move forward, and they don’t always match. Sometimes the person who hurt you never fully understands why, and you have to find your own way through the betrayal. That’s not fair. It’s also frustratingly common. Waiting for accountability before you allow yourself to heal can leave you stuck indefinitely, tethered to someone else’s (un)willingness to show up.
Let the timeline be unreasonable
Processing betrayal rarely follows a tidy arc. You’ll think you’re through it, and then a smell, a song, an unrelated conversation will put you right back at the beginning. That’s not failure — it’s just how injuries to trust actually heal, in loops rather than lines. Be suspicious of anyone, including yourself, who tells you that you should be “over it” by now.
What I didn’t expect, in my own situation, was how much clarity came simply from having somewhere quiet to think it through without an audience of people who already had opinions. Betrayal has a way of making you want to talk to everyone and no one about it at the same time — and yet it’s rarely a group conversation that actually gets you through it. It’s often one honest conversation, uninterrupted, in a setting that isn’t asking anything else of you. And sometimes that is a conversation you have with yourself.
That’s the whole raison d’être of my private Realignment Retreat — three days, just you, no group to engage with or perform “fine” in front of. Time to wander along the Camino de Santiago, think out loud, and actually work through what happened, at your own pace, with someone who’s spent two decades learning how to listen for what’s underneath the version people lead with.
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.
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.
I used to think setting healthy boundaries had to be dramatic to count. That you needed a raised voice, or a slammed door, or at the very least a strongly worded text, for a boundary to register. Turns out I only believed this because I’d never before watched Loki work a paddock.
Loki is the smallest horse in my herd and, without question, the one most firmly in charge. He weighs, generously, about as much as a large dog. And yet he moves horses three times his size out of his space with nothing more than a flattened ear and a warning look, the equine equivalent of a raised eyebrow. No drama. No chasing. No prolonged negotiation. Just: not here, thank you. And the other horse simply adjusts its approach.
I’ve spent a good portion of my adult life doing the opposite of this.
The Smallest Horse is in Charge
When I first brought the herd together, I expected the boundary-setting to look like conflict — pinned ears, some kicking, a bit of chaos while everyone worked out the pecking order. There was a little of that, briefly. But what actually settled the herd wasn’t aggression. It was consistency. Loki doesn’t get louder every time someone tests his space. He does the same small thing, every single time, at exactly the same intensity, whether it’s the first offence or the fiftieth. No warning shots that escalate into something bigger because the first attempt didn’t land. Just the same clear signal, repeated, until everyone learns it’s reliable enough to believe.
What struck me most was how little residual tension there was afterwards. If Loki indicates Valentino should move off his hay, Valentino moves off the hay, and thirty seconds later they’re standing companionably in the shade together like nothing happened. Because, to Loki, nothing did happen. A boundary was communicated and respected. That’s the whole event. No grudge attached, no story added on top about what it meant that Valentino had crowded him in the first place.
Compare that to how most of us handle it. We tolerate the crowding — at work, in a friendship, in our own families — well past the point of comfort, saying nothing, being terribly accommodating, and then when we finally do say something, it comes out sideways. Too big, too late, wrapped in weeks of resentment that had nowhere else to go. We treat boundary-setting like a last resort instead of routine maintenance, which is exactly backwards. Loki never waits until he’s furious to move someone along. He does it the moment he needs space, at the smallest necessary size, before resentment has any chance to build.
Firm Is Not Necessarily Aggressive
I think this is the piece most of us skip past: a clear boundary and an aggressive one are not the same instrument, even though we tend to reach for aggression because we’ve let things go on so long that a gentle correction no longer feels like enough. Loki never needs to escalate, because he never let the first small crossing slide in the way that makes escalation necessary later. His boundaries are firm precisely because they’re small and immediate — not because they’re forceful.
I noticed this most clearly in myself, oddly, while grooming Aurore. She’s a wonderfully affectionate horse who will happily stand right on top of you if you let her, which is charming for about four seconds and then genuinely a safety issue when you’re holding hoof clippers. My first instinct, always, was to just absorb it — shuffle over, make myself smaller, accommodate the crowding rather than address it. It took real practice to instead put a flat hand on her shoulder the moment she leaned in, firmly, without apology, without a running commentary about how sorry I was to be asking. She’d step back. We’d carry on. No harm done, because I’d said something before there was a problem.
I’d spent two decades in clinical practice watching this same dynamic play out among staff, and plenty more years failing to apply it to my own working relationships. The people who set boundaries well rarely got angry. They were the ones who made small, clear objections early, calmly, and meant it consistently enough that they rarely had to raise their voice at all.
Practising the Flattened Ear
You don’t need to master some elaborate boundary-setting script to get better at this. Loki’s entire toolkit is a look and a small shift of weight. What makes it effective isn’t sophistication — it’s that he uses it immediately, every time, without escalating drama into the exchange. The lesson isn’t to become more assertive in some general sense. It’s to say the small true thing the moment you notice you need to, before it has time to compound into something that requires a much bigger, angrier version of the same message.
Start smaller than feels sufficient. A “that doesn’t work for me” said early is worth infinitely more than the perfectly composed essay you’ll eventually deliver after six months of silent resentment. Loki never writes essays. He just moves his ears.
Attend a Master Class in Setting Healthy Boundaries
If you’d like to see this in practice rather than just read about it, my retreats include unhurried time simply being around the herd — and there’s no faster way to notice your own boundary habits than standing next to a horse who has absolutely no interest in your people-pleasing tendencies. Come spend a few days with us on your own or with a small group and let Loki show you how it’s done. He’s very patient with slow learners, provided you don’t crowd the hay.
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.
“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 Camino de Santiago walking retreat host on the quiet exhaustion so many high-achievers mistake for normality
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.
One of the questions I ask every guest when they arrive is, “How are you?”
Almost everyone gives roughly the same answer. “Oh, I’m fine.” Or perhaps, “A bit tired,” usually accompanied by a smile that suggests they’re apologising for even mentioning it.
What I’ve learned after hosting dozens of Camino de Santiago walking retreats is that almost nobody realises quite how tired they really are. I don’t mean the kind of tiredness that a good night’s sleep sorts out. I mean the more debilitating kind — the sort that creeps up so gradually we stop noticing it’s there at all, the way you stop noticing a low hum in a room until someone switches the fan off.
Life has a habit of demanding more than we realise it’s asking. Careers become more draining. Parents grow older. Children leave home — or don’t. Relationships need nurturing. The news gets scarier, the world less predictable than it once seemed, and we adapt, because that’s what human beings do rather well. We keep going, right up until the day we find ourselves standing in front of the fridge, unable to decide what to have for dinner, and wondering when small decisions started feeling quite so difficult.
Many of my guests are remarkably capable people. They’ve built careers, raised families, started businesses, cared for ageing parents, volunteered, and quietly held up friends going through hard times. They’re used to managing a great deal, and they’ve become so good at it that they no longer recognise how much coping they’re actually doing. Competence, it turns out, is an excellent disguise.
Then they arrive here — and for the first day or so, most of them continue at exactly the same pace. They check their phones. They apologise for taking a work call. They tell me they’ll “just quickly” answer a few emails before dinner. I’ve learned not to say very much at this stage. The Camino tends to take care of it without my interference.
My retreats include two or three days walking sections of the historic Le Puy route, alone, carrying little more than lunch, water and perhaps a notebook. On the first morning, many set off with real determination — some even tell me how quickly they expect to finish, as though the Camino were a to-do list of particularly scenic bullet points. I smile, not because they’re wrong exactly, but because they haven’t yet discovered that the Camino will no doubt have other ideas. It’s been here for over a thousand years. It’s not going to be rushed by someone’s Tuesday deadline.
After walking for a while, the pace will begin to slow as you grow physically tired, as will the constant mental commentary, the endless planning, and the invisible pressure to make full use of every single minute. Somewhere between the vineyards and the sunflower fields, the shady woodland paths and the hilltop stone villages, your nervous system seems to breathe out for what may be the first time in years. You’ll start noticing birdsong instead of notifications. The scent of wild mint and thyme replaces the smell of exhaust fumes. It sounds almost ridiculously simple. I rather think it is.
One of the things that fascinates me is how extraordinarily well people sleep during the retreat. They tell me they haven’t slept like that in years, and at first they assume it’s the walking. Walking certainly helps. So does fresh air, and so does good food. But I suspect something more important is going on underneath all that. For the first time in a long while, they stop being vigilant. They stop anticipating the next outrageous demand, stop wondering who desperately needs them, stop worrying about tomorrow before today has even finished. Their bodies finally get the message that, for now, it’s safe to rest.
As a doctor, I spent many years watching what prolonged stress does to people physically. As a retreat host, I’ve become just as interested in what it does emotionally. It shrinks our world. It convinces us that rushing is normal and that rest has to be earned. It whispers that if we stop, even for a moment, everything might quietly fall apart.
Do you know what I’ve noticed, though? It rarely does. Emails wait. Meetings happen without us, somehow. The world carries on spinning with a confidence that is, frankly, a little insulting given how essential we’d assumed we were. We, meanwhile, come home remembering what it feels like not to be running on empty.
The Camino doesn’t remove our responsibilities — they’re all still there when we get back, patiently queuing for attention. What it often removes is the illusion that we have to lug them around every waking moment of every day. Perhaps that’s why so many guests tell me they feel lighter when they leave. Not because their lives have become easier, but because they’ve remembered what it feels like not to be exhausted all the time.
I sometimes think emotional tiredness is rather like living next to a railway line. At first, every passing train keeps you awake. Eventually you stop hearing them altogether — until you spend a few quiet nights in the countryside and suddenly realise just how much noise you’d been living with the whole time, without clocking it.
The Camino offers that kind of quiet. And in it, many people discover something they hadn’t expected: they weren’t lazy, they weren’t unmotivated, and they certainly weren’t “just getting older.” They were simply far more tired than they’d ever allowed themselves to admit.
Could you be more exhausted than you realise?
If you’re longing for a few days to step away from the demands of everyday life, walk the Camino through the peaceful countryside of southwest France, and rediscover what genuine rest actually feels like, I’d love to tell you more about my small-group Camino de Santiago walking retreats.
Sometimes the greatest gift we can give ourselves isn’t another task completed. It’s permission to stop carrying the world on our shoulders for a little while.
You can email me at MargarethaMontagu@gmail.com.
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
I have never once managed to hurry a horse into trusting me. I want to be very clear about this, because for the first few months after I brought Tess home, I tried.
Not obviously, of course. I wasn’t standing in the paddock barking commands. But there was a quieter version of rushing that I didn’t recognise as rushing at the time — the extra step I’d take toward her when she flinched, the treat I’d hold out a little too eagerly, the small, hopeful “come on, it’s okay” I’d murmur as if saying it enough times might speed things along. I told myself I was being patient. I was, technically, waiting. But I was waiting the way you wait for a kettle to boil — watching it, willing it, checking constantly to see if we were there yet.
Tess was having none of it. And thank goodness, honestly, because she taught me the difference between waiting patiently and waiting impatiently, which turns out to be enormous.
The Horse Who Wouldn’t Be Rushed
Tess came to me carrying whatever her history had handed her — I don’t know the specifics, only the evidence. The way she’d startle at raised hands. The care she took never to be cornered, always leaving herself an exit. The length of time it took before she’d let anyone near her shoulder, let alone her head. Everything about her said she’d learned, at some point, that trust was a dangerous thing to offer.
I discovered, somewhat humbling, that none of my urgency made the slightest difference to her timeline. Not my good intentions, not my genuine affection for her, not even the fact that I meant her nothing but well. Tess didn’t care how I felt about the process. She cared about consistency. It wasn’t one grand gesture that won her over. It was showing up the same unremarkable way, day after day, until eventually “same” became something she could rely on. Trust, it turns out, isn’t about persuasion. It’s demonstrated, slowly, until it becomes evidence.
The turning point wasn’t dramatic. There was no breakthrough moment, no music swelling. One ordinary morning, she simply didn’t move away when I walked past. That was it. Months of consistency, and the reward was an absence — she didn’t flinch. I nearly missed it.
We Want Everything Immediately
I think about Tess a lot when I watch how impatient we’ve become with anything that requires time — including ourselves. We want the six-week transformation, the parenting hack that finally gets the toddler to sleep through the night, the leadership technique that turns a disengaged team into a high-performing one by the next quarterly review. There’s an entire industry selling shortcuts to things that, by their nature, don’t have shortcuts. Trust — a child’s, a colleague’s, a horse’s — doesn’t respond to technique. It responds to time and to whether you show up the same way when nobody’s checking.
I saw this constantly in medicine, long before the horses. The patients who healed weren’t the ones who wanted it most, or tried hardest, or read the most about their condition. They were the ones who could tolerate a process that didn’t move at the speed of their wanting. Frustration doesn’t accelerate healing. It just makes the person feel worse while the actual timeline continues, unmoved, underneath.
Parenting a frightened child, managing a burned-out team, rebuilding your own trust in yourself after a hard few years — they’re all the same exercise, dressed differently. You cannot bully your way to feeling safe. You can only be reliable long enough that reliability starts to register as fact rather than a hope.
What Patience Actually Requires
The uncomfortable part of this lesson is that patience isn’t a feeling you generate. It’s not about staying calm on the inside while you wait for the good outcome — I certainly wasn’t calm on the inside with Tess, not for a long while. Real patience is behavioural. It’s doing the same steady thing regardless of how you feel about the pace, and regardless of whether today looks like progress or looks like nothing at all.
That reframe helped me more than anything else. I stopped needing to feel patient and started just acting consistently, which is a much lower bar and, conveniently, the only bar that actually matters to the horse — or the child, or the team, or the version of yourself you’re trying to rebuild trust with.
Tess still keeps her exits open. She probably always will. But she’ll stand beside me now while I do it, which is its own kind of trust — not the erasure of what came before, just proof that consistency, held for long enough, can sit right next to caution without either one needing to win.
If You’re in the Slow Middle of Something
If you’re in the unglamorous middle of rebuilding trust with someone — a child, a team, yourself — and you’re tired of being told to just be more patient as though patience were a mood you could simply select, I’d love to welcome you to a Crossroads or a Rebooted and Realigned retreat here in the southwest of France.
A lot of my one-to-one mentoring work also sits exactly here: not in grand strategy, but in the steady, repeatable groundwork that actual change is built on. So get in touch if you’d like a thinking partner for the slow season.
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.
“I am an experienced medical doctor – MBChB, MRCGP, NLP master pract cert, Transformational Life Coach (dip.) Life Story Coach (cert.) Stress Counselling (cert.) Med Hypnotherapy (dip.) and EAGALA (cert.) I may have an impressive number of letters after my name, and more than three decades of professional experience, but what qualifies me to excel at what I do is my intuitive understanding of my clients’ difficulties and my extensive personal experience of managing major life changes using strategies I developed over many years.” Dr M Montagu
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