Walking Together as a Couple: Can Walking The Camino de Santiago Together Improve our Relationship?

Couples who walk the Camino together don’t just survive the blisters — they start talking to each other in a different way.

What This Article Is About

This article is for the couple who is fine. Not in crisis, not miserable, not in need of urgent intervention — just fine. Fine in the way that a good jumper that has been washed too many times is fine: still perfectly functional, slightly less vivid than it used to be, a little shapeless in places you’d rather not examine too closely. If you and your partner have been meaning to do something properly together — not a weekend city break where you mostly argue about where to eat, not a package holiday where you stare at separate phones by a pool — but something that actually means something, this article is about why walking the Camino de Santiago together through the French countryside might be the most unexpectedly transformative thing you do for your relationship all decade.

Walking Together as a Couple: 5 Key Takeaways

Couples who walk together talk to each other in a different way. Side-by-side movement removes the face-to-face confrontational dynamic that makes difficult conversations feel like negotiations, and replaces it with something more like thinking aloud together — which is frequently where the real conversations finally happen.
Shared physical challenge recalibrates how partners see each other. You discover things about the person you have been living with for years — their pace, their resilience, their particular way of navigating difficulty — that daily life had completely obscured.
Five days without the usual props of distraction (work, screens, social obligations, the endless administration of ordinary life) creates a quality of attention between two people that most couples haven’t experienced since the early days of their relationship.
The Camino’s structure — a route, a direction, a shared daily purpose — provides couples with something surprisingly rare: a goal they are working towards together, rather than in parallel.
Most couples who walk the Camino together report not just enjoying the experience, but returning with a renewed sense of who they are as a pair — not the administrative unit that manages the household and the children and the diary, but the two actual people who chose each other.

The Couple Who Walked Until Found Each Other Again

Tom and Rachel Girard had been together for nineteen years and married for fourteen of them. They had two children aged eleven and eight, a semi-detached house in Lyon that was simultaneously too small and too expensive, a shared calendar on their phones that contained almost no entries that belonged exclusively to either of them, and a relationship that both of them would have described, if pressed, as good. Solid. Fine, really.

The problem — if it was a problem, which neither of them was entirely prepared to name as such — was that they had not had a conversation that surprised either of them in approximately three years. They knew each other’s opinions on everything. They finished each other’s sentences not because of romantic synchronicity but because the sentences were usually about logistics. Who was collecting Léa on Thursday. Whether the boiler service had been booked. What they were doing about Christmas this year given the situation with Tom’s mother, which was, as it had been for some time, complicated.

The Camino retreat was Rachel’s idea. She had read about it somewhere, mentioned it over dinner with the tone of someone proposing something they expect to be declined, and was slightly startled when Tom said yes immediately. He would later admit that he had said yes before she finished the sentence because he could not, at that precise moment, have told you a single interesting thing about himself that wasn’t also true of the role he occupied. Father. Husband. Architect. Man who needed to book the boiler service.

They arrived in Gascony on a Friday evening in September. The air was different. Cooler than Lyon, green in a way that felt almost aggressive after months of city living, and conspicuously, thrillingly quiet. They had dinner with the other walkers — a retired woman from Edinburgh, a man who had left his job in finance and wasn’t yet sure what came next, a woman from Amsterdam who laughed at everything. Rachel had two glasses of local wine and told a story about herself that Tom had never heard before. He looked at her across the table with an expression she didn’t immediately recognise.

It was, she realised later, interest. Uncomplicated, undistracted, fully present interest. The look he used to give her before they knew everything about each other.

They began walking the following morning. The path wound through farmland and ancient forest, marked with the Camino’s familiar shell symbols, unhurried and entirely indifferent to the contents of their shared calendar. By the end of the first hour, they were talking. Not about Léa’s Thursday collection or the boiler or Christmas. About something Tom had been thinking about at work that he hadn’t mentioned because there had never quite been a moment. About something Rachel had been reading that had shifted something in her thinking and that she had filed away because the right conversation hadn’t arrived.

The right conversation, it turned out, had been waiting for a path through the French countryside and ten kilometres of uninterrupted time.

On the second day, somewhere on a ridge above a valley that had no name either of them could find on their phones, Tom said something that made Rachel stop walking. She stood on the path and looked at him. He was standing in the light with mud on his boots and his hair slightly toussled by the wind, and she thought — with a clarity that felt almost physical — that she had missed him. That she had been missing him for years while living in the same house. And that he was, standing right there on an old French pilgrimage path, entirely real.

What they discovered over the remaining three days — and what they brought home that neither of them has been able to leave behind — is what this article is about.

What Couples Who Walk Together Know That Too-Busy-To-Walk Couples Don’t

There is a well-documented phenomenon in psychology sometimes called the ‘shoulder-to-shoulder effect.’ It describes the way that conversations held during side-by-side activity — walking, driving, doing something physical together — have a measurably different quality from conversations held face-to-face. The directional gaze is removed. The implicit confrontational dynamic of facing each other dissolves. There is something else to look at, something else to be present to, and in that slight redistribution of attention, the defences come down and the honest things become easier to say.

This is one reason why the most important conversations in many relationships happen in cars. It is also one reason why walking together is, neurologically and relationally speaking, one of the most connecting things two people can do.

The Camino de Santiago amplifies this effect considerably. A single walk in a local park has some of it. Several consecutive days of walking through ancient French landscape, with nowhere else to be and nothing else to manage, has it in a concentration that most couples find genuinely startling. The conversations that happen on day four of a Camino retreat are conversations that have often been waiting years to occur — not because the couples were avoiding them, but because modern life had never once produced a silence long enough for them to begin.

There is also the question of novelty. Relationship research is consistent on this point: shared new experiences reactivate the neural pathways associated with early-stage attraction and bonding. The brain, encountering something new alongside a familiar person, responds in ways that closely resemble the neurochemistry of falling for someone. New landscape, new physical challenge, new community, new rhythm of days — the Camino delivers all of this, and it delivers it to both people simultaneously, which means you are having the experience together rather than one of you having it while the other watches.

The couples who come to the Camino not in crisis but simply in need of something they can’t quite name are often the ones who are most changed by it. They didn’t know they were looking for each other. They found each other anyway.

The physical challenge matters too, and it is worth being honest about this. Ten kilometres a day is not a stroll. There will be moments of discomfort, of tiredness, of blisters requiring unglamorous attention at the end of the day. There will almost certainly be at least one moment when one of you is walking faster than the other, or one of you wants to stop for longer at a view that the other has already finished admiring. These small negotiations — navigated daily, in real time, in a context where the stakes are low enough to be honest — are, in miniature, the negotiations of a shared life. Couples who walk together are, without necessarily realising it, practising something.

What they practise on the path, they tend to carry home.

Walking Together as a Couple: 5 Mistakes to Avoid

1. Treating it as a test of the relationship. The Camino is not an assessment centre for couples. It is not designed to expose your incompatibilities or stress-test your communication under pressure. Arrive with curiosity rather than an agenda. The couples who get the most from it are the ones who came to have an experience together, not to prove something or fix something. If something needs fixing, the walking tends to surface it gently anyway — without anyone having to engineer the moment.

2. Walking at different paces and making it mean something. Partners rarely walk at exactly the same pace, and this can become, if you let it, a surprisingly charged daily negotiation. One of you will be faster. One of you will want to stop more. Neither of these things is a metaphor for the relationship unless you decide it is. Walk at the pace of the slower person, or agree to walk separately for sections and reconvene. The path goes to the same place regardless of how quickly you arrive.

3. Using the retreat to have the conversation you’ve been avoiding for three years. The Camino will, in all likelihood, create the conditions for honest conversation naturally. You do not need to arrive with a list of grievances and a five-year plan for the relationship. Couples who attempt to use the walking as a venue for pre-planned difficult discussions tend to find the conversations go badly — not because the Camino can’t hold difficult things, but because forced conversations in beautiful landscapes have the same problem as forced conversations anywhere. Let it happen naturally. It will.

4. Spending the evenings on your phones. The quality of what builds between two people over several days of walking is directly proportional to the quality of attention they give each other when they stop walking. The evenings — dinner, a glass of wine, the particular tiredness that comes from a day of purposeful movement — are where a significant amount of the relational magic actually happens. If both of you are checking emails by eight o’clock, you are importing the problem you came to leave behind.

5. Not talking about it when you get home. The shift that happens on the Camino requires a little maintenance in the early days after returning. Life reconvenes fast, and the calendar fills quickly, and it is entirely possible to be back in the full logistics of ordinary existence within forty-eight hours of landing. Make a small, specific commitment before you leave France: one evening a week with no phones, a walk together on Sundays, a check-in question at dinner.

5 FAQs About Walking Together

What if we walk at completely different paces?

This is one of the most common practical concerns couples raise before a walking retreat, and one of the least problematic in practice. The Camino in France is not a race, and a guided small-group retreat structures the day in a way that accommodates different paces comfortably. You may walk sections together and sections separately — many couples find that the periods of walking alone, followed by reuniting further down the path, are among the most interesting parts of the experience. A little distance, as it turns out, does wonders for the quality of what you say when you catch up.

We’re not in crisis — is a Camino retreat still relevant for us?

Arguably more so. Couples in acute difficulty often need specific therapeutic support that a walking retreat is not designed to provide. But couples who are simply in the slow drift of familiarity — who are functional, affectionate, busy, and quietly less connected than they used to be — are precisely the people the Camino seems to work on most reliably. You don’t need to be broken to benefit from being reset. And the reset, for couples who arrive in reasonable shape, tends to be surprisingly profound.

What if one of us is significantly fitter than the other?

The French Camino routes used in the retreat are chosen for accessibility as well as beauty — they are challenging enough to be meaningful without requiring athletic preparation. The distances walked each day are manageable for people of average fitness who have done some preparation walking beforehand. If there is a significant fitness difference between you, discuss it before you come; the important thing is that both partners arrive having done some walking in the weeks beforehand, so that the experience is one of shared effort rather than one person managing the other.

Can walking together really improve a relationship, or is that overstated?

The research on shared physical activity and relationship satisfaction is consistent: couples who exercise or engage in physical activity together report higher relationship quality, greater feelings of closeness, and increased attraction compared to couples who do these things separately. Add the dimensions of nature, shared novelty, purposeful direction, community, and five days of unhurried time — all of which the Camino provides — and you have a combination that the research would predict to be powerfully connecting. It is not overstated. If anything, the couples who come tend to be surprised by how much more it delivers than they expected.

What if we argue on the walk?

Then you argue on the walk. The Camino is not a conflict-free zone, and a five-day retreat with your partner will not be uniformly harmonious — particularly on the days when someone’s feet hurt and someone else is being relentlessly optimistic about how much further it is to lunch. Arguments that happen while walking through beautiful French countryside, however, have a quality that kitchen arguments do not: they tend to resolve faster, escalate less, and leave less residue. Movement helps. Fresh air helps. The particular absurdity of being cross with someone on an ancient pilgrimage path helps most of all.

The Path Goes in the Same Direction

Tom and Rachel Girard came home from Gascony on a Wednesday afternoon. The children were collected. The boiler appointment was, eventually, rescheduled. The calendar filled back up with the usual entries, because life does not pause for revelation, and theirs was no exception.

But something had changed in the architecture of the ordinary. There was a walk on Sunday mornings now — not a long one, just an hour, just the two of them — that had become, without anyone formally deciding it, non-negotiable. There were dinner conversations that didn’t end at the logistics. There was, occasionally, the particular look across a room that Rachel had thought she might have lost permanently, and that had turned out to be merely mislaid somewhere on a ridge above an unnamed valley in the French countryside.

Nineteen years in, they were still surprising each other. It turned out that was less a matter of having the right relationship and more a matter of giving the relationship room to breathe. Five days, ten kilometres a day, and one very old path had been room enough.

Couples retreats on the Puy en Veslay route of the Camino de Santiago are available for small groups of up to four guests. Three non-guided walks, beautiful surroundings, good food, and the particular quality of time that only arrives when you’ve left the calendar behind. Couples welcome — especially the perfectly fine ones.

Find out more and book your retreat at margarethamontagu.com

Do you dream of escaping your stressful life to raise a herd of goats or grow sunflowers in the south of France? Then you may be ready for an Esprit Meraki retreat. Get access to this “very serious” quiz to help you figure out how urgent your need for a change of scenery is, when you subscribe to my monthly newsletter.

If your soul is craving fresh air, meaningful movement, and a chance to reconnect with nature, join us on a Camino de Santiago Walking Retreat in the southwest of France. This isn’t just a scenic hike – it’s a powerful, natural reboot for your body, mind, and spirit. Imagine quiet paths, rolling hills, cozy evenings, and slow conversations. No fitness requirements. No forced bonding. No pressure to have a breakthrough. Just one foot in front of the other, and a journey that meets you exactly where you are.

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

Research

1. “The Pilgrimage on the Camino de Santiago and Its Impacts on Marital and Familial Relationships” — PubMed / Journal of Religion and Health (2023) pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10150338/

This is a peer-reviewed academic study published in 2023, based on surveys and in-depth interviews with 24 couples who walked the Camino together. The research found that walking the Camino as a couple had a measurably positive impact on marital relationships — specifically helping to strengthen bonds and trust, improve communication and mutual connection, and increase expressions of care and affection. It’s Camino-specific, couples-specific, and academically rigorous. Cite this one with confidence.

2. “Couples’ Shared Participation in Novel and Arousing Activities and Experienced Relationship Quality” — Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (Aron et al., 2000)

The foundational study behind the self-expansion theory that underpins so much of modern relationship psychology. Across three controlled experiments, couples who participated in novel and arousing activities together showed significantly greater increases in experienced relationship quality than those who did mundane activities — and the effect held even when controlling for relationship social desirability. This is the science behind why the Camino works on couples specifically — the novelty, the physical challenge, the unfamiliar landscape. Published in one of psychology’s most respected journals and cited thousands of times since.

3. “Walking Together for a Better Marriage” — Marriage Dynamics Institute

A more accessible, practitioner-focused piece that draws together several studies into one readable argument. It cites sociologist Harry Brod’s finding that men are more likely to define emotional closeness as working or playing side-by-side, while women often view it as talking face-to-face — making walking together one of the rare activities that meets both partners’ instincts for connection simultaneously. Psychology Today

“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

04/06/202604/06/2026

Why So Many Women Book Camino de Santiago Walking Breaks On Their Own

And why they rarely regret it – because somewhere between the silence, the vineyards, the blisters, and the breathtaking relief of not having to take care of absolutely everyone else for five whole days, many women rediscover the version of themselves they thought life had quietly swallowed whole.

Some women book Camino walking breaks because they want adventure.

Some because they need a break.

Some because life has become so relentlessly messy and noisy that even the sound of another WhatsApp notification feels personally offensive.

But beneath all the practical reasons lies a quieter truth few women are willing to voice out loud: they actually are just desperate to hear themselves think again.

Not as someone’s wife.
Not as someone’s mother.
Not as someone’s employee, caretaker, therapist, organiser, emotional support human, or unpaid family logistics coordinator.

Preferably while walking through the French countryside with decent coffee available on tap, good food magically appearing at mealtimes, and nobody asking where the extra batteries are.

And that, quietly, is why so many women book Camino da Santiago walking retreats on their own – or with one or two like-minded friends – and why they so rarely regret it.

5 Key Takeaways

Walking the Camino alone is often less about “escaping life” and more about reconnecting with oneself.
Many women discover confidence, clarity, and emotional resilience they had forgotten they possessed.
Small-group Camino retreats offer connection without the emotional exhaustion of large group travel.
Time in nature help calm an overstimulated nervous system far more effectively than doomscrolling under a weighted blanket.
Women frequently return home feeling lighter, clearer, braver, and strangely more in touch with themselves.

Why Do Women Want To Walk Alone?

The Camino de Santiago has an uncanny habit of finding women precisely when their lives have become too heavy to carry gracefully. Sometimes the breaking point arrives dramatically — a slammed door, a screaming match, a signed document slid across a table. But sometimes it arrives because someone asked one final, microscopic question at exactly the wrong moment. While you were holding six grocery bags. Managing a crisis. Answering emails on your phone with your chin. Trying not to cry in a supermarket parking lot.

For Claire Botherington, it was the yoghurt.

Not metaphorically. Literally. The yoghurt.

Claire was forty-eight, recently divorced, professionally successful, permanently exhausted, and increasingly certain that everyone else had received a secret instruction manual for adulthood that had somehow never arrived in her mailbox. She booked the Camino walking retreat at 11:47 p.m. on a Tuesday — standing in her kitchen, staring at a perfectly good, full pot of yoghurt, while her teenage son shouted from upstairs that there was “nothing to eat.”

There was food everywhere.

But apparently none of it was good enough.

Something inside her snapped. Not loudly — she wasn’t the type. It happened quietly, with the faint internal sound of a thread finally giving way. Which, as it turns out, is often far more dangerous than a scene.

The next morning she woke up to discover she had booked a solo walking retreat in the south of France. She cancelled it in her head at least fourteen times before breakfast. What kind of woman just does that? She made coffee. Cancelled it again. Ate toast. Cancelled it twice more.

She went anyway.

On the first walk, she barely spoke.

On the second, she cried without warning — ugly, unexpected tears — while passing through vineyards under a sky so blue it felt offensive, because nobody had needed anything from her for six consecutive hours. Six. She counted.

That night, back in her room, she stood at the window looking out over the quiet French countryside and felt something she hadn’t felt in years. Not happiness exactly. Something stranger than happiness.

She didn’t want to go home.

The thought arrived small and terrifying, like a crack in a wall you suddenly realise has been there for years. And somewhere in the silence, a second thought crept in behind the first — quieter, more dangerous, impossible to unhear:

What if this isn’t just a temporary escape?

What if this is a whole new beginning?

The Real Reason Women Walk Alone

There is a common misconception that women who travel alone are lonely.

Most are not.

Many women arrive at Camino retreats carrying invisible emotional backpacks heavier than anything they packed in their luggage. Years of responsibility. Caretaking. Emotional labour. Decision fatigue. The relentless pressure to keep functioning cheerfully while quietly running on fumes.

Some have spent years prioritising everyone else’s needs so consistently that they no longer know what they themselves enjoy.

The Camino interrupts that pattern.

Walking creates space. Silence. Perspective.

Something shifts when your only real job for the day is to put one foot in front of the other while birds argue in the hedgerows and ancient paths stretch quietly ahead of you.

Problems untangle themselves differently while walking.

Grief softens.

Burnout loosens its grip.

People breathe more deeply without even noticing.

And perhaps most importantly, women rediscover parts of themselves that had slowly disappeared beneath obligations, routines, and the exhausting performance of “holding it all together.”

Also, there is something deeply empowering about successfully navigating a journey alone.

Even a gentle one.

Especially if life has recently made you doubt your own strength.

5 Mistakes to Avoid When Booking a Camino Walking Break

1. Waiting Until You Feel “Brave Enough”

Confidence rarely arrives before the decision.

It usually arrives afterwards.

Most solo guests feel nervous before their retreat. That is completely normal. Courage is often just fear wearing comfortable walking shoes.

2. Overpacking Emotionally and Physically

Women often arrive carrying enough emotional responsibility to run a small nation.

You do not need to solve your entire life during five days on the Camino.

You only need to walk.

Also, nobody has ever needed six pairs of emergency trousers.

3. Choosing Huge Group Tours

Large group tours can feel socially exhausting, especially for introverts or emotionally depleted people.

Small Camino retreats create space for meaningful conversations, solitude, rest, and genuine connection without feeling like a school excursion with matching backpacks.

4. Treating the Camino Like a Competition

You do not need to walk the fastest, appear the most enlightened, or pretend your knees are not negotiating aggressively with gravity by day three.

5. Ignoring What Comes Up Emotionally

The Camino has a sneaky habit of surfacing thoughts and feelings people have avoided for years.

Let them come.

Many guests discover that the emotions they feared most were simply exhausted parts of themselves asking to be acknowledged at last.

FAQs about Camino Walking Breaks

Is the Camino safe for solo female travellers?

Generally, yes — particularly when joining a small, professionally organised retreat. Many women discover they feel safer and more supported than they expected.

Do I need to be very fit to join a Camino retreat?

Not at all. Most people are ordinary humans with ordinary knees and occasionally questionable life choices. A reasonable level of mobility and preparation is enough for most of this retreat’s Camino walks.

Will I feel awkward arriving alone?

Almost everyone worries about this beforehand. Interestingly, solo guests often connect more deeply and naturally than people who arrive with companions.

What emotional benefits do people experience on the Camino?

Guests often report reduced stress, greater clarity, emotional release, improved confidence, deeper self-awareness, and a renewed sense of hope.

Why do people say the Camino changes them?

Because slowing down, walking in nature, disconnecting from constant noise, and reflecting honestly on life creates conditions where meaningful internal shifts can happen.

Conclusion

Perhaps the real magic of the Camino is not that people find themselves there.

It is that they finally stop abandoning themselves long enough to find themselves again.

The women who arrive alone are rarely weak, lost, or broken.

More often, they are strong people who have been strong for far too long.

And somewhere between the vineyards, the conversations, the silence, the laughter, the aching feet, and the endless rhythm of walking, many rediscover something they thought they had misplaced years ago:

Their own inner voice.

If your own life has started feeling unbearably loud, heavy, or emotionally overcrowded, perhaps this summer or autumn is the right time to walk for a little while.

Not to escape your life.

But to return to it having found yourself again.

28/05/202628/05/2026

Book Review: An Immense World by Ed Yong

★★★★★

Reviewed by Margaretha Montagu, host of the Book Lovers’ Binge Reading and Camino de Santiago Walking Retreats

There are books that make you smarter, and then there are books that make you feel like you have been walking around half-blind your entire life — not in a crushing, existential way, but in the most thrillingly disorienting way imaginable. Ed Yong’s An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden World Around Us belongs, triumphantly and rather humblingly, in the second category. Published in 2022, it won the Royal Society Science Book Prize and has since done what only the very best popular science writing ever manages to do: it didn’t just change how I think. It changed how I walk.

I first encountered this book the way I encounter most things that matter — sideways, and slightly by accident. A guest at one of my retreats pressed her copy into my hands on the last morning, with the particular intensity of someone who has just discovered fire. “Read this,” she said, in the tone of voice that is not really a suggestion. I read it on the train home, after a visit to Bordeaux, missed my stop, and did not mind one bit.

By the time I reached the chapter on echolocation, I was the sort of person who sits on trains making small involuntary noises of wonder. This is, I should tell you, not my usual comportment on public transport. But An Immense World is not a usual book.

“Every animal is enclosed within its own sensory bubble, perceiving but a sliver of an immense world.” — Ed Yong

So, what is it actually about? At its heart, An Immense World is an exploration of a single idea — one of those ideas so simple and so staggering that you wonder how you lived without it. The concept is the Umwelt: a term coined by the Baltic German biologist Jakob von Uexküll in the early twentieth century, meaning the unique sensory world that each animal inhabits. The tick that detects only warmth and the smell of butyric acid. The mantis shrimp with sixteen types of photoreceptors (we have three, and we are already insufferably pleased with ourselves about colour). The star-nosed mole navigating its entire universe through a nose ringed with twenty-two fleshy tentacles. The shark that can detect the electrical field of a heartbeat. The robin that quite possibly sees magnetic north, woven like a ghost image into its very field of vision.

Yong moves through these worlds — and dozens more — with the curiosity of a child and the rigour of the exceptionally good science journalist he is. Each chapter unfolds like a door opening onto a corridor you didn’t know existed. Electroreception. Magnetoreception. The lateral lines of fish, which sense pressure waves in water the way we might feel a draught in a dark room. The infrasound of elephants, communicating across distances that make mobile phone coverage look frankly limited. The ultraviolet patterns on flowers, invisible to us but blazing to a bee — a secret language written on the face of every garden, which we have never been equipped to read.

What Yong is really doing, beneath all this gorgeous biological detail, is asking us to practice a particular kind of humility. The world is not the world as we perceive it. The world is immense — layered with sensory realities we will never access, buzzing with information our bodies were simply not built to receive. Every animal is living in its own private universe, as real and as complete as ours, and we are all — every last one of us — experiencing only the narrowest possible sliver of what is actually there.

I have thought about this constantly since reading it. I thought about it walking the Camino, pausing on a hillside to look at the view — and wondering what the hawk circling above was seeing in that same landscape, what frequencies the grass and stone and sky were broadcasting that we would never, ever hear. I thought about it sitting with my Friesian horses in the field in the early morning, watching their ears swivel and track sounds from distances I couldn’t imagine, registering weather shifts in their skin that I was oblivious to. I thought about it standing in the garden at dusk, watching the bats emerge, and understanding — properly, for the first time — that they were not flying through darkness. They were flying through a world of their own exquisite making, every wall and wing and moth as clear to them as the landscape is to us.

“To understand the senses of other animals is to understand that there is no single correct way of experiencing the world.” — Ed Yong

The retreat guests who have read this book before arriving walk differently — I am quite sure of it. There is a quality of attention in them that I have come to recognise. They stop more. They crouch down more. They watch things — beetles, horses, the particular way a dog tilts its head before a storm — with a focused, interested patience that the non-readers often take a day or two longer to find. An Immense World seems to install a new piece of perceptual software: one that keeps whispering, what is it like to be that? A question that is, I would argue, one of the most valuable questions a human being can learn to ask.

Yong is a beautiful writer as well as a magnificent thinker. He wears his expertise lightly, moving between cutting-edge research and vivid, grounded storytelling with the kind of ease that looks effortless and certainly isn’t. His portraits of the scientists he meets — and their decades-long obsessions with obscure sensory phenomena — are warm and funny and often quietly moving. These are people who have spent their careers listening to things the rest of the world couldn’t hear, and Yong renders their dedication with unmistakable affection.

I read many books and recommend many books, but there are only a handful I have slipped into the reading list for my retreats with the private certainty that it will change something in the people who read it — permanently, quietly, and for the better. An Immense World is one of those books. Not because it is long or demanding (it isn’t — it moves like a river, fast and clear and irresistible). But because it trains a muscle we didn’t know was underdeveloped: the muscle of perceptual curiosity. Of wondering what the world looks, sounds, smells, and feels like to a creature that is not you.

On the Camino, we talk a lot about presence — about being here, now, in this particular body, on this particular path, under this particular sky. An Immense World adds a gorgeous layer to that practice. Because once you know that the world is infinitely richer than your senses can detect, the act of paying attention becomes not just a discipline but a kind of reverence. You are standing in the middle of something vast and layered and astonishing, and you are catching only the edge of it — and that, somehow, is enough to bring you fully awake.

My 10 key takeaways from An Immense World:

1. Every animal lives in its own sensory bubble — the Umwelt. Jakob von Uexküll’s concept of the Umwelt is the book’s beating heart: each animal perceives only the slice of reality its senses are built to detect. A tick’s world is warmth and butyric acid. A dog’s world is a landscape of smell. None of these worlds is more “real” than another — they are simply different.

2. Our human senses are not the gold standard — just one option among millions. We tend to assume our perception of the world is the complete version. Yong dismantles this quietly but thoroughly. We are, sensory-wise, fairly ordinary animals — impressive in some areas, startlingly limited in others.

3. Vision is far stranger and more varied than we imagine. Some animals see in ultraviolet. Mantis shrimp have sixteen types of photoreceptors to our three. Many fish and birds see colours we have no names for. The visual world of a bee moving through a flower garden bears almost no resemblance to what we see in the same space.

4. Sound shapes entire worlds — including ones we never knew existed. Elephants communicate in infrasound across vast distances. Whales sing in frequencies that once travelled across entire ocean basins. Bats build a precise three-dimensional map of their world purely from echoes. Hearing, Yong shows, can be as rich and complex a sense as sight — richer, in many cases.

5. Electroreception is a sense we can barely conceptualise. Sharks, electric eels, and the platypus can detect the faint electrical fields generated by living bodies. This sense — entirely absent in humans — allows them to “see” through murk, darkness, and solid ground. It is a reminder that there are entire sensory dimensions for which we have no frame of reference at all.

6. Many animals may navigate by sensing the Earth’s magnetic field. Migratory birds, sea turtles, and possibly dogs appear to have a built-in compass — perceiving magnetic north not as a concept but as a direct sensory experience, possibly woven into their vision as a kind of overlay. The precise mechanism is still debated, but the evidence is increasingly compelling.

7. Touch is vastly underrated and extraordinarily sophisticated. The star-nosed mole navigates its entire world through a nose ringed with twenty-two fleshy tentacles, each packed with nerve endings. The crocodile’s jaw is among the most sensitive touch organs in nature. Yong makes a strong case that we have systematically underestimated this sense — in other animals, and perhaps in ourselves.

8. Human activity is drowning out the sensory worlds of other animals. One of the book’s most urgent arguments: light pollution disrupts species that navigate by stars; noise pollution masks the acoustic signals animals depend on for hunting, mating, and communication; chemical pollution interferes with the scent trails that entire ecosystems run on. We are not just destroying habitats — we are scrambling the sensory fabric of the natural world.

9. Asking “what is it like to be that animal?” is a radical act. Yong returns repeatedly to the philosopher Thomas Nagel’s famous question — what is it like to be a bat? — and argues that genuinely trying to answer it, even imperfectly, is one of the most important things we can do. It is the foundation of both good science and genuine compassion toward other creatures.

10. Perceptual humility is the beginning of wonder. The book’s deepest takeaway is not a fact but an orientation: the world is unimaginably richer than any one creature can perceive. Accepting that — sitting with the sheer scale of what we are missing — does not diminish our experience. It expands it. The appropriate response to An Immense World is not inadequacy, but awe.

So read this book on the way here. Or pack it and read it in the evenings when your legs ache and the stars are out and everything feels open. And then go outside the next morning and pay attention differently.

You won’t regret it.

Ed Yong is a science journalist and staff writer at The Atlantic, where his work has earned him a Pulitzer Prize for Public Service — awarded for his landmark COVID-19 coverage. His first book, I Contain Multitudes (2016), explores the world of the microbiome: the trillions of microorganisms that inhabit our bodies and shape our health, mood, and even our behaviour. It is, if anything, equally mind-expanding — and pairs wonderfully with An Immense World for readers who want their sense of the world systematically dismantled and rebuilt, more spacious and more wonderful, from the ground up.

Join us for the Book Lovers’ Binge Reading Camino de Santiago Walking Retreat in the sun-drenched southwest of France: a journey where the trail and the story unfold together. Walk ancient paths at your own pace, then settle in each evening with a good book. This isn’t a fitness challenge — it’s a gentle rhythm — one step, one chapter, one honest conversation at a time. Rolling hills, quiet villages, golden light. No expectations, no drama, no agenda but your own unfolding.

Join us for the Book Lovers Binge Reading Camino de Santiago Walking Retreat in the sun-drenched southwest of France: a journey where the trail and the story unfold together. Walk ancient paths at your own pace, then settle in each evening with a good book. This isn’t a fitness challenge—it’s a gentle rhythm—one step, one chapter, one honest conversation at a time. Rolling hills, quiet villages, golden light. No expectations, no performance, no agenda but your own unfolding.

28/05/202628/05/2026

We Don’t Know What We Don’t Know

Why the Wisest Thing You Can Do Right Now Is Admit You Might Be Missing the Whole Picture

What this is: A raw, honest, occasionally funny exploration of what we don’t know and why the most transformative thing you can do for your life is acknowledge what you cannot yet see, and what happens when you finally give yourself the time and space to find out.

What this isn’t: A motivational pep talk, a to-do list for self-improvement, or another article telling you to journal more and drink less coffee.

Read this if: You’ve done the work, read the books, ticked the boxes, and still feel like something’s just slightly off, like there’s a version of your life you haven’t quite located yet.

5 Key Takeaways

The most important things about your life are often invisible to you until something, a challenge, a conversation, a change of scenery, forces them into the light.
Slowing down is not a luxury. It is the only reliable method for seeing yourself and your life with any real clarity.
Your unknown unknowns are running the show. The beliefs, patterns, and assumptions you don’t even know you hold are directing your decisions far more than your conscious intentions ever will.
Community and landscape are profoundly underrated teachers. Walking alongside others in nature dissolves the carefully constructed personas we carry into ordinary life.
Awareness, even uncomfortable awareness, is always the beginning of freedom. You cannot change what you cannot see. But once you see it? Everything becomes possible.

Introduction: What You Don’t Know Might be Costing You More Than You Realise

There’s a version of you that’s been waiting very patiently at the other end of a long walk through the French countryside.

You haven’t met yet.

Not because you haven’t tried. You’ve tried. You’ve done the courses, the retreats, the affirmations, the therapy sessions where you cried tastefully into a tissue and called it a breakthrough. You’ve read the books, downloaded the apps, reorganised your mornings. You’ve put in the effort. And yet, there’s still this quiet, persistent sense that you’re missing something. Something important. Something you can’t quite name.

That’s because you can’t name it yet. And that is precisely the point.

The ancient Sufi poets had a concept for it. The Johari Window model of psychology describes it. Donald Rumsfeld made it accidentally famous in a 2002 press briefing that the internet never fully got over. And I discovered it, with embarrassing vividness, while hosting walking retreats on the Camino de Santiago in the green hills of southwest France.

We do not know what we do not know.

It sounds obvious. It sounds almost too simple to be useful. But sit with it for a moment, really sit with it, and you’ll find it is one of the most radical, most liberating, and most quietly devastating ideas you will ever genuinely reckon with.

Because here’s what it actually means: the thing that is most limiting your life right now is something you are not even aware exists. It isn’t the problem you’ve been working on. It’s the one you haven’t found yet.

What you’ll gain from reading this: a clearer understanding of why life feels stuck even when you’re doing everything right, a story that might feel uncomfortably familiar, five mistakes most people make once they start waking up to their blind spots, and a small but genuinely powerful practice to begin changing this today.

How Oliver Marsh Walked 35 Kilometres and Discovered He’d Been Living Someone Else’s Life

“How Five Days Walking in the French Countryside Cracked Open Everything I Thought I Understood About Myself“

Oliver Marsh arrived in Gascony with expensive hiking boots, a brand-new journal with not a single word in it, and the confident air of a man who had already done a considerable amount of work on himself.

He was fifty-two. He was successful, by every observable measure. A respected architect in Bristol, a father of two adult children he genuinely liked, a husband of twenty-three years to a woman he still found interesting. He ran on Sundays. He cooked elaborate meals on Saturdays. He had read most of the books on the “must read before you die” lists and had opinions about all of them.

He had signed up for the five-day Camino de Santiago walking retreat in southwest France because his wife had suggested it might be “revealing,” and because he had recently turned fifty-two and felt, somewhere beneath the successful surface of himself, the low hum of something unfinished.

He did not expect to be undone by it.

He had, after all, come prepared.

The first morning was fine. The light was extraordinary, gold and green and impossibly clear, and Oliver noticed it with the appreciative detachment of a man who has been to Florence. He walked at a confident pace. He made conversation easily. He was charming at breakfast, articulate on the trail, and quietly pleased with himself by the time they stopped for lunch in a stone village so old it seemed to have grown from the earth rather than been built upon it.

He ate bread with butter and local honey, drank coffee that tasted the way coffee is supposed to taste, and wrote three words in his journal: “Lovely. Very French.”

By day two, something started to unravel.

It was the silence, partly. Not the absence of sound, there were birds, and wind, and the soft percussion of walking boots on ancient paths, but the absence of agenda. Of performance. Of the particular mental hum that comes from being a person with responsibilities and a reputation to maintain.

Out here, on a gravel path worn smooth by centuries of pilgrims, nobody needed Oliver to be impressive. Nobody was waiting on an email. The oak trees lining the path were entirely indifferent to his professional standing.

He found it, unexpectedly, unbearable.

Not the walk. The quiet. The simplicity.

On the evening of day two, over a long dinner lit by candles and laden with food from the surrounding fields, the conversation turned to the question that hung over the retreat like woodsmoke: What are you not seeing about your own life?

Oliver opened his mouth to give a polished answer and found, to his considerable surprise, that nothing came out.

Not because he had nothing to say. But because, for the first time in years, he was genuinely uncertain what the honest answer was.

He sat with it. He looked at the candlelight. He smelled rosemary and roasting garlic and the particular damp-stone scent of an old French farmhouse. He heard the others around the table, talking softly, laughing occasionally, unspooling themselves gently in the way people do when they have been walking all day and are warm and fed and temporarily released from who they usually are.

Something, entirely unexpectedly, cracked open.

By day three, Oliver had begun to notice a pattern he had never seen before.

Not because it wasn’t there. It had always been there. But in the rhythm of ordinary life, in the pace and noise and obligation of being Oliver Marsh of Bristol, there had simply been no space to see it.

He had spent thirty years becoming excellent at architecture because his father, a quiet, disappointed man who had given up his own creative dreams, had made it very clear, through the eloquent medium of silence, that this was what success looked like. Oliver had taken that blueprint, literally, and built a career on it. A good career. A career he was, largely, proud of.

But was it his?

He stood on a hillside on the third morning, breathing the cold lavender-scented air, looking out over a valley that had been farmed and walked and prayed over for two thousand years, and he thought: I don’t actually know.

He thought: I have never actually asked.

He thought, with something between grief and relief: I did not know that I did not know this.

By day five, Oliver had filled thirty-four pages of his journal. His wife would later say, when he came home and she saw his face, that he looked like someone who had remembered something important that they had not known they had forgotten.

He had not resolved anything, not yet. The unknown unknowns do not all obligingly reveal themselves in five days. But he had found the questions.

Our Blind Spots

What “We Don’t Know What We Don’t Know” Actually Means for Your Life

The concept has a formal home in psychology. The Johari Window, developed in 1955 by psychologists Joseph Luft and Harry Ingham, describes four quadrants of self-knowledge: what we know about ourselves and others know too, what we know but keep hidden, what others can see but we can’t, and, most fascinatingly, the unknown unknown, what neither we nor anyone else in our immediate world can see about us yet.

That fourth quadrant is not a small room. For most of us, living busy, distracted, screen-saturated lives in environments that reward performance over reflection, that fourth quadrant is more like a continent.

And this matters enormously, because our unknown unknowns are not passive. They don’t sit quietly in the corner waiting to be discovered. They act. They shape our choices, colour our perceptions, drive our fears and our ambitions, and construct the stories we tell about who we are and what we deserve.

The person who keeps choosing relationships that mirror their childhood wounds and can’t understand why they keep ending the same way, they’re in that quadrant. The driven professional who is relentlessly productive and can’t understand why they feel empty at the end of a successful week, same quadrant. The woman who longs for simplicity and yet keeps saying yes to everything and can’t understand why her life is so complicated, yes. That too.

Here is what makes this particularly interesting: the pace of modern life is almost perfectly designed to keep that quadrant invisible. Speed, noise, busyness, the tyranny of the to-do list, these are not neutral conditions. They are, functionally, very effective ways of never having to sit still long enough to notice what’s really going on.

This is why walking retreats, done well, can be genuinely transformational in ways that therapy or books or weekend workshops often can’t replicate. Not because walking is magic, though the research on what happens to your brain chemistry and your capacity for insight when you walk in nature for extended periods is remarkable. But because five days of intentional slowness, in a landscape that is indifferent to your usual identity, alongside other thoughtful humans who are doing the same work, creates precisely the conditions in which the unknown unknowns can finally surface.

And when they surface, not for everyone, not always, but for many, the change they catalyse is not incremental. It is architectural.

This is not just personal, either. When one person in a family, a team, a community begins to see themselves more clearly, the ripple effects are significant and measurable. Relationships shift. Conversations deepen. The particular quiet cruelty of unconscious patterns, passed down through families, replicated in workplaces, recycled in communities, begins to lose its grip. One person’s clarity has a remarkable tendency to give permission to those around them to seek their own.

This is why the question “What don’t I know about myself?” is not a navel-gazing luxury. It may be among the most socially responsible questions a thoughtful person can ask.

5 Mistakes to Avoid When You Start Waking Up to Your Blind Spots

Because the Journey from “I don’t know what I don’t know” to “I actually know something now” has some predictable potholes

1. Assuming that knowing is the same as changing. Insight and transformation are not the same event, though we often treat them as though they are. You can have a profound realisation on a hillside in France and be behaving unchanged by Thursday. Awareness is the beginning, not the finish line. Be patient with the gap between seeing and shifting.

2. Turning self-discovery into another performance. There is a particular trap for high-achievers: they approach inner work the same way they approach everything else. They do it well, they do it thoroughly, they get good at the vocabulary of it, and they present a beautifully curated version of their insights to the world. This is still a mask. The work happens underneath the performance, in the places you don’t yet have language for.

3. Going it alone. The unknown unknowns are called that for a reason. By definition, you cannot see them yourself, which means solitary reflection has a ceiling. You need other perspectives, gentle, trusted, honest ones, to illuminate what your own vision cannot reach. A skilled guide, a thoughtful group, a retreat environment, these are not optional extras. They are the mechanism.

4. Rushing the process. Modern wellness culture has given us a very peculiar relationship with speed. We want the insight and we want it efficiently. Five days in France is already a commitment; two days feels more manageable. But the deeper material, the unknown unknowns, tends not to surface on demand. It surfaces in the third day’s silence. The fourth evening’s conversation. Give it time. Give it more time than you think you need.

5. Treating the discomfort as a sign something is wrong. When the unknown unknowns begin to surface, it doesn’t always feel like relief. It can feel like grief, confusion, or a disconcerting sense that the floor of your life is less solid than you believed. This is not failure. This is not breakdown. This is, as the Camino pilgrims have known for a thousand years, exactly what it feels like to walk through something important.

Five Minutes That Might Change the Direction of Your Year

You don’t need a retreat in France for this, though it helps enormously. You need five uninterrupted minutes, a pen, and the willingness to be genuinely curious rather than defensively certain.

Step 1: Find somewhere quiet. Outside is ideal. Put your phone face down, or, bravely, in another room entirely.

Step 2: Take three slow breaths. Not the performative kind. Actually slow down.

Step 3: Write, without editing, your answer to this question: “If there is something important that I am not currently seeing about my own life, what might it be?”

Write whatever comes. Even if it feels silly. Especially if it feels uncomfortable.

Step 4: Write this: “I am open to seeing what I have not yet been able to see. I give myself permission to not have all the answers yet.”

Step 5: Close the journal. Go for a walk, if you can. Let it breathe.

Do this once a week. Watch what emerges over time. Be patient with yourself. The unknown unknowns don’t surrender on a schedule.

5 Razor-Sharp FAQs

Answering the Questions People Are Actually Asking Right Now

Q1: How do I know if I have significant blind spots about my own life? The most reliable indicator is a persistent gap between how much effort you are putting in and how satisfied or alive you actually feel. If you are doing everything “right” and still feel vaguely dissatisfied, stuck, or like you’re living slightly beside your own life rather than in it, that’s the signal. Not a crisis. A compass point.

Q2: Can I discover my unknown unknowns on my own, or do I need help? You can begin the process alone, and the intention-setting exercise above is a good starting place. But by definition, what you cannot see, you cannot see on your own. A skilled guide, a retreat environment, a trusted community, or even a single honest conversation with the right person can illuminate things that decades of solo journaling cannot reach. Both have their place. Neither is sufficient alone.

Q3: Isn’t a walking retreat just a holiday with spiritual marketing? Fair question. The answer depends entirely on the retreat. A well-designed walking retreat, one with intentional structure, skilled facilitation, genuine space for reflection, and a community of like-minded people, creates conditions that are qualitatively different from a holiday. The walking matters: research shows that bilateral movement in nature measurably increases insight and reduces rumination. The community matters: being witnessed by others in a non-ordinary context accelerates self-awareness significantly. The distance from ordinary life matters. It’s not magic. It’s design.

Q4: What if what I discover about myself is something I don’t want to know? Then you are in very good company, and you have found something worth finding. The things we don’t want to know about ourselves are almost always the things that are most limiting us. The discovery may be uncomfortable. Staying unconscious is worse. And in the right environment, with the right support, uncomfortable discoveries tend to feel less like devastation and more like relief.

Q5: How do I integrate what I learn on a retreat back into ordinary life? This is the most important question, and the most underasked. Integration requires three things: community (people who knew you before and can hold you accountable to your new understanding), practice (something small and daily that keeps the new awareness alive, like the exercise above or a regular journaling practice), and patience (real change happens in the weeks and months after a retreat, not always during it). The work done on the retreat is the planting. The rest of the year is the growing.

Conclusion: The Beginning of Change

There is an old Sufi story about a man who spends his whole life searching for a great treasure, travelling the world, consulting wise men, crossing deserts and seas. He comes home, exhausted and empty-handed, and digs in his own garden to plant something. The treasure is there, three feet down.

This is not a story about staying home. It is a story about looking.

The most important thing about “we don’t know what we don’t know” is not the not-knowing itself. It is what becomes possible the moment you admit it. The moment you loosen your grip on certainty and let yourself become genuinely curious about what you might be missing, something extraordinary happens. Not all at once. But it begins.

Invitation: Come and Find Out What You Don’t Yet Know

You’ve tried rearranging the pieces. What if the picture itself needs changing?

My five-day Camino de Santiago walking retreats in the breathtaking southwest of France are designed, deliberately and lovingly, for exactly the person who is ready to find out what they’ve been missing. On an ancient pilgrimage path, at farmhouse dinners and due to the quiet miracle of sustained time in wild nature, guests consistently discover not just rest, but clarity. Not just beauty, but insight. Together, they create the conditions in which your unknown unknowns can finally, gently, tell you what you need to hear.

If you’re ready to stop managing your life at a distance and start actually living it, with more depth, more meaning, and considerably better bread, come and walk with us. Find out more and reserve your place here.

Are You Ready for a Retreat?

Not sure if a retreat is right for you right now? Or perhaps you simply want to explore the idea gently, without commitment? Take my Ready for a Retreat? Quiz when you sign up for my newsletter. It takes five minutes and is surprisingly honest. Sometimes it’s useful to have something outside of your own head help you see clearly.

Sign up and take the quiz here.

A Final Reflection

Oliver Marsh, on his last morning, stood at the edge of a field that had been planted and harvested and left fallow and planted again for longer than his country had existed. He thought about the word “fallow.” How it means unplanted. Resting. Waiting.

How it is not, in fact, doing nothing.

What part of you has been waiting for permission to lie fallow long enough to remember what it’s actually for?

References

Luft, J., & Ingham, H. (1955). The Johari window, a graphic model of interpersonal awareness. Proceedings of the Western Training Laboratory in Group Development. University of California, Los Angeles. (The foundational paper introducing the Johari Window model and its four quadrants of self-knowledge, directly underpinning the “unknown unknowns” framework discussed throughout this article.)
Kruger, J., & Dunning, D. (1999). Unskilled and unaware of it: How difficulties in recognizing one’s own incompetence lead to inflated self-assessments. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 77(6), 1121–1134. (The landmark study demonstrating that people systematically overestimate their own competence in areas where they lack knowledge, providing empirical support for why we struggle to see what we do not yet know.)
Bratman, G. N., Hamilton, J. P., Hahn, K. S., Daily, G. C., & Gross, J. J. (2015). Nature experience reduces rumination and subgenual prefrontal cortex activation. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 112(28), 8567–8572. (This study found that walking in natural environments significantly reduces repetitive negative thought patterns and associated neural activity, explaining part of why extended time in nature, as on a walking retreat, creates measurable conditions for new insight and self-awareness.)
Oppezzo, M., & Schwartz, D. L. (2014). Give your ideas some legs: The positive effect of walking on creative thinking. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 40(4), 1142–1152. (Stanford research demonstrating that walking, especially outdoors, significantly increases creative output and divergent thinking, providing a biological mechanism for why walking retreats facilitate the kind of open, associative thinking required to see beyond one’s existing cognitive maps.)
Kross, E., & Ayduk, Ö. (2017). Self-distancing: Theory, research, and current directions. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 55, 81–136. (Research on psychological self-distancing demonstrates that creating temporal, physical, or conceptual distance from one’s ordinary self-view dramatically increases the capacity for objective self-reflection, a mechanism central to why retreat environments, particularly those involving physical distance from one’s usual context, are disproportionately effective at enabling new self-understanding.)

09/05/202609/05/2026

Yearning for a Simpler, Slower, Savoured Life

Six years ago, I suddenly had a strong desire to stop the bus and simply get off.

But not in a dramatic “sell everything I own and move to an isolated cabin with an open fireplace in the Pyrenées mountains” sort of way.

Although admittedly, after one particularly absurd day recently involving bureaucracy, passwords, a missing document, and technology asking me to “verify I am human” seventeen times, the cabin did seem briefly attractive.

No, what I mean is something subtler than that. Slower. Simpler.

I wanted to stop treating every day like an endurance event.

To stop feeling as though life is one long obstacle course, day after day, after day.

I wanted a different life. I wanted to stop struggling to survive and make time to savour the simple things in life.

I have been thinking about it for a long time, before I took the plunge. Not obsessively, but in the way a quiet longing tends to surface — when I was driving along our often deserted country roads, while I was feeding the feed-us-now-or-we’re-going-to-die horses, when I was standing in my kitchen, brewing a cup of coffee. I had a feeling that there had to be another way to move through a day. That somewhere underneath the rushing and hustling and scrolling and the relentless forward motion, there is a life I actually wanted to live.

Maybe you know this feeling too.

Perhaps this happens to more and more women in their 40s, 50s and 60s.

We have spent decades carrying things.

Families.
Careers.
Worries.
Responsibilities.
Other people’s expectations.
Our own (utterly unrealistic) expectations.

We have held everything (and just about everyone) together with tired graciousness and increasingly expensive skincare.

And somewhere along the way, many of us quietly forgot how to simply “be” in our lives.

Not optimise them.
Not improve them.
Not reinvent them for the fifth time.

Just… live them. Seeing, hearing, feeling, smelling, and tasting our lives, intentionally.

Maybe we need to make drastic changes in our lives to be able to do this, maybe not. I did not. I loved living in the French countryside, I loved hosting my Camino de Santiago retreats, and seeing my horses contentedly grazing in their meadows made my heart sing.

But I was so tired.

Mine was a particular kind of tiredness that has nothing to do with how much sleep I’ve had. It was the tiredness of disconnection. I drank my coffee, but I didn’t taste it. I noticed the rampant wild mint, but I didn’t smell it. I saw the sunset, took a picture, but didn’t sit down inside it. The day happened, and then it was over, and it left very little behind.

I found myself craving ordinary things with almost embarrassing intensity.

The aroma of a cup of coffee brewed from scratch, using the best beans I could afford.
A long, unhurried lunch in the garden, laughing with friends, while bees drift lazily from flower to flower.
Slipping between fresh, fragrant sheets, dried in the wind.
Big, juicy fire-engine-red tomatoes, still warm from the sun.
The sound of hoofbeats on gravel.
Soup made with love, bubbling gently on the stove while rain runs down the windows.
Reading in bed while the house settles into silence around me.
Walking slowly enough to notice the endless diversity of wildflowers, instead of merely counting my steps.

I think many of us are yearning for this now.

Not because we have become lazy.
Not because we have “lost direction.”

But because something inside us has changed.

We are no longer impressed by the things that once dazzled us.

The endless striving. The desperate need to collect possessions.
The busyness disguised as productivity.
The strange modern habit of treating exhaustion as a personality trait.

More and more, I think what many of us want is not a bigger life.

It’s a simpler one.

A slower one.

A life with room to breathe inside it.

Days with more texture. Days to share, talking with other women who feel the same pull — toward slowness, toward simplicity, toward a life that is savoured rather than simply survived.

I see this all the time on my Camino retreats.

Women arrive stressed to breaking point from years of holding everything together.

And then, after a few days of walking quietly through the French countryside, something begins to loosen.

Their breathing slows.

Then their faces soften.

Then they begin noticing things again:
Church bells ringing out across the fields.
Golden sunlight falling across an old stone wall.
A shared bottle of wine at dusk.
The profound luxury of not needing to rush anywhere.

And slowly, almost shyly, joy returns.

Not the loud kind sold to us online.

Something softer.

More sustainable.

A new kind of awareness.

Almost as though they are remembering who they were before life became so busy.

I wonder if you feel this too.

If you do — if any of this sounds like something you’ve been carrying around but haven’t quite found the words for — I’d love for you to stay in contact.

I’m building something here. A community for women who are feeling their way toward a different kind of life. Women who are done with always being busy, who are curious about what it might feel like to stop rushing long enough to actually arrive somewhere.

There is a fear, I think, that slowing down means falling behind. That if you stop rushing, you will miss something. But consider what is already being missed in the rushing: the flavour of your breakfast, the colour of the sky on your commute, the sound of your own house in the early morning before anyone else is awake. These are not nothing. These are, arguably, everything.

The simpler, slower, savoured life is not a life of less. It is a life of more — more texture, more awareness, more of the quiet pleasure that has been there all along, waiting only for you to pay attention.

I don’t have all the answers. I’m figuring this out alongside you. But I do believe there is something powerful in finding your people — in being reminded that your longing is not for a fantasy, but for a compass.

Join my Community.

Or join one of my retreats.

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.

07/05/202625/05/2026

Using The Camino As A Mirror: An Ancient Pilgrim Path Reveals An Uncomfortable Truth

A frank, funny, and surprisingly practical guide to using an ancient pilgrimage as a reset button for anxious, overwhelmed souls, helping them to reconnect with what actually matters

What this is: A candid, warm, and occasionally cheeky article about what happens when stressed, switched-on people stop consuming the news and start walking ancient pilgrim roads. It is also, very gently, an invitation to consider doing it yourself.

What this isn’t: A lecture about digital detoxing. A woo-woo promise that walking will fix your life. A guilt trip. A beginner’s guide to stress management. You already know stress is bad for you; we are past that.

Read this if: The current state of the world is quietly hollowing you out. You are tired in a way sleep does not fix. You have a suspicion that something important has gone missing, you just cannot quite name it. And you are curious, even just a little, about what might happen if you gave yourself five days, a pair of decent walking shoes, and a very good book.

See also: From Couch to Camino

5 Key Takeaways

The Camino acts as a living mirror, reflecting back who you actually are, not who the news cycle, your inbox, or your social feed needs you to be.
Movement is medicine for an anxious mind, and walking in nature activates neurological processes that therapy, supplements, and Netflix binges simply cannot replicate.
Reading in retreat is not escapism, it is a sophisticated act of self-recalibration. Stories change the chemistry of how we see our own lives.
The world’s chaos is real, but your nervous system was never designed to carry all of it, all of the time. Choosing to step back is not irresponsible; it is necessary.
Transformation is rarely loud. It often arrives quietly, on a dusty path, somewhere between the third kilometre and the second café au lait.

Introduction: The Mirror You Did Not Know You Were Avoiding

NOBODY warns you about this particular kind of tired.

Not the tired that comes from running a marathon or pulling an all-nighter. This is something else entirely, the bone-deep, soul-level exhaustion that settles in when you have been paying attention to the world for too long and it keeps handing you things you cannot fix.

You check the headlines. You close the app. You open it again. Rinse, repeat, despair.

You are not fragile, and you are not catastrophising. The world genuinely is in a state right now. Climate anxiety, geopolitical instability, economic uncertainty, the relentless acceleration of everything, all of it is real, and all of it is landing on people like you, thoughtful, empathetic, capable people who care deeply and feel the weight of that caring like a stone in each pocket.

Here is what nobody is saying loudly enough: you were not built to absorb this much. And more importantly, you do not have to keep trying.

This article is about what happens when you stop. When you lace up your boots, tuck a novel into your bag, and walk an ancient path through the golden hills of southwest France. It is about the strange, irreversible magic of the Camino de Santiago, and specifically about this: the Camino does not give you answers. It shows you a reflection. And sometimes, that reflection is exactly what a stressed, wonderful, slightly frayed human being needs most.

By the time you reach the end of this piece, you will understand why thousands of people return from the Camino not with solutions to the world’s problems, but with something far more useful: a clearer sense of who they are, what actually matters to them, and how to live with purpose in a world that will always be imperfect.

That is not nothing. That is, in fact, everything.

Alana’s Hills

Alana Spencer did not like hills.

This was established within the first twenty minutes. Not dramatically, not with complaint—just a quiet, consistent preference for the path of least resistance. When the trail tilted upward, she slowed. When it steepened, she paused. When there was an alternative—even a longer one—she took it.

“I just prefer a steady pace,” she said lightly, the first time someone noticed.

It sounded reasonable. It was reasonable. That was the problem.

The Camino, that morning, had other ideas. The path rose gently at first, then less gently, then with a kind of unapologetic insistence. Not extreme. Not heroic. Just undeniably uphill. The others kept walking.

Alana hesitated, scanned for options, and—finding none—followed.

Within minutes, the familiar negotiation began. This is unnecessary. There’s probably an easier way. You’re not built for this sort of thing. Her breathing shortened. Her shoulders tightened. She stopped, hands on hips, watching the others continue—unbothered, it seemed, by both gravity and existence.

“I’ll catch up,” she called, with the optimism of someone who did not intend to.

She waited until they were out of sight, then turned slightly, noticing a faint suggestion of a flatter detour skirting the hill. Not an official path. Not entirely a path at all. But passable.

She took it.

It worked, in the way these things often do. It was easier. Less steep. Less demanding. It curved gently around the hill, rejoining the main trail further along. She arrived at the top only a few minutes after the others.

No one said anything.

But something in her chest felt… off. Not guilt, exactly. Not quite relief either. More like a quiet, persistent question.

Later that day, it happened again. Another incline. Another pause. Another calculation.

This time, there was no alternative path.

She stood at the bottom of the hill longer than necessary, staring up at it as though it might reconsider.

“You coming?” someone asked, not unkindly.

“In a minute.”

They went on ahead.

Alana remained, suspended between intention and avoidance.

It was, she realised with a flicker of recognition she did not entirely enjoy, a familiar position. Projects delayed. Conversations postponed. Decisions softened into “later.” Not dramatic avoidance—nothing so obvious—but a lifetime of gentle rerouting. Choosing the manageable over the meaningful. The flatter path over the direct one.

She looked up again.

The hill had not changed.

She exhaled, adjusted her backpack, and started walking.

It was not graceful. Within ten steps, her breathing was uneven. Within twenty, she considered stopping. Within thirty, she was mildly offended by the entire concept of elevation.

But she kept going.

Something shifted—not suddenly, not triumphantly, but incrementally. Her breathing found a rhythm. Her legs, though unconvinced, continued cooperating. The hill remained uphill, but it stopped feeling like an argument.

Halfway up, she noticed birdsong. Not because it had started, but because she had.

At the top, she did not collapse. She did not celebrate. She simply arrived.

The others were sitting on a low stone wall, passing around a bottle of water, talking about nothing in particular.

“Good climb,” someone said. Alana nodded, slightly surprised to find that she agreed.

That afternoon, the path rose again. Not as steep. Not as long. Just enough.

She didn’t look for a way around. She walked.

By the third day, it became quietly obvious.

It wasn’t the hills.

It had never been the hills.

It was the reflex. The almost invisible instinct to step sideways at the first sign of discomfort. To make things easier, even when “easier” cost her something she couldn’t quite name.

The Camino, with its inconvenient honesty, had simply declined to participate in that arrangement.

On the final morning, they approached a long, steady incline that stretched further than the eye particularly appreciated.

Alana didn’t pause.

She didn’t scan for alternatives.

She just adjusted her pace and began.

Step by step. Breath by breath. No negotiation. No detour.

At the top, she turned—not to admire the view, though it was worth admiring—but to look at the path behind her.

It hadn’t changed.

But she had.

The Camino as Mirror

There is a reason the Camino de Santiago has been walked by millions of people across more than a thousand years. And it is not (only) the spectacular scenery, though the southwest French stretches of the route, with their medieval villages, rolling vineyards, and theatrical skies, could stop your heart on a clear morning.

It is what the path does to a mind in motion.

When we walk, particularly in nature and over sustained distances, something genuinely neurological happens. The bilateral rhythm of walking, left, right, left, right, activates both hemispheres of the brain in a way that mirrors EMDR therapy. Stress hormones fall. The default mode network, that anxious, self-referential part of your brain that lies awake at 3am composing catastrophic scenarios, finally gets a rest. Creativity and emotional processing step into the space.

In other words: the Camino does not just tire your legs. It genuinely quiets the noise.

But here is the piece most people miss. The walking is only half of it.

When you combine sustained, rhythmic movement in nature with reflective reading, good conversation, and intentional journaling, you create a perfect storm of self-awareness. Stories, as neuroscientist Uri Hasson’s research shows, synchronise the brains of storyteller and listener. Reading a great novel is not escapism; it is a profound act of perspective-taking. It stretches the empathy muscle, softens rigid thinking, and often allows us to see our own situations with a clarity we could not access while living inside them.

This is the design, conscious or not, behind a retreat that pairs the Camino with a Booklovers’ Binge. You walk to quiet the noise. You read to hear yourself again.

And then something interesting happens. The Camino, ancient and indifferent and beautiful, begins to hold up a mirror.

You discover what kind of walker you are, and it is never entirely separate from what kind of person you are. Do you charge ahead and exhaust yourself? Do you hang back and miss things? Do you stop to examine every interesting stone, to the mild exasperation of others? Do you share your water bottle freely or guard it anxiously?

The path shows you, without agenda or judgment, without any particular interest in sparing your feelings. That is rare. And it is, when you are ready for it, a gift of immeasurable value.

The Ripple Effect: How One Person’s Reset Changes More Than Just One Person

This is the part that is easy to overlook when you are in the middle of your own exhaustion: your depletion costs the people around you.

Not as a guilt trip. As a fact of interconnection.

When you return from a genuine reset, from five days in which you have moved your body, rested your nervous system, read deeply, journalled honestly, and been in conversation with other thoughtful human beings, you do not arrive home as the same person who left. You arrive as a slightly more spacious, clear-eyed, less reactive version of yourself.

And that version shows up differently. At the dinner table. In the difficult conversation you have been avoiding. In the meeting where you used to lose your temper. In the quiet moment when your child or partner or friend needs you to be actually present, not half-absent and scrolling.

One person’s reset is never just one person’s reset. It ripples. It models something to every person in their orbit, that it is possible to step back, to choose rest, to return clearer. It gives others permission to do the same.

And at a community level? When more people are operating from a place of genuine, grounded self-awareness rather than chronic anxiety, the quality of every conversation, decision, and relationship improves. The Camino is, quietly, a civic act.

5 Mistakes to Avoid (So You Actually Get Something From This)

Mistake 1: Treating It Like a Productivity Hack

The Camino is not a five-day course in becoming more efficient. If you arrive with a list of outcomes, optimised sleep strategies, and a tracking app for your steps, you will miss the entire point. Come with open hands, not a project plan.

Mistake 2: Spending the First Two Days Decompressing and Calling It Wasted Time

The first day, possibly the second, will feel uncomfortable. Your mind will be loud. You will wonder if you should have stayed home. This discomfort is not a sign something is wrong. It is proof something is working. Do not bail on the process before the process begins.

Mistake 3: Comparing Your Walk to Someone Else’s

If Harriet from Edinburgh powers up every hill like a fell runner while you are gasping after a gentle incline, good for Harriet. Your pace is your pace. Your insights are your insights. This is not a competition; it is a conversation between you and yourself.

Mistake 4: Refusing to Journal Because You “Are Not a Writer”

The journalling component of this retreat (specifically the Reconnect with Nature guided prompts, which are included free with the retreat) is not asking you to write beautifully. It is asking you to write honestly. The pen is not for aesthetics. It is for excavation.

Mistake 5: Leaving Your Insights Behind at the Farmhouse

The retreat ends. Real life resumes. The mistake is believing that the clarity belongs to France and not to you. Before you leave, write down the three most important things you noticed about yourself. Decide, specifically, what you will do differently with that knowledge. Insight without intention is a lovely holiday souvenir. Insight with intention is a life change.

A Short, Powerful Intention-Setting Exercise: The Three Honest Questions

1. What am I actually carrying right now that does not belong to me? (Name the global anxieties, other people’s fears, the problems you cannot personally solve that you are nevertheless dragging around.)

2. What have I been neglecting in myself that genuinely needs attention? (Not what you think you should want. What your body, heart, and mind are actually hungry for.)

3. If I knew I was allowed to choose rest and renewal right now, what would that look like? (Write the answer before the practical objections arrive. Let the answer be honest before it is reasonable.)

The intention is not a plan. It is a compass bearing.

5 FAQs: The Questions People Are Actually Asking

Q1: Do I have to be religious to walk the Camino?

Absolutely not. The Camino de Santiago originated as a Christian pilgrimage route, but today it is walked by people of every faith, no faith, and every variety of spiritual curiosity in between. What the path requires is not belief in any particular doctrine, but a willingness to be present and reflective. That is a thoroughly secular capacity, and one that rewards everyone who brings it.

Q2: What if I am not fit enough? The walking will put me off.

The 5-day Camino Express retreat includes three walking days on routes that are carefully chosen for their accessibility and beauty, not their difficulty. You do not need to be an athlete. You need comfortable shoes and a willingness to put one foot in front of the other, which, if you have survived the past several years of global news cycles, you are clearly capable of.

Q3: Is it strange to go on retreat alone?

It is, for approximately the first forty-five minutes. After that, the combination of a warm, well-fed group of fellow thoughtful humans, a good book, and the particular social lubricant of shared experience tends to dissolve that strangeness entirely. Many guests arrive alone and leave with friendships that last years. The long dinner table has a way of doing that.

Q4: What actually happens to my stress levels? Is there evidence for this?

Yes, and the evidence is robust. Research published in journals including Frontiers in Psychology and Environmental Health and Preventive Medicine consistently shows that sustained walking in natural environments significantly reduces cortisol levels, lowers blood pressure, reduces rumination, and improves mood and cognitive function. Add meaningful reading and reflective journalling, and you are working with some of the most evidence-based wellbeing interventions available.

Q5: What if I am in the middle of a crisis, a job loss, a relationship ending, a health scare? Is this the right time?

Possibly the best time. Not because the Camino will solve your crisis (it will not), but because a crisis is precisely the moment when you most need to hear yourself clearly above the noise. The path creates the conditions for that. Many guests arrive carrying something specific and heavy, and while the thing itself does not disappear, they leave with a clearer sense of how to carry it, and why, and what actually matters in light of it.

Conclusion: The Path Ahead

There is a line attributed, probably apocryphally, to the Camino itself: “The path does not judge. It simply reveals.”

That is, in the end, what makes this ancient route so stubbornly, persistently relevant. Not its medieval churches or its spectacular French countryside, though both are worth the airfare on their own. But the fact that something about sustained, unhurried movement in beautiful landscape, in the company of honest people and good books, strips away the performed version of yourself and leaves you standing, slightly sweaty, perhaps with blistered toes, face to face with who you actually are.

In a world that is asking you to be outraged, anxious, and constantly responsive, the decision to step onto a pilgrim path and simply walk is, quietly, an act of profound self-respect.

“Not all those who wander are lost. Some of them are, at last, beginning to find themselves.”, adapted, with reverence, from J.R.R. Tolkien

Step Onto the Path: A Gentle Invitation

You have been carrying the weight of the world for long enough.

Imagine five days in the golden light of southwest France. Three walking days on ancient Camino routes through vineyards, medieval villages, and open skies that put everything back in proportion. Unhurried breakfasts. Long, candlelit dinners with people who are also, quietly, looking for something real. Afternoons deep in a brilliant novel. Evenings writing things in a journal you did not know you needed to say.

The Booklovers’ Binge Reading and Camino de Santiago Retreat was designed precisely for people like you, capable, thoughtful, a little worn, and ready for something that is not a package holiday or a productivity course, but a genuine chance to remember who you are.

Not Sure If You Are Ready? Take the Quiz

If something in this article made you pause, that pause is worth paying attention to.

Sign up for the newsletter and take the Ready for a Retreat? Quiz to discover whether a walking and reading retreat is the right next step for where you are right now. It takes five minutes and asks the questions you have probably been half-asking yourself already.

The Camino does not promise you a better world when you return. It promises you a better view of the one you already inhabit, and of the person navigating it.

Before you close this tab or pick up your phone, ask yourself:

What would it mean for you, specifically, to stop running from the chaos and start walking toward yourself?

Take your time.

References

Bratman, G. N., Hamilton, J. P., Hahn, K. S., Daily, G. C., & Gross, J. J. (2015). Nature experience reduces rumination and subgenual prefrontal cortex activation. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 112(28), 8567–8572. (Demonstrates that walking in natural environments significantly reduces repetitive negative thinking and associated neural activity, providing evidence for the Camino’s restorative psychological effects.)
Capaldi, C. A., Dopko, R. L., & Zelenski, J. M. (2014). The relationship between nature connectedness and happiness: A meta-analysis. Frontiers in Psychology, 5, 976. (Meta-analysis confirming that connection with the natural world is robustly associated with greater wellbeing, subjective happiness, and reduced anxiety, underpinning the therapeutic value of nature-based retreats.)
Hasson, U., Ghazanfar, A. A., Galantucci, B., Garrod, S., & Keysers, C. (2012). Brain-to-brain coupling: A mechanism for creating and sharing a social world. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 16(2), 114–121. (Provides neuroscientific evidence that reading narrative fiction creates neural coupling between writer and reader, supporting the claim that deep reading is a powerful empathy-expanding and self-awareness tool.)
Song, C., Ikei, H., & Miyazaki, Y. (2016). Physiological effects of nature therapy: A review of the research in Japan. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 13(8), 781. (Systematic review of shinrin-yoku and nature therapy research showing significant reductions in cortisol, blood pressure, and sympathetic nervous system activity following immersion in natural environments, directly relevant to the walking retreat model.)
Smyth, J. M., Johnson, J. A., Auer, B. J., Lehman, E., Talamo, G., & Skinner, C. S. (2018). Online positive affect journaling in the improvement of mental distress and wellbeing in general medical patients with elevated anxiety symptoms: A preliminary randomised controlled trial. JMIR Mental Health, 5(4), e11290. (Randomised controlled trial demonstrating that structured reflective journalling produces significant improvements in mental wellbeing and reductions in anxiety, providing evidence for the journalling component of the retreat experience.)

06/05/202628/05/2026

From Couch to Camino: Discovering Inner Peace, One Step (and One Insight) at a Time

How a Long Walk Can Short-Circuit Your Existential Crisis

I’ve been wondering about two things.

Firstly, why nearly all of my Camino de Santiago walking retreats guests, often weary from the demands of modern life when they arrive, within just two or three days of treading this ancient path, experience what I call “life-changing incidents and insights.” Secondly, why do they come back again and again to walk the same sections of the Camino, here in the sun-blessed southwest of France?

Why does this specific path act as such a potent catalyst for change? Is it merely the fresh air and stunning scenery? I think, maybe, it’s due to a hair-raising cocktail of pattern disruption, neurological recalibration, and a psychological state known as liminality. It’s not just a walk; it’s a physical, psychological and spiritual reset button, served with a side of unexpected camaraderie and, if you’re lucky, a fresh and flaking butter-drenched croissant.

You Remove Yourself From Your Own Story, because Sometimes, All You Need is a New Path (and a Good Pair of Socks)

Most of us spend our lives as unreliable narrators of our own stories. The same worries, the same misunderstandings, the same people whose opinions we care too much about — they form a kind of echo chamber that we mistake for reality.

The moment you step onto the Camino, you’re out of that echo chamber. Your usual props are gone. You’re in a foreign country, you don’t speak the language particularly well, or at all, your phone has no service, and the only thing on your agenda is to put one foot in front of the other and secure a bed at the end of the day’s walk.

Our modern lives are often lived on autopilot. We wake up, check our phones, commute, work, scroll, sleep, repeat. Our brains are constantly engaged in a relentless barrage of micro-decisions and digital distractions, leaving little room for genuine introspection.

The Camino, even in short bursts, offers a radical, almost jarring, disruption to this pattern. Suddenly, the urgent emails, the incessant notifications, the endless to-do lists—they all fade into the background. Your KPIs (key performance indicators) for the day become delightfully simple: follow the arrows, find water and somewhere to have a wild wee, and get yourself to the next charming village. This forced simplicity is a precious gift. When the brain is liberated from the relentless cognitive (over)load of daily life, it finally has the time, the glorious, unburdened bandwidth, to wander, to reflect, and to process information on a much deeper level.

Distance — literal, physical distance — is one of the oldest tools we have for gaining perspective. It’s why we “need space” in relationships, why therapists ask you to imagine watching your life from the outside, why the best decisions are rarely made in the room where the problem lives.

This is precisely when those “insights” begin to bubble to the surface.

So you might find yourself grappling with a profound existential question about your life’s purpose, only to realise the most pressing decision of the moment is whether to take the scenic route or the slightly shorter, muddier path. Or perhaps a deep spiritual revelation will strike you while you’re trying to decipher the subtle differences between two types of local cheese. These moments, where the mundane meets the magnificent, are the heart of the Camino’s charm. It’s a gentle reminder that sometimes, clarity arrives not in grand pronouncements, but in the quiet spaces between steps.

The Camino Effect: Why Your Brain Loves Long Walks (Even When Your Knees Don’t)

When you engage in physical activity, especially sustained walking, your body produces more BDNF, or Brain-Derived Neurotrophic Factor. Think of it as “Miracle-Gro” for your neurons. This incredible protein promotes neuroplasticity—the brain’s ability to reorganise itself by forming new neural connections—and encourages the growth of new brain cells. So, while you’re busy admiring the rolling hills of Gascony, your brain is literally getting smarter, more adaptable, and more open to new ideas.

Then there is the activation of the Default Mode Network (DMN). This is the brain’s “daydreaming” network, responsible for introspection, memory retrieval, and creative problem-solving. While our busy modern lives often suppress the DMN, the rhythmic, meditative act of walking allows it to flourish. This is why so many people experience those “aha!” moments on the Camino—the solutions to long-standing problems, the creative sparks, the sudden clarity about a life decision. Your brain, finally given permission to process, connects disparate ideas and serves up insights you didn’t even know you were seeking.

En plus, the left-right-left rhythm of walking helps to synchronise the brain’s hemispheres. This bilateral stimulation can create a unique state of consciousness, often compared to the effects of EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing) therapy, helping individuals process old traumas or deeply ingrained emotional patterns. It’s a gentle, natural way to untangle the knots in your mind, one step at a time.

Liminality, a term coined by anthropologist Victor Turner, describes a state of being “in-between.” On the Camino, you shed your everyday identity. You are no longer defined by your job title, your social status, or your usual roles. You are simply “a pilgrim.” This threshold state, neither here nor there, is a sacred space of transition, deconstruction, and ultimately, reconstruction. It’s a temporary suspension of the rules, where defenses drop, and genuine self-discovery becomes not just possible, but almost inevitable. It’s where you learn that the person you thought you were might just be a costume you’ve been wearing.

There’s a peculiar intimacy that develops on the Camino. You meet someone at a retreat, walk together for four hours, share a lunch of bread and cheese, and somehow end up discussing your marriage, your career, your relationship with your father. Then you walk ahead, and you may never see them again. So you don’t need to manage the other person’s opinion of you. You don’t need to be the version of yourself that your colleagues or family expect.

This is not a malfunction. It’s a feature.

Southwest France’s Secret Sauce: How Even a Mini-Camino Can Lead to Maxi-Metamorphosis

It seems to me that the Camino is a metaphor for life. You are, quite literally, on a path. You have to keep moving. You can’t see what’s around the next bend. Sometimes you take a wrong turn and have to double back, and somehow the detour ends up being the most interesting part. Some days it’s beautiful. Some days it rains sideways and your boots are soaked and you question every life choice that led to this moment.

Sound familiar?

The Camino externalises something we usually experience only internally. The abstract — “finding your way,” “the journey of life,” “one step at a time” — becomes concrete and embodied. And when something abstract becomes concrete, it becomes workable.

I believe this is why even a short section of the Camino — two or three days, as my 5-day retreat guests walk — can carry the weight of something much more. Because the insight isn’t really about the miles. It’s about the permission. The path gives you permission to see your life as a journey with a purpose: not a problem to be solved, but a route to be walked.

The intensity of an experience isn’t always proportional to its duration. These shorter sections offer a potent blend of pattern disruption, physical activity, and communal connection, allowing my guests to quickly shed their everyday burdens and open themselves to incoming insight. The stunning landscapes, the rich gastronomy (a well-deserved reward after a day’s walk!), and the warm, genuine hospitality of the region act as powerful sensory anchors, helping to solidify the insights gained.

The Camino, with its centuries of footsteps and its unofficial motto Ultreïa (roughly: “onward, ever onward”), carries a quietly radical message. The point is not to arrive. The point is to walk with attention. To notice. To let the path teach you what you need to know, in the order it decides you need to know it.

This is a profoundly countercultural idea in a world obsessed with destinations, outcomes, and optimised results. But it’s also, if you’ve ever had a sleepless night of so-called “productive worry,” a deeply liberating one.

What if the confusion you’re in right now is not a failure? What if it’s a section of the path you haven’t walked before?

The people who come home from the Camino changed are not, in my experience, the ones who found The Answer. They’re the ones who stopped being afraid of The Question. They walked far enough to remember — or discover for the first time — that not knowing where you’re going is not the same as being lost..

So, perhaps it’s time to lace up your boots, step out of your comfort zone, and onto the path. Even if it’s just for a few days, you might just discover that the person you’re meant to be has been waiting for you all along, just a few steps down the road.

26/04/202603/05/2026

Book Review: The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho

★★★★★

Reviewed by Margaretha Montagu, host of the Booklover’s Binge Reading and Camino de Santiago Walking Retreats

There are books you read, and then there are books that read you. Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist belongs firmly, defiantly, and rather magically in the second category. Published in 1988 and since translated into more than 80 languages, it has sold well over 320 million copies worldwide — a number so staggering that the mind goes a little wobbly trying to picture it. That’s not a readership. That’s a movement.

I first read The Alchemist right around the time I started hosting my retreats — those glorious, muddy, blister-inducing, soul-expanding weeks where book lovers and Camino hikers converge in the most improbable and wonderful combination imaginable. I remember sitting with the novel in the evenings after long walking days, reading by lamplight, and thinking: this is it. This is the book. Not just a book for a reading list. Not just a book to recommend in passing. The one book. The book I want every single guest who came through my doors to read.

And so that’s exactly what I did. The Alchemist is now not merely on the recommended reading list for my retreats — it is the book I ask all my guests to bring with them. Every one. No exceptions. Not because I’m bossy (well, not only because of that), but because I have witnessed, retreat after retreat, how profoundly this small, deceptively simple story amplifies the Camino experience. There is something almost alchemical — and yes, I use that word deliberately — in what happens when a person reads this book with aching legs and wide open eyes and endlessly rolling landscape ahead of them.

“I don’t live in either my past or my future. I’m interested only in the present. If you can concentrate always on the present, you’ll be a happy man. Life will be a party for you, a grand festival, because life is the moment we’re living now.”― Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist

So, what is it about? On the surface, The Alchemist tells the story of Santiago, a young Andalusian shepherd boy who has a recurring dream of treasure buried near the Egyptian pyramids. Encouraged by a mysterious old king, he sells his flock and sets off across the Sahara, encountering merchants, alchemists, wars, and love along the way. It is, technically, a quest story. But calling The Alchemist a quest story is a bit like calling the Camino de Santiago a walk. Technically accurate. But completely inadequate.

What Coelho has written is a fable about the courage it takes to listen to your own heart. Santiago’s journey is every reader’s journey: the moment you decide to pursue what your soul is calling you toward, the universe (in Coelho’s philosophy, quite literally) rearranges itself to help you. He calls it the Personal Legend — the thing you were born to do, the dream you carry, the treasure that is uniquely and irreversibly yours. The book asks whether you are brave enough to go looking for it. And whether, when you find it, you’ll recognise it.

“Il existe deux choses qui empêchent une personne de réaliser ses rêves : croire qu’ils sont irréalisables, ou bien, quand la roue du destin tourne à l’improviste, les voir se changer en possible au moment où l’on s’y attend le moins.” Paulo Coelho – Le démon et Mademoiselle Prym

It is a short book. You can read it in an afternoon. But it will live in you for years.

My retreat guests who arrive having read The Alchemist walk differently. There’s a particular quality of attention that settles over them. They notice things — the angle of afternoon light on the vineyards, the kindness of a stranger at a waymarker, the peculiar grace of being lost and then found again — with a kind of heightened receptivity. As though the book has tuned them to a frequency they didn’t know existed. That I didn’t know existed.

I’ve had guests tell me that reading The Alchemist before or during the Camino felt like receiving a set of instructions in an hitherto unspoken language they suddenly realised they’d always understood. One guest described walking into Santiago de Compostela with tears streaming down her face, the final lines of the novel running through her head. Another told me, over a cup of herbal tea in the courtyard, that the book had made her rethink her entire career — not dramatically, not overnight, but quietly and permanently, the way the best books always do.

The evenings we’ve spent discussing this book are, honestly, among my happiest memories as a retreat host. There is something particularly rich about discussing The Alchemist in a place where people are already doing the very thing the book describes — following a call, walking toward something they can’t quite name, discovering that the journey is as meaningful as the destination. The conversations go deep, fast. People who met at breakfast are confessing their unlived dreams by dinner.

“Everything tells me that I am about to make a wrong decision, but making mistakes is just part of life. What does the world want of me? Does it want me to take no risks, to go back to where I came from because I didn’t have the courage to say “yes” to life?” ― Paulo Coelho, Eleven Minutes

Got to tell you about the moment that made me feel, rather briefly but unforgettably, like the luckiest person in the literary world. Several years ago, I tweeted about The Alchemist — something heartfelt and probably slightly overenthusiastic, as my tweets about books tend to be. And Paulo Coelho replied. Directly. To me. I won’t pretend I was cool about it. I was not cool about it at all. I may have made a sound that alarmed the horses. It was a small moment in the grand scheme of things, but it felt like a little wink from the universe — the kind of synchronicity that The Alchemist itself is entirely full of, and which you begin, after enough Caminos and enough re-readings, to take almost for granted.

If you haven’t yet read The Alchemist, I want to gently and firmly insist that you do. And if you have read it — read it again. It is a different book at different points in your life, which is perhaps the truest mark of a great one.

Coelho’s wider body of work is rich and worth exploring in full. His novels include The Pilgrimage, The Valkyries, The Fifth Mountain, Eleven Minutes, The Zahir, The Witch of Portobello, Veronika Decides to Die, The Winner Stands Alone, Aleph, Adultery, The Spy, and Hippie. Each has its own flavour and preoccupation, but they share a common beating heart: the conviction that human beings are capable of transformation, that love is the most serious business there is, and that the life you long for is not as far away as you think.

His autobiographical novel The Pilgrimage is particularly worth mentioning in the context of my retreats, as it documents his own walk of the Camino de Santiago in 1986, an experience he later described as a personal spiritual turning point — and the creative catalyst that made The Alchemist possible. Reading The Pilgrimage alongside or just before walking your own Camino adds yet another layer of richness to the experience.

And for those who want to know what Coelho has been up to most recently: his latest book, The Supreme Gift, sees him adapt the classic wisdom of 19th-century missionary Henry Drummond and St. Paul, exploring the nature of love through nine elements: patience, kindness, generosity, humility, gentleness, dedication, tolerance, sincerity, and innocence. It offers a message that will help readers incorporate love into daily life and experience its transformational power — which is, when you think about it, exactly what The Alchemist has been doing quietly for nearly four decades.

The Alchemist is the kind of book that makes you want to set out. It makes you want to sell your flock of sheep, metaphorically speaking, and walk toward whatever treasure your heart has been whispering about for years. It makes the Camino feel not like a challenge to be endured, but a conversation to be had — with the landscape, with fellow pilgrims, with the oldest and most persistent parts of yourself.

Pack it in your rucksack. Bring it to the retreat. Read it by the fire. Argue about it over dinner. Let it argue back.

You won’t regret it.

“When you find your path, you must not be afraid. You need to have sufficient courage to make mistakes. Disappointment, defeat, and despair are the tools God uses to show us the way.”― Paulo Coelho, Brida

26/04/202603/05/2026

The Camino de Santiago Effect: the Path IS the Teacher

How walking an ancient trail in southwest France can quiet the noise of a world that won’t stop shouting

What this is: A thoughtful, grounded exploration of the Camino de Santiago effect, specifically the French routes through southwest France, remains one of the most quietly radical acts of self-renewal available to anyone carrying the weight of a world gone sideways. Plus some practical wisdom for when and how to use it.

What this isn’t: A hiking guide. A spiritual manifesto. A listicle about “ten things your Camino will teach you.” (Though there are takeaways, I couldn’t resist.)

Read this if: You’re intelligent, self-aware, overwhelmed and exhausted. If you’ve read the news one too many times this week, if you sense that what you need isn’t another productivity hack but a genuine reset, one that involves fresh air, good books, and the kind of silence that actually speaks, then yes. Pull up a chair. This one’s for you.

5 Key Takeaways

The Camino doesn’t just give you a walk, it gives you a mirror. The path strips away distraction and returns you to yourself in ways that no retreat centre, no matter how beautiful its brochure, can manufacture.
Walking at pace with your own thoughts is a lost art, and perhaps the most urgently needed one. The Camino’s rhythm, one foot, then the other, rewires stressed nervous systems better than most therapies.
Nature is not the backdrop. It is the curriculum. Ancient woodland, open skies, and the scent of thyme underfoot are doing serious neuroscientific work on your cortisol levels whether you notice it or not.
Combining walking with reading and journalling creates a rare kind of integration. Insights don’t just arrive; they settle. They become yours.
The personal shift you experience ripples outward. When you return calmer, clearer, and more grounded, the people around you, your family, friends, colleagues, community, feel that shift. One person’s renewal is never just one person’s story.

Introduction: Something Happens When We Stopped Moving

Stressed, Overwhelmed, and Running on Empty? What 1,200 years of pilgrimage wisdom can teach you about slowing down, tuning in, and finding yourself again

SOMEWHERE between the twenty-fourth news alert of the morning and the third doom-scroll session before noon, most of us lost the plot. Not our personal plot, necessarily, though that too sometimes. The larger plot. The one where humans were supposed to be okay, where the world was, if not exactly fine, at least manageable.

It isn’t anymore, is it?

And here you are, smart, resourced, thoughtful, a person who has already tried things, the meditation app that dinged at you like a passive-aggressive life coach, the digital detox that lasted until Tuesday, the long weekends that left you more depleted than when you arrived. You’re not broken. You’re not weak. You are simply, profoundly, and entirely understandably overwhelmed by the weight of a world that has stopped making sense.

The ancient pilgrims who first walked the routes to Santiago de Compostela weren’t running away from anything. They were walking towards something. Clarity. Grace. The still, small voice that gets drowned out by modern life’s relentless static. They had the right idea.

This article is an invitation to consider that the oldest roads in Europe might still be the fastest route back to yourself. Not because walking is magic (though it is, a little), but because the Camino de Santiago, particularly through the golden landscapes of southwest France, offers something increasingly rare: the conditions under which transformation can actually happen.

By the time you finish reading, you’ll understand why the path itself is the greatest teacher you’ve never met, and what happens when you combine it with nature, silence, and the kind of companionship that doesn’t require you to perform.

The Story of Miriam Devereux: “I Thought I Was Going on Holiday. I Didn’t Realise I Was Going Home.”

Miriam Devereux, fifty-three, secondary school librarian, devoted grandmother, and self-described “professional worrier,” stood in her bedroom on a Tuesday evening in early autumn and stared at the pile of books on her bed. Seven books. For a five-day retreat. She had culled the list three times already.

“I might finish them all,” she said aloud, to nobody in particular.

Her cat, Biblio, regarded her with the eloquent contempt only cats can embody.

She had found the retreat almost by accident, the way the important things usually arrive, sideways, through a link in a newsletter she almost deleted. Book Lovers’ Binge Reading and Camino de Santiago Hiking Retreat. Southwest France. Five days. Small group. She had read the description, standing at the kitchen counter with cold tea and the BBC news playing in the background, reporting on something she could no longer bear to listen to.

She had booked it before she reached the third paragraph.

The morning they set out, the sky was the particular shade of pale gold that only exists in the Gers at six in the morning. Miriam’s boots were new and she felt faintly ridiculous, like a woman playing at being an adventurer. The group was small, three other people who had each arrived carrying their own invisible baggage alongside their actual packs. A retired architect from Edinburgh. A teacher from Amsterdam who hadn’t slept properly in eight months. A woman named Rosa who said she was “between lives” and meant it literally.

Miriam initially thought the pace was too slow. Then, after twenty minutes, she realised it wasn’t slow at all. It was realistic. It was the pace at which you could actually look at things.

And there was so much to look at.

The light fell differently here, filtered through oak canopies that had been growing since before anyone alive had been born. The path smelled of damp earth and wild thyme and something else, something harder to name, like the memory of every person who had ever walked this way before. The sound of her own breathing, steady and even, began to crowd out the background noise she had been carrying in her chest for months.

She didn’t speak for the first hour. Neither did anyone else. Nobody needed to.

They walked through a landscape so unreasonably beautiful it almost felt like an argument. Rolling hills dissolving into morning haze. Ancient churches half-buried in wildflowers. A donkey watching them from a field with the considered expression of a philosopher who had seen worse and was not particularly impressed.

By that evening, Miriam had finished the first thirty pages of the novel she’d brought, a sweeping, generous story about belonging and starting over. The words had gone in differently than they usually did. Less like consumption and more like nourishment.

By day three, something had quietly shifted. The architecture of her anxiety, the elaborate, load-bearing structure she had spent years building and maintaining, the one propped up by news cycles and catastrophic thinking and the nagging sense that to stop worrying was somehow irresponsible, that structure was developing cracks. Not collapsing. Changing shape.

In the evenings, curled in deep chairs with their books and notebooks, the group talked about what they were reading, about what they were thinking, about the strange and particular relief of walking without a final destination that needed to be reached today. The Camino, they discovered, has a disarming way of making the journey itself feel like the point.

Miriam’s notebook was filling up. Not with resolutions, she had made and broken too many of those to bother, but with observations. A line from her book that had made her breath catch. A question she hadn’t known she had, about what she actually wanted her next decade to look like.

On the last morning, she woke early and sat on the terrace of the farmhouse with coffee and her journal, watching the mist lift from the valley below. The world, that same battered, bewildering world, was still out there. But she was different within it. Quieter. More anchored. Less at the mercy of it.

Monsieur Biblio, she thought, was going to be very confused by the new version of her.

She smiled. Opened her book.

When One Person Changes, Everything Changes

Miriam’s story, while hers alone, is also entirely universal. The Camino de Santiago effect has been doing this to people for over a thousand years, and what’s striking is not merely the personal transformation it catalyses, but the scale of the ripple effect that transformation creates.

We live in a moment of collective stress that is not just political or economic but deeply psychological. The World Health Organisation has described a global mental health crisis. Studies track sharp increases in anxiety, depression, and what researchers now call “eco-anxiety,” a specific, mounting dread about the state of the natural world. Many of us are not simply stressed. We are running on depleted systems, trying to show up fully for our families, our work, our communities, from tanks that are approaching empty.

The Camino, particularly when experienced in the context of a thoughtfully structured retreat that combines walking with reading, journalling, and immersion in nature, offers something that is genuinely reparative. Not a fix. Not a cure. A recalibration.

Research is increasingly clear on the mechanisms involved. Walking in nature reduces cortisol. It activates the parasympathetic nervous system. Bilateral movement (left, right, left, right) has been shown to process stored emotional material in ways that parallel certain therapeutic modalities. Add the cognitive stimulation of reading, the reflective depth of journalling, the social glue of small-group conversation, and you have a genuinely potent combination.

But the impact doesn’t stop at the individual level.

When Miriam returned home, her husband noticed. Her students noticed. Her book group noticed. She was different, not in a disruptive or performative way, but in the way of someone who has been reset to their actual factory settings, more patient, more present, more genuinely curious.

This matters because stressed people, depleted people, make stressed and depleted communities. The reverse is equally true. One person who has genuinely rested, renewed, and reconnected returns to their relationships, their workplace, their neighbourhood, and they change the temperature of those spaces. They ask better questions. They listen more. They model something that others lean towards, even without knowing why.

The Camino has a phrase: Buen Camino. Good path. It’s what pilgrims say to each other as they pass. What strikes newcomers is how genuinely it is meant. The Camino creates a temporary community held together by shared effort and shared direction. Something of that generosity, that fundamental goodwill towards fellow travellers, tends to come home in the pilgrim’s rucksack.

In a world that is very good at making us feel powerless, the Camino reminds us that meaningful change, the kind that lasts and the kind that spreads, nearly always begins with a single person deciding to walk a different path.

Literally, in this case. But you know what I mean.

5 Mistakes that Limit the Camino de Santiago Effect

Mistake 1: Treating it like a fitness challenge rather than a reset. The Camino is not primarily about mileage. It is about attention. People who arrive determined to “crush it” often miss what the path is actually offering. Walk at a pace that allows you to see. Your step count is not the point.

Mistake 2: Leaving your phone in your pocket, not in your bag. Accessibility is the enemy of presence. The research on even the sight of a smartphone reducing cognitive capacity is unambiguous. Put it away. The news will still be there when you return, unchanged in its capacity to exhaust you.

Mistake 3: Waiting until you’re ready. There is no “ready.” If you’re waiting until the world settles down, until work calms, until the kids are older, until the timing is perfect, you will wait indefinitely. The Camino doesn’t ask you to arrive prepared. It asks you to arrive. The preparation happens on the path.

Mistake 4: Packing too much and expecting too little. This applies to actual luggage (the rule of thumb is “halve what you think you need, then halve it again”) and to emotional expectations. People who arrive hoping for a specific outcome often have a harder time than those who arrive open and curious. The path gives what is needed, not always what is wanted.

Mistake 5: Walking alone in a group. One of the great gifts of a small-group retreat is the people you meet. Resist the temptation to use the communal setting as a backdrop for a solo experience. The conversations at the farmhouse table, the shared observations on the path, the books passed from hand to hand, these are part of the curriculum too. Don’t skip them.

A Short Intention-Setting Exercise Before You Walk

Before you begin any significant journey, inner or outer, intention creates direction without demanding a destination.

Find five quiet minutes. Open your journal to a fresh page. Write the following prompts, and then answer them without editing yourself:

What am I carrying that is not mine to carry? (List whatever comes. Don’t overthink it.)
What do I most want to feel differently about when I return?
What is one thing I am willing to let the path teach me, even if I don’t know yet what that is?
What would “enough” look, sound, and feel like, for me, right now?
What small act of kindness to myself would make this journey feel like a gift rather than an achievement?

Fold the page. Carry it with you. Don’t read it again until the last day of your walk.

A Gift Included in Every Reading Retreat

Reconnect With Nature: A Guided Journalling Course Inspired by Horses

Because the work of reconnecting with the natural world doesn’t have to end when you return home, every Book Lovers’ Binge Reading and Camino de Santiago retreat includes free access to the online course Reconnect with Nature: A Guided Journalling Course Inspired by Horses.

Created to deepen your relationship with the natural world through reflective writing and the wisdom of horses (genuinely one of nature’s most emotionally intelligent teachers), this course continues the work the path began. Think of it as the follow-up lesson for when you’re back at your desk and the world is being noisy again.

Explore the course here.

5 FAQs: What People Are Really Asking About the Camino Right Now

Q: Do I have to be religious to walk the Camino de Santiago? Absolutely not. The Camino’s origins are Christian pilgrimage, but its present reality is magnificently diverse. Walkers include atheists, agnostics, practitioners of every tradition, and a large number of people who describe themselves simply as “searching for something.” The path asks for feet, not faith. Though the faith part often arrives uninvited, and tends to be rather welcome when it does.

Q: How fit do I need to be? Fit enough to walk for several hours at a comfortable pace over varied terrain. Not athlete-fit. Not even particularly sporty. The retreats are designed for people in ordinary, middle-of-life physical condition who want a meaningful experience, not a punishing one. You will be surprised by what you are capable of, in the best possible way.

Q: Is it safe to travel solo as a woman? The Camino has an extraordinarily strong culture of looking out for fellow pilgrims. Small-group retreats add an additional layer of community and support. Many women report that a walking retreat in southwest France, with a small group and experienced guide, feels safer and more genuinely nourishing than almost any other kind of travel they’ve done.

Q: What if I want to read and walk, not just one or the other? Then you’ve found exactly the right retreat. The Book Lovers’ Binge Reading and Camino de Santiago retreats are specifically designed to weave walking and reading together throughout the day, morning walks, afternoon reading, evening conversation, reflection and journalling. They are for people who love both and have been waiting for someone to combine them properly.

Q: I’ve tried retreats before and came back feeling great for a week, then slid back. How is this different? That slide is real, and it’s common. What tends to create lasting change isn’t just the peak experience of the retreat itself, but the tools and practices that continue it. The journalling course included with the retreat, the books you carry home, the intention you set on the path, these are designed to extend the work beyond the five days. You won’t be the same person who slid back, because you won’t be relying on the same mechanisms.

Conclusion

There is a quality of attention that only walking can generate. Philosophers knew it. Poets knew it. Ancient pilgrims, shuffling through rain and sun and the particular loneliness of the long middle stretch, knew it in their bones.

What the Camino de Santiago offers, in its ancient, quietly insistent way, is not escape from the world but return to yourself within it. The path asks nothing except that you show up, put one foot in front of the other, and be willing to be surprised.

In a world that is generating more noise, more fear, more complexity than most of us were designed to process, that invitation is not a luxury.

It is a necessity.

“A pilgrim is someone who is on the way, and knows it. Most of us spend our lives not knowing we are on the way. The Camino teaches you this, and that is why it is not a destination but a transformation” , adapted from the tradition of the Camino

Gift Yourself Five Days

You’ve been carrying the weight of a world you can’t fix. You’ve been reading the news and feeling the particular exhaustion of caring about things you cannot control. You’ve been looking for something, not a solution exactly, but a place to put it all down for a while and remember who you are underneath the noise.

The Book Lovers’ Binge Reading and Camino de Santiago Walking Retreats in the south-west of France are five days of walking ancient pilgrimage routes through landscapes of almost absurd beauty, reading without guilt, talking with people who get it, and writing your way into the clarity you’ve been looking for.

Small groups. Farmhouse stays. Books passed hand to hand. Morning walks and afternoon pages. Evening conversation that matters.

Discover the retreat here.

Ready for a Retreat? Take the Quiz

Not sure if a walking and reading retreat is right for you, or if you need something a little different first? Sign up for the newsletter and take the Ready for a Retreat? Quiz, a quick, honest gut-check that will tell you exactly where you are and what kind of renewal might serve you best right now.

Take the quiz here.

If you could put down one thing you’ve been carrying, just for five days, what would it be? And what might become possible if you did?

References

Bratman, G. N., Hamilton, J. P., Hahn, K. S., Daily, G. C., & Gross, J. J. (2015). Nature experience reduces rumination and subgenual prefrontal cortex activation. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 112(28), 8567–8572.
Oppezzo, M., & Schwartz, D. L. (2014). Give your ideas some legs: The positive effect of walking on creative thinking. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 40(4), 1142–1152.
Ulrich, R. S., Simons, R. F., Losito, B. D., Fiorito, E., Miles, M. A., & Zelson, M. (1991). Stress recovery during exposure to natural and urban environments. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 11(3), 201–230.
Shapiro, F. (2001). The role of eye movement desensitisation and reprocessing therapy in bilateral stimulation and trauma processing. Journal of Clinical Psychology, 58(12), 1547–1558. (See also broader research on bilateral stimulation and walking as embodied memory processing.)
Li, Q., Morimoto, K., Nakadai, A., Inagaki, H., Katsumata, M., Shimizu, T., … & Kawada, T. (2007). Forest bathing enhances human natural killer activity and expression of anti-cancer proteins. International Journal of Immunopathology and Pharmacology, 20(2 Suppl 2), 3–8.

Written with warmth, a little mischief, and the genuine conviction that the Camino de Santiago still leads somewhere worth going.

25/04/202603/05/2026

Fast Reset: Because Even Excellent Coffee Can’t Fix Everything

A perfectly good cup of coffee, one careless comment, and suddenly your brain is directing a full-length drama. Enter the fast reset—a small shift with a surprisingly big impact.

This article first appeared on my Substack “Margaretha Montagu’s Stories”

If you have met me, you will know that I’m serious about coffee. It’s not that I drink ten cups a day. I probably have no more than three, but it’s the best quality coffee I can afford to buy. It’s not that I’m addicted, not really, I just appreciate good coffee.

A Minor Betrayal, Served Hot

So imagine what it felt like when I’d just handed a friend a cup of coffee I made with genuine care — the best extra corsé beans, a double espresso, a little noisette with just a nuage of full-fat milk, the perfect sipping temperature and an aroma to get up for on a Sunday morning. And without missing a beat, without even a courtesy sip, they say: “Oh, thanks, but I’m more of a grand crème sort of person.” What? As in drowning that preciously, lovingly nurtured coffee flavour in gallons of cream?

Such a casual comment. Unthinking. Unbothered. As if she didn’t just audit my entire raison d’etre. I smile, and sip my perfect coffee. But internally? An in-depth review has begun. By lunch I’ve got it on endless replay. By mid-afternoon I’m Googling speciality coffee certifications, not entirely as a joke. By dinner I’ve decided I need a better (more expensive) coffee machine, different beans, less corsé, and possibly different friends.

The Olympic Sport of Overthinking

Most of us are experts at replaying such moments. And moments much worse than that. A perceived insult. A slight. A (possible) misunderstanding. We retell ourselves the story. For days. Weeks. Months. Years. We ask ourselves why did they say that and what did they mean by that until the original event, which maybe lasted five seconds, has been extended into a six-hour conversation with your inner critic.

Enter: The Fast Reset (Stage Left, Slightly Out of Breath)

Ironically, it was the coffee incident that led me to discover the fast-reset.

The “fast reset” is the art of recovering your composure before your imagination writes a wildly unhelpful sequel: you’ve been rattled, possibly been mildly dramatic about it, and then—through a deliberate shift like reframing—you return to yourself before the situation turns into a full-length, endlessly-repeated emotional soap opera.

Resetting is not pretending you’re fine when you aren’t. It’s not toxic positivity, or slapping a smile over something that obviously hurt. It’s not the infuriating advice to “just don’t let it bother you” — as if that were ever a useful instruction.

What It Actually Looks Like in the Wild

A real reset looks more like this:

You notice something’s off. Maybe your jaw is tight. Maybe you’ve reread the same paragraph four times. Maybe you’ve been a little snappier than usual, and you know it, and you don’t particularly like it. You stop. You acknowledge it — yeah, that thing she said this morning really got to me. You let yourself feel it briefly and honestly, without adding too much drama. And then, gently, deliberately, you put it down. You let it go.

You get back on track.

Not because it didn’t matter. But because you’ve decided the rest of your day matters more.

The Secret of Unshakeable People

This is what the people who seem unshakeable actually do. They FEEL it. They just don’t pitch a tent at that point in time.

Fast-resetters feel the frustration without becoming the frustrated person. They notice the bad mood the way you’d notice bad weather — real, inconvenient, temporary, and not a reflection of how the rest of the week will go.

They also tend to have what you might call an “exit ritual” — a small, almost mundane action that signals to the brain that a moment is over. A walk around the block. Splashing cold water on their face. Making a cup of coffee with slightly more ceremony than necessary. It sounds too simple to be real, but that’s precisely the point. The brain recognises and responds to patterns. When you consistently pair a small action with the intention to let go, that action eventually becomes the letting go.

Apparently. I’m still practising.

A New Philosophy: Feel It, Then Promptly Move On

Fast-resetting is a mindset shift, really — from “I’ll feel better once I’ve processed this properly” to “I’ve felt it. I’m done. Now moving on.”

There’s an almost stubborn power in this. In deciding that one bad moment doesn’t get to determine the rest of your day, week, month, etc.. In treating your own peace as something worth protecting, rather than something that gets eroded by whatever the day throws at you.

A Difficult Habit to Break

I can see exactly how valuable this skill could be. I understand the logic, I believe the science, and I am fully on board in principle. The problem is that I’m also someone who has been doing the precise opposite for four decades, which means my neural pathways are basically seasoned veterans at this point: highly trained, deeply committed, and completely unimpressed by my new intentions. You don’t rewire forty years of habit with a deep breath and a good attitude.

Like most skills, it no doubt gets easier the more you practise. I’ll have to do a LOT of practising to change this habit.

But I will, because my energy definitely isn’t endless, and I want what I spend it on, to matter.

Many of my Camino de Santiago walking retreat guests struggle with this. When you walk the Camino, for hours on end, sooner or later your brain might start rerunning past insults, arguments, disappointments, misunderstandings. You end up marinating yourself in a bad mood with real dedication, real craftsmanship even. And fast-resetting? Let’s just say it becomes a serious challenge, every step of the way.

Lots of time to practice, walking the Camino.

The Energy Audit You Don’t Need

Every time you replay an argument you can’t change, you spend energy. Every time you let a ten-second inconvenience simmer for three hours, you waste energy. Every time you carry a morning mood all the way into your evening, your energy gets depleted — and you spend it on something that’s already past history, that you cannot alter, that is frankly not worth making out the invoice.

Some things ARE worth sitting with, processing properly, talking through. But the unappreciated coffee? The terse reply? The plan that didn’t work out? Those have a natural expiry time, and it’s a lot shorter than we tend to give it.

Not Indifference—Discernment with Good Boundaries

Resetting fast isn’t indifference. It’s prioritisation. It’s the decision that your afternoon is more valuable than your grievance. That your presence — with yourself, with the people you love, with the work you care about — is worth more than the story of what went wrong at breakfast.

Reframe if you need to, as in “their behaviour says more about them than about me,” or whatever works in that specific situation. Then let the moment pass. Fretting about it uses up to much of your energy. Let it go.

Again and again and again.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on fast resetting – have you mastered the art? Or are you, like me, stil practising?

What This Article Is About

Walking Together as a Couple: 5 Key Takeaways

The Couple Who Walked Until Found Each Other Again

What Couples Who Walk Together Know That Too-Busy-To-Walk Couples Don’t

Walking Together as a Couple: 5 Mistakes to Avoid

Further Reading

The Relationship Cure by Dr. John Gottman

Mating in Captivity by Esther Perel

Embracing Change — in 10 Minutes a Day by Margaretha Montagu

5 FAQs About Walking Together

What if we walk at completely different paces?

We’re not in crisis — is a Camino retreat still relevant for us?

What if one of us is significantly fitter than the other?

Can walking together really improve a relationship, or is that overstated?

What if we argue on the walk?

The Path Goes in the Same Direction

5 Key Takeaways

Why Do Women Want To Walk Alone?

The Real Reason Women Walk Alone

5 Mistakes to Avoid When Booking a Camino Walking Break

1. Waiting Until You Feel “Brave Enough”

2. Overpacking Emotionally and Physically

3. Choosing Huge Group Tours

4. Treating the Camino Like a Competition

5. Ignoring What Comes Up Emotionally

Further Reading

Wild by Cheryl Strayed

The Salt Path by Raynor Winn

Embracing Change – in 10 minutes a day by Margaretha Montagu

FAQs about Camino Walking Breaks

Is the Camino safe for solo female travellers?

Do I need to be very fit to join a Camino retreat?

Will I feel awkward arriving alone?

What emotional benefits do people experience on the Camino?

Why do people say the Camino changes them?

Conclusion

5 Key Takeaways

Introduction: What You Don’t Know Might be Costing You More Than You Realise

How Oliver Marsh Walked 35 Kilometres and Discovered He’d Been Living Someone Else’s Life

Our Blind Spots

What “We Don’t Know What We Don’t Know” Actually Means for Your Life

5 Mistakes to Avoid When You Start Waking Up to Your Blind Spots

Five Minutes That Might Change the Direction of Your Year

Further Reading

5 Razor-Sharp FAQs

Conclusion: The Beginning of Change

Invitation: Come and Find Out What You Don’t Yet Know

Are You Ready for a Retreat?

A Final Reflection

References

5 Key Takeaways

Introduction: The Mirror You Did Not Know You Were Avoiding

Alana’s Hills

The Camino as Mirror

The Ripple Effect: How One Person’s Reset Changes More Than Just One Person

5 Mistakes to Avoid (So You Actually Get Something From This)

Mistake 1: Treating It Like a Productivity Hack

Mistake 2: Spending the First Two Days Decompressing and Calling It Wasted Time

Mistake 3: Comparing Your Walk to Someone Else’s

Mistake 4: Refusing to Journal Because You “Are Not a Writer”

Mistake 5: Leaving Your Insights Behind at the Farmhouse

A Short, Powerful Intention-Setting Exercise: The Three Honest Questions

Further Reading: Five Books That Will Change How You Walk Through This World

1. The Way Is Made by Walking by Arthur Boers

2. A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit

3. The Gifts of Imperfection by Brené Brown

4. Wanderlust: A History of Walking by Rebecca Solnit

5. Lost and Found: A Memoir by Kathryn Schulz

Included Free With All Retreats: Reconnect with Nature: A Guided Journaling Course Inspired by Horses

5 FAQs: The Questions People Are Actually Asking

Q1: Do I have to be religious to walk the Camino?

Q2: What if I am not fit enough? The walking will put me off.

Q3: Is it strange to go on retreat alone?

Q4: What actually happens to my stress levels? Is there evidence for this?

Q5: What if I am in the middle of a crisis, a job loss, a relationship ending, a health scare? Is this the right time?

Conclusion: The Path Ahead

Step Onto the Path: A Gentle Invitation

Not Sure If You Are Ready? Take the Quiz

References

You Remove Yourself From Your Own Story, because Sometimes, All You Need is a New Path (and a Good Pair of Socks)