Author: Margaretha Montagu

Hard-won lessons, honest surprises, and why this ancient path might be exactly what your overwrought nervous system needs right now

What this is: A candid, warm, and occasionally hair-raising guide to what really happens when you walk your first Camino de Santiago — the blisters, the breakthroughs, the beauty, and the bits the guidebooks politely skip.

What this isn’t: A step-by-step training manual, an equipment review, or a spiritual dissertation. You won’t find a packing checklist or a calorie-by-kilometre breakdown here.

Read this if: You’re exhausted by the relentless noise of the world, you’ve been quietly wondering whether a long walk in France might fix what nothing else has, or you’re simply a book-loving human who suspects that the answers you’re looking for might be found somewhere between page 247 of a good novel and a sun-drenched vineyard path in Gascony.

5 Key Takeaways

1. The Camino asks nothing of you except your presence — and in a world that asks everything of you, on spread sheets, this is a radically different experience.
2. You don’t need to be religious, athletic, or spiritually enlightened to benefit from walking the Camino. You just need to show up.
3. The combination of walking, reading, and nature immersion is one of the most scientifically supported ways to reduce cortisol, restore focus, and reclaim a sense of self.
4. Slowing down is not falling behind. The Camino will teach you this. Repeatedly. With great kindness on the occasional steep hill.
5. The person who starts the walk is rarely the person who finishes it — and that is entirely the point.

Introduction

The headlines are relentless. The group chats ping at midnight. Your nervous system hasn’t had a day off since approximately 2019, and somewhere under the pile of to-do lists and doomscrolling, there’s a quieter version of you — one who used to read whole books in a single sitting, who used to notice the breathtahing colour of autumn light, who used to feel genuinely rested on a Monday morning.

That version of you isn’t gone. It’s just buried.

And here’s what this article is: a love letter to that quieter self, wrapped in the practical wisdom of an ancient pilgrimage route, seasoned with ten honest lessons from people who walked the Camino de Santiago and came back fundamentally changed.

By the time you finish reading, you’ll have a clearer picture of what the Camino actually involves (beyond the romanticised Instagram reels), what surprises most first-timers, what mistakes to sidestep, and — if you’re open to it — how five days walking through the vineyards and sunflower fields of southwest France, with a good book tucked under your arm, might be the most quietly revolutionary thing you do this year.

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

10 Things I Wish I Knew Before I Walked the Camino de Santiago

1. Your feet will have a few objections. Pay attention.

The Camino teaches you, quickly and without much sentimentality, that your body has been trying to tell you things for years. Blisters are information. Aching hips are information. The bone-deep tiredness you feel after the first day is information. Pay attention. It is the beginning of a much longer conversation. Break in your boots long before you arrive. Your feet will thank you with an enthusiasm that borders on the emotional.

2. You do not need to be particularly fit. You need to be consistent.

There is a myth that stops more people than any blister ever has: the idea that the Camino is only for athletes, seasoned hikers, and people who eat quinoa for breakfast. It is not. The vast majority of pilgrims are in their fifties, sixties, and beyond, many of whom are not regular walkers. What matters is building a steady, consistent walking habit in the weeks before you go, not hitting a particular speed or distance. The Camino rewards those who simply keep moving, not those who move fastest.

3. The Camino is not a race.

The competitive achiever in you will want to walk faster, farther, and more impressively than everyone else. The Camino will gently, then insistently, disabuse you of this instinct. The people who get the most from it are invariably the ones who slow down, stop often, and occasionally sit on a wall for twenty minutes doing nothing but watching a bird. You set your own pace. That is not a consolation. That is the whole point.

4. You will meet yourself on the path.

Somewhere around kilometre three, when the novelty has worn off and your podcast has ended and there is nothing between you and your thoughts except birdsong and gravel, you will discover what is actually on your mind. This can be uncomfortable. It is always useful. The Camino is as much a mental and emotional journey as a physical one, something that surprises almost every first-time pilgrim. Hours of walking through open countryside gives you something most of us rarely experience: uninterrupted, unhurried time to think. Bring something worth thinking about.

5. The path itself is the teacher.

You don’t need to manufacture insight or force revelation. The Camino has been teaching people things for over a thousand years. Your only job is to walk, pay attention, and stay curious. The lessons arrive on their own schedule, with excellent timing and no respect whatsoever for your agenda. There are traditions woven into the path that carry their own wisdom, including the custom of carrying a stone from home and leaving it behind at the Cruz de Ferro, a small, weighty act of letting go that means something different to everyone who does it.

6. A good book and a long walk are more therapeutic than they have any right to be.

There is something about moving through beautiful landscape and then settling into a story that unlocks a particular kind of calm. It isn’t escapism, it’s integration. Your body walks, your mind reads, and somewhere in between, the two start cooperating in ways they haven’t managed for years. The combination is, frankly, unreasonably effective. Give it two days before you notice the difference.

7. You will not feel lonely, even if you arrive alone.

Many first-time pilgrims worry about this, especially solo travellers. The Camino has a way of dissolving that particular anxiety within the first few hours. You will see familiar faces along the path, share tables with people who will become friends, and find that the community of the Camino is one of the most genuinely warm and welcoming you will encounter anywhere. And if you need solitude, that is equally available. The path holds both.

8. The food matters more than you think.

Simple food, shared with other people, eaten slowly, without a screen in sight, is a form of medicine. The first time you sit down to a bowl of homemade soup after a long walk, you will understand this in your body before your brain has caught up. No complicated menu, no decision fatigue, no scrolling for restaurant options at 9 p.m. Just good, honest food and the particular satisfaction of having earned it.

9. A simple daily rhythm is a form of freedom, not a limitation.

Most pilgrims are surprised by how quickly, and how gratefully, they fall into the Camino’s basic daily pattern: wake, breakfast, walk, stop for coffee in a village, walk, lunch, walk, rest, dinner, sleep. No complicated schedule. No competing demands. Just one step at a time. Within days, this simplicity stops feeling sparse and starts feeling intensely, unexpectedly liberating. You begin to understand how much of your daily exhaustion comes not from doing too much, but from choosing too much.

10. You don’t have to be spiritual to have a spiritual experience.

The Camino has a way of producing moments of inexplicable clarity regardless of your beliefs, or lack of them. A particular quality of morning light. A conversation with a stranger that goes somewhere you didn’t expect. A hawk overhead at precisely the right moment. Call it what you like. It tends to happen anyway.

11. The other walkers are half the gift.

You will talk to people on the Camino that you would never encounter in your ordinary life. And you will have conversations, real ones, unmediated by status or small talk or the performance of productivity, that stay with you long after you’re home. The Camino strips away the usual social scaffolding and leaves something more honest in its place.

12. Pack once, then take half of it back out.

Overpacking is the single most universal rookie mistake on the Camino. Even if you’re just carrying a day pack, too much stuff is still too much stuff. Heavy bags are harder to manage and quietly demoralising in ways that are difficult to explain until you’ve experienced them. Leave room in your bag for what you bring back.

13. Silence is not absence.

Most of us are starving for silence and don’t know it. The Camino provides it in abundance. At first, you may find it deeply uncomfortable. The instinct to fill it, with music, podcasts, news, anything, is strong and entirely understandable. Resist it. By day three, you will be protective of the silence. By the time you leave, you will be wondering how to carry it home.

14. You are stronger than you currently believe.

Before you start, it is entirely normal to wonder: Can I actually do this? Am I fit enough, good enough, young enough, brave enough? These questions are valid. They are also, in practice, answered by the walking itself. Day by day, step by step, your body finds its rhythm and your confidence follows. And by the end, you will know, in a way that no motivational quote has ever managed to convey, that you are considerably more capable than you gave yourself credit for.

15. You will not want to leave.

The pull you feel, standing at the car on the last morning, to stay just one more day, is not attachment to a place. It is a recognition that you have found something in yourself worth keeping, and a quiet, fierce determination not to let it go. The Camino does not end when the walking stops. It continues in every choice you make to slow down, pay attention, and live just a little more deliberately than before.

The Day Thomas Bergmann Finally Stopped Running

Thomas Bergmann was the sort of man who scheduled his dentist appointments six months in advance and colour-coded his inbox.

He was fifty-two, a senior architect at a firm in Hamburg, and he had not taken a proper holiday in four years. Not because he couldn’t afford one. Not because the firm couldn’t survive without him. But because somewhere along the way, Thomas had confused busyness with significance, and stillness with failure.

He heard about the Camino de Santiago from a colleague who’d walked it the previous autumn. The colleague had returned with muddy boots, a deeper laugh, and an irritating habit of saying things like, “Yes, but does it matter?” at project meetings. Thomas found it annoying. Then, six months later, he found himself researching it at 2 a.m. while half-watching a documentary about climate change and half-reading three different breaking news alerts on his phone.

Something in him cracked open. Not dramatically. The way old plaster cracks, quietly, in a corner you’d stopped noticing.

He found the five-day Camino de Santiago Appetiser Express retreat first, but finally decided to book a spot at a five-day Book Lovers’ Binge Reading and Camino de Santiago retreat in southwest France, in the Côtes de Gascogne, almost entirely on impulse. He told himself it was research. He packed four books, his laptop, two pairs of hiking boots (one for trail, one for “just in case”), a portable charger, and a low-level anxiety about what he might find when he stopped moving fast enough to outrun himself.

He arrived on a Saturday evening in October, when the Gascon light was doing that thing it does in autumn, pouring itself sideways across the vineyards in shades of copper and amber that no Instagram filter has ever quite replicated. The farmhouse smelled of woodsmoke and something scrumptiously slow-cooked. There were books on every surface.

The other guests were already settled: a woman called Miriam who’d been reading since before dinner and barely looked up, a retired teacher called Antoine who was working his way through a stack of Nordic crime fiction with great concentration and a glass of local wine, and a younger woman named Sofia who announced cheerfully that she’d left her phone in her car and wasn’t going back for it until Wednesday.

Thomas opened his laptop. Then he closed it. Then he looked at the bookshelf. Then he looked out at the darkening vineyard. Then, with a feeling he couldn’t quite name, a mixture of relief and terror, he picked up the first book he’d thrown in his bag at the last minute, an old copy of The Alchemist he hadn’t read since university, and he sat down in the armchair by the window.

He didn’t move for two hours.

The first Camino walking day came on Monday morning. Thomas had expected a solemn procession of deeply spiritual people in matching pilgrim gear, speaking in hushed tones about their inner journeys. What he found was considerably more human: a gravel path winding through sunlit fields, the distant sound of cowbells, the smell of damp earth and wild thyme, and his own lungs working in a way they hadn’t in years.

The retreat host walked with them for part of the morning, pointing out a medieval waymarker half-hidden in the hedgerow, a hawk circling above the ridge, a cluster of wild rosehips heavy on their stems. She didn’t say much. She didn’t need to.

Thomas noticed his thoughts, initially frantic, all unread emails and looming deadlines and a background hum of global anxiety, beginning to slow. Not stop. Just slow. Like a river hitting a wider channel.

By the second kilometre, he had stopped checking the time.

By the fourth, he was noticing the way the autumn light moved across the path ahead of him, always just slightly out of reach, always inviting him forward.

By the time he stopped for lunch, sitting on a low stone wall with sandwiches and a thermos of coffee, looking out across a valley that had been quietly going about its business since the twelfth century, Thomas said something he hadn’t said in a very long time.

“I feel like myself.”

He said it quietly, to no one in particular. Miriam, beside him, nodded without looking up from her book. She’d heard that one before. It was what the Camino did, she said, if you let it.

By Wednesday morning, when it was time to leave, Thomas had finished two books. He had walked approximately forty kilometres over three days through some of the most quietly beautiful countryside in France. He had eaten better than he had in months, slept longer than he had in years, and had a conversation with Antoine over dinner that somehow moved from Nordic crime fiction to the meaning of life to a shared laugh about their respective attempts at sourdough bread during lockdown.

He hadn’t checked the news once. He hadn’t scheduled a single meeting. He’d received seventeen work emails, which he knew because his phone, restored to his pocket on the last day, told him so. And his reaction, for the first time in years, was a mild, unconcerned: those can wait until tomorrow.

The man who packed his car in the golden Gascon morning light was, in all measurable ways, the same Thomas Bergmann who had arrived four days earlier with his colour-coded inbox and his backup hiking boots.

Except that he wasn’t.

Not really.

Not at all.

One Person’s Camino Can Change Everything Around Them

Walking the Camino de Santiago has a ripple effect.

Yes, the transformation begins with one person, on one path, putting one foot in front of the other. But what happens next ripples outward in ways that are difficult to predict and impossible to overstate.

Thomas, back in Hamburg, began taking his lunch breaks outside. He started leaving his phone in his jacket pocket during meetings. He said “I don’t know” more often, and meant it, and discovered that his team respected him more for it, not less. He began recommending the retreat to a colleague who was struggling. He talked to his teenage daughter about her phone use with considerably more gentleness and considerably less hypocrisy than before.

He started reading again, properly, the way he had before architecture school had swallowed him whole, before the world had become so loudly, insistently urgent. He read novels, histories, poetry. He discovered that a man who reads widely is a man who listens better, thinks more carefully, and is slower to catastrophise.

This is the quiet revolution that begins on an ancient path in southwest France.

It doesn’t announce itself. It doesn’t arrive with a thunderbolt or a viral moment. It arrives as a small, stubborn shift in how you hold your attention, how you treat your own tiredness, how willing you are to stop — genuinely stop — and let the world continue its spinning without your supervision.

Research consistently bears this out. Studies in environmental psychology show that spending time in natural settings reduces rumination, lowers cortisol, and restores directed attention. The combination of rhythmic walking, narrative immersion through reading, and social connection in a low-pressure environment creates conditions for what researchers call psychological restoration, a deep resetting of the nervous system that cannot be achieved by a weekend on the sofa, however worthy your intentions.

When one person restores themselves, genuinely, they become less reactive and more present. And presence is, arguably, the thing the world is most desperately short of right now.

It begins with five days. It continues for a lifetime.

5 Mistakes to Avoid on Your First Camino

Mistake 1: Over-packing, in every sense of the word

Most people bring far too much — in their bags, in their heads, in expectations. Pack light. Physically, yes, but also mentally. Leave the plan at home. Leave the ambition to have the definitive transformative experience. Show up with room for whatever actually happens.

Mistake 2: Treating it as a fitness challenge

If you’re spending your preparation period training for peak performance rather than walking for pleasure, you’ve already misunderstood the invitation. A reasonable base of walking fitness is sensible; turning the Camino into a training target is a different thing entirely, and one that tends to produce misery rather than magic.

Mistake 3: Spending the walk on your phone

The news will still be terrible when you get back. The emails will wait. Social media will continue its relentless performance of other people’s lives without your participation. The single greatest gift you can give yourself on the Camino is your full, undivided, offline attention. You can do it. You know you can.

Mistake 4: Comparing your experience to someone else’s

Someone will have had a profound spiritual awakening on day one. Someone else will have cried unexpectedly at a medieval chapel. Your experience is yours. Maybe you’ll feel peaceful. Maybe you’ll feel bored before you feel peaceful. Maybe you’ll spend an entire afternoon thinking about nothing except what you want for dinner. It’s all the Camino. It’s all valid. It’s all enough.

Mistake 5: Treating it as a one-time event rather than a beginning

The single most common regret among Camino walkers isn’t about blisters or rain or wrong turns. It’s that they went home and gradually let the clarity they found slip through their fingers as daily life reclaimed them. The Camino works best as a beginning, a starting point for the slower, quieter, more intentional life you caught a glimpse of on the path.

A Short Intention-Setting Exercise Before Your Walk

Sit somewhere comfortable, preferably near something natural, a window, a garden, a park bench. Take three slow, deliberate breaths. Then, without editing yourself or aiming for profundity, complete these sentences:

“What I am most ready to put down is…”

“What I most want to find, or find again, is…”

“The version of me I’d like to walk back home as is…”

Write them down. Fold the paper. Keep it with you.

Further Reading: 5 Books That Walked the Same Path

1. The Pilgrimage by Paulo Coelho

The book that introduced the Camino to the wider world, and still, decades later, one of the most honest accounts of what the path does to a person. Coelho doesn’t romanticise the difficulty or the doubt. He walks alongside them. I see the book is going to be filmed soon.

2. I’ll Push You by Patrick Gray and Justin Skeesuck

A true story of friendship, vulnerability, and extraordinary determination — one man pushes his disabled best friend in a wheelchair across the Camino. It will rearrange your understanding of what is possible, what matters, and what friendship actually means.

3. Walking the Camino: A Modern Pilgrim’s Journey by John Brierley

Less a guidebook than a philosophical companion, Brierley’s text treats the outer landscape as a mirror for the inner one. Packed with reflection questions and gentle wisdom, it is the book most likely to make you stop mid-path and stare thoughtfully into the middle distance.

4. The Art of Pilgrimage by Phil Cousineau

For those who want to understand not just the Camino but the deeper human impulse toward pilgrimage, this is a beautiful, quietly radical read. Cousineau argues convincingly that sacred travel is not an indulgence but a necessity, and makes you wonder why you haven’t done this sooner.

5. Wanderlust: A History of Walking by Rebecca Solnit

Solnit explores the relationship between walking, thinking, and freedom across history and culture. It is the kind of book that makes you want to immediately put on your boots, which is precisely the effect it should have.

PS. If you are in the thick of change right now, navigating a world that seems to shift under your feet daily, my book Embracing Change — in 10 Minutes a Day is a quietly powerful companion. Practical, warm, and entirely free of the breathless urgency that characterises most self-help, it is the book equivalent of a reliable friend who happens to know exactly what to say.

If you are currently facing a major life transition or any other dramatic change in your circumstances, and you have no idea how you are going to cope, the good news is that the strategy presented in this book can help you, step by step, to improve your ability to handle the stress caused by change, even if you feel entirely powerless at the moment.

My Reconnect with Nature: A Guided Journaling Course Inspired by Horses online course is included free in every reading retreat. Because walking the Camino is one kind of nature immersion, and this gentle, beautifully crafted journaling course deepens and extends that reconnection in ways that continue long after you’ve returned home. It is, in a word, generous — and it is yours.

 Reconnect with Nature: A Guided Journaling Course Inspired by Horses for anyone interested in increasing their emotional, physical and social resilience by starting a journal, but does not have much time to invest and is looking for a simple, easy-to-implement strategy that gives tangible and lasting results. Get immediate access

5 FAQs People Are Actually Asking Right Now

Is the Camino de Santiago dangerous for solo travellers?

The Camino is consistently rated among the safest long-distance walking routes in the world. It is well-marked, well-travelled (particularly in spring and autumn), and hosted by communities that have been welcoming pilgrims for over a thousand years. Solo women, in particular, frequently cite the Camino as one of the most empowering and safe travel experiences of their lives.

Do I need to be physically fit to walk the Camino?

A reasonable level of walking fitness is helpful, particularly for the longer stages of the full Camino Francés. However, retreats that incorporate shorter, curated sections of the Camino — such as the Appetiser Express and the Book Lovers’ retreat in Gascony — are designed to be accessible to walkers of varying fitness levels. The focus is on immersion and experience, not athletic achievement.

What is the best time of year to walk the Camino?

Spring (April to June) and autumn (September to October) are widely considered the most rewarding seasons — mild temperatures, manageable crowds, and a quality of light that borders on the unreasonable. The retreats in southwest France run from March to November, with October and May being particularly popular.

Can the Camino help with burnout and anxiety?

The research strongly suggests yes. Multiple studies on nature-based interventions, rhythmic exercise, and narrative reading show significant reductions in cortisol and anxiety symptoms. Walking in natural environments has been shown to reduce activity in the prefrontal cortex regions associated with rumination, which is the kind of science that makes you want to immediately book your train ticket.

Do I need to be religious or Catholic to walk the Camino?

Absolutely not. The Camino welcomes pilgrims of every faith, background, and philosophical persuasion. It has been walked by atheists, agnostics, Buddhists, Christians, and a great many people who simply describe themselves as “looking for something.” Whatever that something is, the Camino has a long, distinguished history of helping people find it.

Conclusion

The world is not going to quieten down on your behalf. The news cycle, the group chats, the low hum of collective anxiety that seems to have installed itself permanently somewhere behind your left eyebrow — none of that is disappearing while you figure out the right moment to take a break.

There is no right moment. There is only the decision.

The Camino de Santiago has been walked by stressed, searching, world-weary people since the ninth century. They came carrying grief, confusion, exhaustion, and an unshakeable sense that something needed to change. Most of them found not a destination but a direction — a quieter, more honest orientation toward their own lives.

The fifteen things I wish I’d known before I walked are really one thing, dressed in different clothes: the path gives back what you bring to it, and more. Presence returns you to yourself. Silence gives you room to hear what matters. Walking reminds your body that it is a body, not a machine. Reading restores the inner world. And kindness, the warm, generative, unhurried kindness you find in a sun-drenched Gascon farmhouse among a small group of fellow readers, reminds you that you are not alone in any of it.

“Not all those who wander are lost. Some of them are simply finding their way back.” — adapted from J.R.R. Tolkien

An Invitation

Are you tired enough to rest? Brave enough to slow down? Curious enough to see what’s on the other side of all that noise?

Five days, four nights. Southwest France. Vineyards, books, good food, ancient path, and a small circle of like-minded humans who have also decided that enough is enough.

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.

The Book Lovers’ Binge Reading and Camino de Santiago Retreat is a 5-day, 4-night escape in the Côtes de Gascogne — the most unhurried, sun-blessed corner of France. You’ll walk sections of the Camino through fields and forest, eat simple Gascon food, sleep deeply, and read as much as you want, for as long as you want, without a single person asking you to be anywhere or do anything. There are only four spots per retreat date. Which means it is as close to truly personal as a retreat gets. Your nervous system will send you a thank-you note. Possibly several.

👉 Discover the retreat and claim your spot here.

Not Sure If You’re Ready?

Take the Ready for a Retreat? Quiz — it takes three minutes and will tell you more about what you actually need right now than six months of vague intention-setting.

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.

Sign up for the newsletter and take the quiz here.

What would you do, who would you become, and what would you finally let go of, if you gave yourself five uninterrupted days to simply be?

Author Bio: Dr Margaretha Montagu – described as a “game changer”, “gifted healer”, “guiding light” and “life-enriching author” – is an experienced medical doctor, a certified NLP practitioner, a medical hypnotherapist, an equine-assisted psychotherapist (EAGALAcertified) and a transformational retreat leader who guides her clients through life transitions – virtually, or with the assistance of her Friesian and Falabella horses, at their home in the southwest of France.

References

1. 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.
2. Kaplan, S. (1995). The restorative benefits of nature: Toward an integrative framework. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 15(3), 169–182.
3. Berman, M. G., Jonides, J., & Kaplan, S. (2008). The cognitive benefits of interacting with nature. Psychological Science, 19(12), 1207–1212.
4. Mar, R. A., Oatley, K., & Peterson, J. B. (2009). Exploring the link between reading fiction and empathy: Ruling out individual differences and examining outcomes. Communications, 34(4), 407–428.
5. Holt-Lunstad, J., Smith, T. B., & Layton, J. B. (2010). Social relationships and mortality risk: A meta-analytic review. PLOS Medicine, 7(7), e1000316.

© Dr Margaretha Montagu. All rights reserved. This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute medical advice. All stories are illustrative. Images are for representational purposes only.

My “After the Reinvention” article first appeared on my Substack, Margaretha Montagu’s Stories.

Reinventing yourself, reconstructing your life, against all odds, succeeding, sailing over all the hurdles, is such a deeply satisfying thing to do. A couple of years later, on a timid spring morning, a pale sun just cresting the hill, turning an unexpected late frost into a field of diamonds at the feet of pitchback Friesian horses that are embodying their frustration with the late arrival of their breakfast, I was asking myself, ” Why do I feel so demotivated? So discontent, so vaguely depressed?”

I did it. I built a new life for myself and for my horses, on a little farm in the (mostly) sun-blessed southwest of France, where I host Camino de Santiago walking retreats. I realised my dream. I am, honestly, intensely grateful that I have made it this far, despite all the blood-curdling challenges.

But I did’t feel as inspired as I used to feel.

On the next retreat, I met Susan. Susan arrived at Maison Meraki with the look of someone who had recently made a very significant decision and was beginning to have very significant doubts about it.

She’d driven down from Paris. Fifty-three years old. Divorce finalised three years ago. Kids grown, gone, launched. She’d spent the past two years doing what she called, with a self-deprecating wave of her hand, “the reinvention thing” — therapy, a ceramics class, learning to tango, a solo trip to Portugal, a new job she actually liked. She’d done it. She’d started again. She was, by her own account, well.

And yet.

She sat at the al fresco table that first evening, picking at a bowl of garbure — that thick, smoky Gascon soup that smells like someone’s grandmother has been slow-cooking love itself since Tuesday morning — and she had the eyes of a person who had lost her way.

“I don’t know why I feel like this,” she said, to no one in particular, and then looked slightly horrified that she’d said it out loud.

I’ve been organising walking retreats on the Camino du Puy — the old pilgrim route that winds south from Le Puy-en-Velay through the oak and sunflower country of the Gers — for a few years now, out here in the south-west of France where the light turns the colour of old honey in the late afternoon and the sunflowers have the audacity to face you directly, like they’re waiting for an answer to a question. I’ve watched a lot of people walk through the middle of their stories.

We talk a lot about the courage to start. The leap. The pivot. The new chapter. There are approximately nine thousand podcasts about it and at least four books on your nightstand with some variation of Begin or Start in the title. Starting again is, culturally speaking, a huge achievement. We love a phoenix. We love a comeback. We’ll throw a party for the woman who finally left the marriage on the way to nowhere, changed careers, and signed up for the PhD.

What we talk about far less is what happens about two years later. The part where the novelty has been fully metabolised, the adrenaline of the decision is (regretfully) a distant memory, and you’re just… cruising. Getting up and doing your thing again and again and again. Not because it’s new and terrifying and therefore secretly thrilling, but because this is your life now, and it’s good — genuinely good — except that it doesn’t feel that good anymore. It feels boring. It feels exhausting. It feels meaningless.

This is the unexpected grey zone. Just uniformly grey, no hundred shades to it. The place where the new life you built with such courage stops feeling new, and starts feeling ordinary, and you find yourself wondering, with a creeping unease you’re almost ashamed of, whether this was actually worth it. Whether you’re actually in a better place. Whether the whole reinvention was worth it, or just a story you told yourself while fueled by adrenaline.

Susan, I would discover over the next few days, was deep in the grey zone. Had been for months.

The next morning, my guests set off through the village and past the boulangerie, where someone was already pulling trays from the oven, the smell of warm bread hanging in the cool air as a promise of an edible miracle. The path south of Nogaro descended almost immediately — this section of the route has a sense of humour involving thighs — and within twenty minutes the walkers were in the oak forest, the light coming through in long pale fingers, the path underfoot a soft carpet of last year’s leaves that muffled everything to a kind of held-breath quiet.

I watched them leave, as I always do, with a noisette (small expresso) to handand the mild envy of someone who has organised the adventure rather than gone on it. By late afternoon I’d caught up with the group again — a mossy stone wall beside a field where two horses stood in companionable silence, flicking flies with their tails — and I found Susan sitting slightly apart from the others, boots off, staring at nothing in particular with the focused intensity of someone having a very unpleasant internal conversation.

I sat down beside her and waited. The horses swished. The valley below shimmered in the heat.

“I thought it would feel different,” she said eventually.

“The walk?”

“My life.” She turned her water bottle in her hands. “I did the work. Genuinely. I made substantial changes. I built something new. The job is good. I have friends. I’m not unhappy.” A pause that carried some weight. “I’m just… not enjoying it anymore. Like the colour’s turned down on everything and I can’t find the dial.”

Initially, she’d thought that it was just a bad patch. Now it was late spring, the fields around us were an almost offensive shade of green, the wild orchids were out along sides of the path, and she still felt as though she were watching her own life through glass. She’d stopped going to the ceramics class. No longer want to learn how to tango. She’d cancelled plans with her friends. She’d withdrawn. She’d started wondering, seriously and with a kind of cold logic that frightened her a little, whether the whole reinvention had simply been the result of trying desperately to cope with a crisis — whether she had, now, in some important sense, run out of reasons to keep going.

“Not dramatically,” she said quickly, catching my expression. “I’m not — I just mean I’ve lost momentum. Reasons to keep going. It all feels a bit what’s the point of it all?“

I recognised the feeling. “I sound so ungrateful, don’t I?”

I’ve walked this path — metaphorically, since my own knees have opinions — long enough to recognise the particular flavour of what Susan was describing. It’s not failure. It’s not even depression, necessarily, though it can shade into it if you leave it unattended. It’s something more specific to reinvention: the anticlimax that follows the high.

Starting again generates its own energy. The decision itself is electric. Then you build your new life, and if you’ve done it well, if you’ve been brave and intentional and done the therapy and taken the ceramics class and booked the solo trip — you end up somewhere genuinely better. But then you have to live there. Quietly. Without the drama of transformation to power you forward.

Watching pilgrims walk the Camino I’ve learned that the ones who find it hardest are not the unfit ones or the underprepared ones or even the ones with the least motivation. They’re the ones who thought that by this point — whatever point they’d fixed in their minds — they would feel different. Settled. Content. Fulfilled. Done.

It was late afternoon, the sky over the Gers gone that improbable luminous gold, when Susan caught up with me as I was getting dinner ready. She was sunburned across the nose and looked like she’d been crying, which she clearly had, and also like she felt much better, which she also clearly did.

She’d stopped, she said, at a spot where the path curved around a wide field of sunflowers, thousands of them, all turned the same direction with their absurd, devoted, slightly gormless faces. Something about the spectacle of all that bright yellow, all that uncomplicated aliveness, had just completely undone her. She’d sat in the grass at the field’s edge and cried for about fifteen minutes for no reason she could name and then felt, for the first time in months, like herself.

“I think I’ve been waiting to feel motivated,” she said. “Like motivation would come back and then I’d know I was okay. But maybe that’s not how it works.”

It’s not, I told her. Motivation is a tourist. It shows up enthusiastically, takes a lot of photos, and leaves. What keeps you going after motivation has caught its flight home is something quieter and less glamorous. Purpose.

Not motivation, nor discipline, or even rest. Purpose. In the early days of reinvention, purpose is built in: rebuilding yourself is your purpose. You are the project. But a few years on, when the reconstruction is largely done and the new life is humming along perfectly adequately, that scaffolding quietly disintegrates — and nobody warned you that it was structural. You’re left with a good life that somehow doesn’t feel like it’s worth bothering with. The answer, I think, isn’t to start over yet again (tempting though that is — at least a crisis has momentum). It’s to do something subtler, more deliberate and much harder: to consciously readjust your purpose. To ask, “what/who is this new life actually in service of?”

Whether that’s all that’s needed, I’m not sure yet. Maintaining friendships, being grateful, being generous, etc., is also important, but when you have a well-defined and aligned-with-your-values purpose, it definitely makes it easier to keep going.

Ages ago, I created an online course, the Purpose Pivot, and I find myself revisiting it and adjusting it now— so that not only people who want to make a change, but also people who have made the change, done the work and are now stuck in a swamp on the other side can find the courage to keep going. You can find out more about this course here.

The Purpose Pivot Protocol – drawing inspiration from the Camino de Santiago, this transformative course guides you through a proven framework to recalibrate your authentic purpose and create a meaningful and fulfilling next act. Get immediate access

I gave Susan access to the course to see if it would be of use to her, during the retreat. She finished it in two days. She went home to the same new job, the same empty nest, the same long, ordinary stretch of days.

But with a new understanding: that continuing takes its own kind of courage. It’s less cinematic than starting. Harder to celebrate. Nobody throws a party for the woman who just… kept going. Who got up on a grey morning and went to work and watered the plants and texted the friend back and chose, quietly and without fanfare, not to give up on the life she’d so bravely built.

Because she has a purpose.

I find that quite helpful, on my greyer days. I hope Susan does too.

If you’re a couple of years after your own reinvention — still going, but running low on motivation — I’d love to hear from you. Especially if you’ve found a way to keep going.

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

What Life Lessons Can You Learn While Walking the Camino de Santiago? – a free guide filled with 10 not just “quaint anecdotes” or Instagram-worthy moments (though there are plenty of those) but real transformations from real people who walked this insight-giving trail – Subscribe to my monthly newsletter to Download the Guide

Author Bio: Dr Margaretha Montagu – described as a “game changer”, “gifted healer”, “guiding light” and “life-enriching author” – is an experienced medical doctor, a certified NLP practitioner, a medical hypnotherapist, an equine-assisted psychotherapist (EAGALAcertified) and a transformational retreat leader who guides her clients through life transitions – virtually, or with the assistance of her Friesian and Falabella horses, at their home in the southwest of France.

Exploring Embodied Cognition and Constructive Self-reflection

5 Key Takeaways

1. Journaling on the Camino isn’t about writing — it’s about thinking clearly. The combination of movement and reflection rewires how you process stress and emotion.
2. The Camino provides the perfect conditions for what psychologists call “constructive self-reflection,” breaking the rumination loop that keeps stressed people stuck.
3. Writing during a pilgrimage creates a personal archive of resilience — evidence you can return to when the world feels overwhelming again.
4. You don’t need to walk 800 km. Even a three-day section through the stunning southwest of France delivers the neurological and psychological reset that makes journalling transformative.
5. The community you meet on the Camino — and the stories you record — can ripple outward, changing not just your life but the lives of those around you.

What this is: A heartfelt, practical, occasionally cheeky deep-dive into why journalling on the Camino de Santiago is one of the most powerful things a person can do for their mental and emotional health — especially right now, in a world that seems to have lost the plot entirely.

What this isn’t: A beginner’s guide to buying the right journal, or a lecture about the importance of “self-care.” You already know that. This is about why the specific combination of walking, wilderness, and writing cracks something open in people that nothing else quite manages to touch.

Read this if: You are quietly exhausted by the state of the world, you’ve tried meditating (twice), you’ve read the productivity books, and you still feel like you’re living someone else’s life at someone else’s pace. Also read this if you suspect that somewhere between the news cycle and the to-do list, you got a little lost.

Introductionn: The Quiet Emergency Nobody’s Talking About

You wake up, reach for your phone, and before your feet have touched the floor, you’ve already absorbed three international crises, a political scandal, and seventeen opinions about all of it. By 8am, your nervous system is running at the kind of frequency that would have been reserved for actual emergencies in any previous century.

This isn’t weakness. This is the entirely rational response of a finely-tuned human being to an entirely irrational information environment. The trouble is, your body can’t tell the difference between a breaking news alert and a genuine threat. And so it keeps bracing. Keeps scanning. Keeps waiting for the danger to pass.

It doesn’t pass. It just refreshes.

Here’s what this article will give you: a compelling case for why the ancient practice of walking the Camino de Santiago, combined with the deceptively simple act of keeping a journal, may be the most effective and genuinely enjoyable intervention available to a stressed, world-weary, quietly-desperate-for-something-different human being in 2025.

And yes, there is a story. A rather good one, involving a woman named Vivienne Marsh, a battered blue notebook, and the precise moment she stopped running from herself somewhere on a sun-drenched path in southwest France.

The Story of Vivienne Marsh

A Story in Four Movements

Movement One: The Problem (or, How Vivienne Stopped Being Vivienne)

Vivienne Marsh had, by every observable metric, an excellent life.

She had a good job, a nice flat, two cats with only moderately volatile personalities, and a group of friends who genuinely liked and looked out for her. She ran half-marathons. She read actual books. She owned a gratitude journal she had used at least four times.

And yet.

On the Tuesday morning she turned forty-three, she stood in her kitchen, waiting for the kettle to boil, and realised with startling calm that she could not remember the last time she had felt like herself. The not-stressed version of herself. Not performing-competence-at-a-meeting of herself. Herself. The one with opinions about poetry and strong feelings about olive oil and a laugh that started in her stomach.

That person had gone quiet somewhere around 2022, and Vivienne had been too busy to notice.

She didn’t have a breakdown. She was far too organised for that. Instead, she did what capable, resourceful women with a type A personality do: she googled solutions. Asked ChatGPT, Claude etc. She tried a meditation app (abandoned after eleven days), a digital detox weekend (spent mostly anxious about being offline), and therapy (helpful, but somehow still happening inside four walls, just as everything else).

What she needed, though she didn’t know it yet, was to get out of her head by getting into her body. To move.

What she needed was the Camino.

Movement Two: The Struggle (or, Day One, Blisters, and a Notebook She Almost Didn’t Pack)

The retreat in southwest France arrived in her inbox via a friend’s recommendation and stayed there for six weeks before Vivienne clicked the link. A reading retreat? On the Camino? It sounded either perfectly designed for her or entirely absurd. She booked it on a Wednesday evening after a particularly dispiriting news cycle, half-expecting to cancel by Friday.

She didn’t cancel.

What she did do was pack badly, overestimate her fitness, and forget that “scenic” in the French countryside might mean “uphill.” On the first morning, following a brunch that smelled of warm bread and woodsmoke, the group set off along a path lined with wild thyme and the very particular silence that only exists when there are no cars anywhere near. Vivienne’s new boots were slightly uncomfortable. Her shoulders were tight. Her brain was still analysing spreadsheets and composing emails.

The group facilitator, a warmly practical woman with the energy of someone who has walked this particular way and won, handed out notebooks before they left. Small, cream-paged things with a dark blue cover. “Write whatever comes,” she said. “Or don’t write anything. But carry it.”

Vivienne shoved hers in her jacket pocket, slightly irritated by the sentimentality of it.

By lunchtime, she had written six pages.

Not about anything important, she would tell you. About the way the light came through the oak trees in long, golden columns. About the smell of the earth after last night’s rain, something between mushroom and memory. About the sound her boots made on the packed-clay path — a soft, rhythmic thud that began, after an hour, to feel like something she could lean into.

She wrote about her cats. She wrote half a sentence about her mother and then stopped, surprised by the lump in her throat.

She ate her lunch on a low stone wall, looking out over a valley that had absolutely no idea what the FTSE 100 was doing, and felt, for the first time in longer than she could calculate, that the moment she was in was the only moment that mattered.

It was slightly terrifying. It was also, unmistakably, a relief.

Movement Three: The Solution (or, What Happened When Vivienne Started Telling herself the Truth)

By day three, something had shifted.

It wasn’t dramatic. There was no epiphany moment soundtracked by swelling violins. It was quieter than that, and stickier. Vivienne had begun to write in the evenings too, curled in one of the deep armchairs in the retreat house with a glass of local wine and her increasingly dog-eared notebook. Around her, other women read. Wrote. The fire crackled. Someone laughed softly at something in her book.

The afternoon’s shared reading session — a selection of passages about solitude, nature, and the peculiar freedom of being somewhere nobody expects anything from you — had loosened something in Vivienne’s chest. The discussion that followed, honest and unperformative in the way that conversations become when people have spent a day walking together, had loosened it further.

She wrote, that evening, about the gap between the life she was living and the life she wanted. Not in a crisis-journal way. In the way you write when you’re finally honest with yourself because you’ve run out of energy for pretending.

She wrote about what she was grateful for, properly, not in the three-words-before-bed way of the abandoned app, but in the full-bodied way of someone who has spent eight hours in extraordinary countryside and eaten extraordinary food and laughed with strangers who somehow already feel like friends. Gratitude, she discovered, is much easier to access when you’ve given your senses something real to work with.

She wrote about what scared her. About what she missed. About the version of herself she wanted to find again.

Movement Four: The Takeaway (or, a different Vivienne Marsh Goes Home)

On the last morning, the group walked a longer stretch, emerging eventually at a high point with a view that made several people go briefly speechless. The world spread out below them, green and ancient and entirely unconcerned with current affairs. Vivienne stood there and felt, in her chest and her shoulders and the soles of her slightly-blistered feet, something she would later describe to her therapist as “a sense of having been put back together in the right order.”

She came home with three things: a slightly battered blue notebook filled to the last page, a list of books she intended to read, and a clarity about her life that no amount of productivity systems had ever managed to provide.

She also came home with a new habit. Every morning, before the phone, before the news, before the day could colonise her thoughts — she wrote. Not much. Sometimes only a paragraph. But it was hers. A room of her own, in ink.

Her colleagues noticed. Her friends noticed. Her cats noticed, though they declined to comment.

Vivienne Marsh had, somewhere between the thyme-scented paths of southwest France and the last page of a cream-paged notebook, remembered who she was.

The Science of Wandering, Wondering and Writing

Why this combination is so extraordinarily effective, not just poetic, but physiological.

Walking, particularly in nature, directly reduces cortisol levels. Research from Stanford University has shown that walking in natural environments, as opposed to urban settings, reduces rumination, the repetitive, self-critical thought patterns that characterise anxiety and depression. The Camino routes in southwest France deliver this in abundance: ancient forests, open fields, gentle river valleys, and the kind of uninterrupted sky that makes problems feel manageable.

Expressive writing reorganises traumatic and stressful experiences. The pioneering work of psychologist James Pennebaker demonstrated that writing about emotionally significant events, even for just fifteen to twenty minutes a day, measurably improves immune function, reduces physician visits, and creates lasting improvements in mood. When you walk the Camino, you have time to write in this way, properly, not squeezed in between meetings, but in the golden space of an evening with nowhere else you need to be.

The combination of physical exertion and reflective writing creates what researchers call “embodied cognition.” Ideas don’t just live in your head; they live in your body. When you’ve walked eight kilometres through landscape that has hosted pilgrims for a thousand years, your body is ready to help your mind make sense of things it has been avoiding.

The Camino strips away the scaffolding. No role, no performance, no identity except pilgrim and walker. In this stripped-back state, journalling becomes not a discipline but a compulsion, because there is so much arising, so much noticing, so much feeling, that not writing it down feels wasteful.

And then there is the community. Fellow walkers, fellow readers, people who have also arrived carrying invisible weight and are, gently and without ceremony, setting some of it down. The conversations that happen on the Camino, at mealtimes, on resting stones, in the half-dark of early morning starts, are of a different quality to ordinary conversation. They are honest in the way that temporary proximity allows. And what you hear in those conversations, what you witness, often finds its way into your journal and into your understanding of your own life.

When Vivienne Marsh came home different, her relationships changed. Not because she announced anything, or made demands, or began ending sentences with “as I learned on my journey.” But because she was calmer, more present, more honest. Because she had stopped performing fine and started being, more genuinely, okay. Because she asked better questions and listened to the answers.

Her team at work noticed that meetings became less fraught. Her friendships deepened, because she brought more of herself to them. Her mother, whom she called more regularly after the retreat, commented that Vivienne seemed, somehow, lighter.

This is how it works. Clarity is contagious. Groundedness ripples. The person who finds their way back to themselves gives implicit permission to everyone around them to do the same.

A community of even slightly more intentional, slightly less reactive, slightly more grounded people is, frankly, a better community. And it starts with one person, one notebook, one path through the thyme-scented hills of southwest France.

5 Journalling Mistakes to Avoid on the Camino

Because Good Intentions and Wrong Approaches Are a Waste of Good Scenery

1. Treating Your Journal Like a List of Events “Walked 9km. Had soup for lunch. Blisters on left heel.” This is a logbook, not a journal. Push past the facts into the feelings, the questions, the noticing. What did the soup taste like? What did you think about during the uphill stretch? What surprised you?

2. Writing Only When You Have “Something Important” to Say The Camino’s magic lives in the ordinary moments: the conversation with a stranger, the quality of light at 7am, the unexpected emotion triggered by a particular bend in the path. If you wait for significance, you’ll miss it.

3. Writing for an Imaginary Reader Your journal is not your Instagram. It doesn’t need to be beautiful, wise, or quotable. The moment you start writing for an audience, even a fictional one, you lose access to the raw material that makes journalling genuinely useful.

4. Skipping the Morning Pages Mornings on the Camino are extraordinary. The light, the quiet, the particular quality of thought before the day takes hold. Even ten minutes of writing before you set off will set a completely different tone for your walk.

5. Leaving Your Notebook in Your Bag Keep it accessible. In your jacket pocket, clipped to your pack, tucked into a top strap. The insight you want to capture will arrive at a completely inconvenient moment, on a hillside, at a water stop, mid-conversation. Reach for it.

Before You Put One Foot on the Path

Find a quiet spot, ideally outdoors, ideally with something living nearby (a tree will do). Take three slow breaths. Then write, without overthinking, your responses to these three prompts:

1. What am I carrying into this walk that I am ready to put down?
2. What do I want to feel by the end of this journey?
3. What would it mean to come home as a slightly different version of myself?

Don’t edit. Don’t explain. Just write. Seal the page with a date and, if you like, a single word that sums up how you feel right now.

You’ll return to this on the last day. What you discover may astonish you.

Further Reading

1. The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron The foundational text on journalling as creative and spiritual practice. Cameron’s “morning pages” concept is essentially the Camino approach to writing: daily, unfiltered, and transformative. Essential reading before any retreat.

2. Wild by Cheryl Strayed A masterclass in what happens when a woman puts herself on a long trail and writes the truth. Not specifically about the Camino, but spiritually adjacent in every way that matters. Strayed’s memoir demonstrates precisely what embodied, moving reflection can produce.

3. The Camino de Santiago: A Pilgrimage to the Stars by Gitlitz and Davidson For historical and cultural context. Understanding why millions of people have walked this path for a thousand years deepens the journalling experience enormously. You are not just walking, you are walking in the footsteps of a very long human story.

4. Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg The most joyful, generous, and practically useful book about writing as a mindfulness practice. Goldberg makes the case, beautifully, that writing is not just expression but investigation. A perfect companion for the Camino journal.

5. Lost Connections by Johann Hari A rigorous and compassionate exploration of why so many of us feel anxious and disconnected, and what actually helps. Hari’s evidence-based case for reconnecting with meaningful values, community, and the natural world reads like a manifesto for exactly what a Camino retreat offers.

P.S. If you want to build a daily reflective writing practice before or after your retreat, Embracing Change in 10 Minutes a Day is a gentle, practical, and genuinely lovely place to start. It does exactly what the title promises, and it fits in a jacket pocket.

If you are currently facing a major life transition or any other dramatic change in your circumstances, and you have no idea how you are going to cope, the good news is that the strategy presented in this book can help you, step by step, to improve your ability to handle the stress caused by change, even if you feel entirely powerless at the moment.

The Reconnect with Nature: A Guided Journaling Course Inspired by Horses online course, a uniquely grounding and sensory writing programme, is included free with all my retreats, including my reading retreats.

5 FAQs About Journalling on the Camino de Santiago

Q: Do I have to be any good at writing to journal on the Camino? Absolutely not. In fact, having no writerly self-consciousness is an advantage. You’re not writing for publication; you’re writing for clarity. If you can think, you can journal.

Q: How much time should I set aside for journalling each day? Most people find that twenty to thirty minutes in the evening and ten minutes in the morning is ideal. But even five uninterrupted minutes of genuine honesty will serve you better than an hour of unstructured navel-gazing.

Q: What kind of notebook should I bring? Small enough to carry comfortably, large enough to write freely. Unlined pages give more creative latitude; lined pages feel less intimidating. Avoid anything so beautiful you’re afraid to use it. This is a working tool, not a keepsake.

Q: Will journalling on the Camino help with anxiety and stress? The research is clear that expressive writing reduces psychological distress, and that walking in nature reduces cortisol. Together, and in the context of community and rest, many people find the combination genuinely transformative. It is not a clinical treatment, but it is a powerful and evidence-informed practice.

Q: What if I don’t know what to write? Start with your senses. What can you see, hear, smell, taste, feel right now? Move from the physical outward. The body is an extraordinarily reliable guide to what the mind is actually trying to process.

Conclusion: Ancient Technology for Modern Problems

There is something quietly radical about walking a path that humans have walked for a thousand years, carrying only what fits on your back, and writing down what you find when the noise finally stops.

The Camino has always been, at its heart, a journey inward disguised as a journey forward. The journal is the tool that makes the inward journey legible, that turns experience into understanding and movement into meaning.

In a world that profits from your distraction and anxiety, choosing to walk, to be still, to write, to reflect, is not escapism. It is, in the most practical sense, an act of resistance. And, as Vivienne Marsh would tell you, it is one of the best decisions a person can make.

“Not all those who wander are lost. But the ones who carry a notebook tend to find their way home considerably faster.” M Montagu

Your Invitation: Five Days That Could Change Everything

The Book Lovers’ Binge Reading & Camino de Santiago Retreats

If the world has been too loud for too long, and you are quietly, urgently ready for something different, consider five days in the southwest of France doing something magnificently, unapologetically good for yourself.

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.

The Book Lovers’ Binge Reading and Camino de Santiago Retreats combine guided walking on ancient Camino paths, shared reading and reflection, exceptional food, extraordinary landscape, and real human connection. You will walk. You will read. You will write. You will sleep deeply and wake without an alarm. The Reconnect with Nature journalling course is included. So is more fresh air than you’ve had in years.

This is not a “fix yourself” retreat. It is a find yourself one.

Take the Quiz: Are You Ready for a Retreat?

Sign up for the newsletter and discover, via the Ready for a Retreat? quiz, exactly what kind of reset your particular nervous system is asking for. It takes five minutes and is considerably more illuminating than doom-scrolling.

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.

References

1. 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.
2. Pennebaker, J. W., & Beall, S. K. (1986). Confronting a traumatic event: Toward an understanding of inhibition and disease. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 95(3), 274–281.
3. Smyth, J. M., Stone, A. A., Hurewitz, A., & Kaell, A. (1999). Effects of writing about stressful experiences on symptom reduction in patients with asthma or rheumatoid arthritis. JAMA, 281(14), 1304–1309.
4. Aspinwall, L. G., & Taylor, S. E. (1992). Modeling cognitive adaptation: A longitudinal investigation of the impact of individual differences and coping on college adjustment and performance. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 63(6), 989–1003.
5. Berman, M. G., Jonides, J., & Kaplan, S. (2008). The cognitive benefits of interacting with nature. Psychological Science, 19(12), 1207–1212.

Here is something to sit with: if you could write one sentence in a journal tonight, one honest sentence about where you actually are right now, what would it say?

You don’t have to share it with anyone. Just write it down.

“I am an experienced medical doctor – MBChB, MRCGP, NLP master pract cert, Transformational Life Coach (dip.) Life Story Coach (cert.) Stress Counselling (cert.) Med Hypnotherapy (dip.) and EAGALA (cert.) I may have an impressive number of letters after my name, and more than three decades of professional experience, but what qualifies me to excel at what I do is my intuitive understanding of my clients’ difficulties and my extensive personal experience of managing major life changes using strategies I developed over many years.” Dr M Montagu

A guide for the quietly exhausted person who has been “fine” for far too long

What this is: A thoughtful, research-informed guide to journaling in natural settings as a practical tool for nervous system regulation, emotional honesty, and self-reconnection during or after major life upheaval. It includes a storytelling section, science, common mistakes, book recommendations, and a gentle invitation to go further.

What this isn’t: Another “buy a cute notebook and light a candle” productivity post. This isn’t about aesthetic journalling for Instagram, morning pages for writers, or gratitude lists for the mildly stressed. It’s for people who have been through something real and need something real in return.

Read this if: You’ve been so busy being strong, helpful, and “fine” that you’ve lost track of what you actually feel. You’re emerging from divorce, illness, bereavement, burnout, or any other life earthquake, and you’re ready, cautiously, to start the next chapter. You suspect that your nervous system has been running the show, and you’d like your actual self back, please.

5 Key Takeaways

1. Your nervous system is not broken. Hypervigilance, people-pleasing, and emotional shutdown are intelligent adaptations, not character flaws. But they stop working for you once the crisis is over.
2. Nature provides co-regulation without conditions. Trees, birds, water, and wind offer the nervous system a sense of safety that doesn’t come with strings attached.
3. Combining movement with writing is neurologically powerful. Walking before or during journalling shifts the brain out of threat-mode and into a state where honest self-expression becomes possible.
4. External validation is a temporary fix. True, lasting safety must eventually be sourced from within. Nature journaling is one of the most accessible ways to begin building that internal anchor.
5. You don’t need to be a “journaller.” If you can write a text message or a shopping list, you can do this. No talent required. Just you, a page, and somewhere green.

Introduction: The Problem With Being Fine

Journaling in Nature: The Art of Finding Your Way Back to Yourself

There’s a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from having managed everything “effortlessly.”

You held it together through the diagnosis, the solicitors’ letters, the funeral, the redundancy, the children who needed you. You were competent and composed and, if anyone asked, “fine.” And now, now that it’s “over,” you find yourself sitting in a life that technically looks okay from the outside, feeling completely lost inside it.

Your body is tense in ways that don’t seem to have a reason anymore. You agree to things you don’t want to do. You say you’re coping a dozen times a day. You’ve almost forgotten what you actually want, what you actually feel, what you actually think when nobody needs anything from you.

You’re not broken. But something important went quiet during the crisis, and it hasn’t come back yet.

This article is about one surprisingly powerful way to bring it home.

Specifically, it’s about what happens when you take a journal outside, into nature, and let the trees, the sky, the sound of water, and a little honest writing begin to do what therapy, productivity, and sheer willpower have not quite managed: help you feel safe enough, in your own body, to tell yourself the truth again.

By the time you’ve read this, you’ll understand why nature specifically matters, how the nervous system responds to green spaces, and how to use simple written prompts outdoors to begin rebuilding the most important relationship in your life: the one with yourself.

Elize’s Story: The Woman Who Froze in the Middle of the Path

How One Afternoon in a French Forest Changed Everything Elise Thought She Knew About Herself

Elise Marchetti had not cried in fourteen months.

She had noted this fact the way you note a minor administrative curiosity, like discovering your passport expired. Mildly interesting. Probably worth addressing at some point.

She was fifty-three, a former head teacher, recently divorced after twenty-two years of marriage, and the proud owner of what she privately called “functional emotional shutdown.” She slept well. She ate sensibly. She went to the gym. She had, by any reasonable metric, handled it beautifully.

So beautifully, in fact, that her friends had stopped asking if she was okay. She seemed more than okay. She seemed sorted. This was, she understood somewhere beneath the sorted, a little bit terrifying.

She had come to the retreat in southwest France because her GP, a quietly perceptive woman, had circled something in a brochure and said, “I think this might be more useful than another round of CBT.” The words on the page had been, “For people who are ready for the next chapter but aren’t sure where to start.” Elise had folded the brochure into her bag and not looked at it again for three weeks. Then, one night at 3 am, she had booked it.

On the second morning, the group was given journals and sent outside alone for an hour.

“Write whatever comes,” they were told. “Or write nothing. But go outside. Walk first.”

Elise walked. The path wound through oak trees heavy with late summer green, and the air smelled of pine resin and, faintly, of rain that hadn’t arrived yet. Underfoot, the ground was soft and slightly uneven, the kind of walking that requires just enough attention to keep you out of your own head without demanding your full attention.

She had expected to list goals. She had brought a list of questions she thought she ought to answer. What do I want my life to look like? What are my values? What am I grateful for?

She sat on a low stone wall, opened the journal, and wrote nothing for seven minutes.

Then a chaffinch landed about two feet from her foot, looked at her with the complete indifference only birds and toddlers can convincingly pull off, and hopped away.

She wrote: I am so tired.

And then, for the first time in fourteen months, she cried.

Not dramatically. Not in a way that would have looked interesting in a film. Just quietly, steadily.

She kept writing. Not about goals. Not about what she wanted her life to look like. About the marriage, yes, but more about the years before it ended, when she had known it was going wrong and said nothing. Said less than nothing, actually. Had become so extraordinarily good at not rocking the boat that she’d essentially handed over the navigation and then wondered why she didn’t know where she was.

She wrote about how she’d learned to read her husband’s face before she said anything. About the tiny automatic calculations she performed at every dinner table: is this a good moment? Is he in the mood to talk? Will this land badly? About how she’d done the same thing at school with difficult parents, and with her own father before that.

She wrote: I have been trying to be safe by making everyone else comfortable. It has not, it turns out, made me feel very safe at all.

The chaffinch came back. She chose to interpret this as encouragement.

By the time she walked back up the path to the farmhouse, she hadn’t solved anything. Her life was still exactly as she had left it an hour ago. The divorce was still final. Her children were still grown and living in different cities. She was still, technically, in the middle of a field in France with three strangers and a journal.

But something had shifted. Some tiny, essential gear had clicked back into place.

She felt, for the first time in longer than she could pinpoint, like herself. Not the sorted, functional, managing version of herself. The actual one. The one who was tired and sad and also, it turned out, quietly furious, and also, underneath all of that, still curious about what came next.

She had not cried in fourteen months. She cried twice more that week.

Both times, she felt better afterwards.

Why Does This Actually Work? The Deeper Picture

What’s really happening when we take our pain outside?

Elise’s experience wasn’t magic, though it felt a little like it. It was neuroscience, meeting ancient wisdom, meeting an honest page.

When we go through major life upheaval, especially the kind that involves broken trust, loss, or chronic uncertainty, our nervous systems do exactly what they’re designed to do: they go on high alert. The amygdala flags danger. Cortisol floods the system. The body tightens, the breath shortens, and the brain begins prioritising survival over self-awareness.

This is what kept our ancestors alive.

The problem is that many of us stay in this state long after the immediate crisis has passed. And in that hypervigilant state, we prioritise attachment over authenticity. We fight or flee, freeze, or people-please our way through days, minimising our own needs, softening our own boundaries, rationalising away emotions that feel too big or too risky to express.

This is not a weakness. It is an extremely sophisticated, deeply ingrained strategy for staying safe in a world where connection has felt unreliable.

But it has a cost.

The cost is the slow erosion of self-trust. When we consistently override our own inner signals to manage other people’s comfort, we stop hearing those signals clearly. We lose the thread back to our own knowing. We become, functionally, strangers to ourselves.

Nature offers something different.

Research consistently shows that time in natural environments activates the parasympathetic nervous system, what we might call the “rest and digest” state, and quietens the amygdala’s threat-scanning activity. Specifically, studies have found that even twenty minutes in a natural setting measurably reduces cortisol levels and shifts brain activity away from the default mode network’s ruminative loop.

In other words, nature physiologically creates the conditions in which honesty becomes possible.

And writing in that state is different from writing from your kitchen table, where the dishes are visible and the inbox is beeping and the ambient pressure of ordinary life keeps your nervous system just brisk enough to stay managed.

Outdoors, with the sensory input of birdsong, breeze, the smell of earth, and the spatial expansiveness of sky, the body begins to release its guard. And in that release, what has been suppressed, named, unnamed, pushed down, rationalised away, begins to surface.

Not dramatically. Gently. The way it did for Elise.

How this ripples outward

Here is what is rarely discussed about this kind of inner work: it doesn’t stay inner.

When a person begins to reconnect with their authentic self, to rebuild the capacity to know what they feel, say what they mean, and tolerate uncertainty without immediately seeking external reassurance, they change the quality of every relationship around them.

Not because they become easier to live with. Sometimes the opposite, at least initially. But because they become real. And real people invite realness in return.

Elise, six months after her retreat, told her daughter something she had never told her before: that she had stayed in her marriage too long because she was afraid of being alone, and that she wanted her daughter to know that fear was not wisdom, and she hoped she would not repeat her mother’s mistake.

The conversation they hadn’t been able to have for years, they had. Because one woman sat on a wall in a French forest and wrote four honest words in a journal.

Communities change one honest conversation at a time. One person who stops performing fine and starts being real, at a time.

5 Mistakes to Avoid When Journalling in Nature

1. Going with an agenda. The temptation to bring a list of “journalling prompts you should answer” is understandable, but it can keep you in problem-solving mode rather than discovery mode. One open question is better than ten structured ones. Try: What am I not saying? or What does my body know that my mind is avoiding?

2. Choosing convenience over nature. Sitting in your backyard with the neighbour’s lawnmower audible is not the same as a quiet forest path. You don’t need to travel to the Pyrenees (though it helps). But genuinely seek out an environment where the sensory input is predominantly natural. Your nervous system knows the difference.

3. Writing to an imaginary audience. This is the sneaky one. We write as if someone will read it, and so we write the version of ourselves we can defend. Notice if your entries sound like a reasonable person explaining their reasonable feelings. Then try again, without the imaginary audience.

4. Stopping when it gets uncomfortable. The moment you want to close the journal and check your phone is usually the moment something real is about to arrive. You don’t have to go further than feels safe. But pause, breathe, look up at the sky or the water, and give it thirty more seconds before you decide.

5. Doing it once and deciding it didn’t work. A single session may crack something open (it did for Elise). Or it may feel awkward and unproductive. Either is fine. This is a practice, not a procedure. Give it a week before you evaluate. Your nervous system has been in protective mode for months or years. It doesn’t fully exhale in one afternoon.

A Short Intention-Setting Exercise: Before You Write

This takes five minutes. Do it standing outside, before you open your journal.

1. Place both feet flat on the ground. Feel the earth or grass or stone beneath you. Really feel it.
2. Take three slow breaths. In through the nose, out through the mouth. Let the exhale be longer than the inhale.
3. Look up. At sky, at treetops, at whatever is above you. Let your gaze soften.
4. Say, quietly or to yourself: “I am not here to perform or to fix or to explain. I am here to listen to myself.”
5. Open your journal to a blank page. Write the date, and then write the first true thing that comes, however small.

That’s it. That’s the whole exercise.

Further Reading

What should you read alongside your journal?

1. The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk A foundational text for understanding how trauma and chronic stress are stored not just in the mind but in the body. Van der Kolk’s research explains, in clear and human terms, why cognitive insight alone is often not enough, and why embodied practices (including movement and time in nature) are essential for healing. Essential for anyone who has found that “just thinking about it differently” hasn’t quite worked.

2. Last Child in the Woods by Richard Louv Though ostensibly about children and nature-deficit disorder, Louv’s landmark work contains profound insight into what disconnection from natural environments costs us at any age, and why re-establishing that connection is urgent rather than optional. Quietly radical.

3. The Wild Edge of Sorrow by Francis Weller A beautifully written exploration of grief and the gates we must pass through to process loss fully. Weller draws on indigenous wisdom, Jungian psychology, and poetic depth to argue that grief is not a problem to solve but a passage to honour. Particularly relevant if you are navigating loss of any kind, including the loss of a life you expected to have.

4. Writing to Heal by James W. Pennebaker Pennebaker is the psychologist whose decades of research established, empirically, that expressive writing has measurable physical and psychological health benefits. This book is practical, evidence-based, and unintimidating. It answers the question “but does journalling actually work?” with a resounding and well-cited yes.

5. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard Not a self-help book. Better than that. Dillard’s Pulitzer-winning account of a year spent observing nature in Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains is a masterclass in the art of deep noticing, and deep noticing is exactly what nature journalling, at its finest, asks of us. Read this and you will never walk past a river the same way again.

PS: If you’re looking for a gentle, daily practice to support your own transition, my book Embracing Change, in 10 Minutes a Day offers exactly that: short, practical exercises designed for people in the middle of major life change, not people who have it all figured out.

If you are currently facing a major life transition or any other dramatic change in your circumstances, and you have no idea how you are going to cope, the good news is that the strategy presented in this book can help you, step by step, to improve your ability to handle the stress caused by change, even if you feel entirely powerless at the moment.

Going Deeper: The Purpose Pivot Protocol

The storytelling circle that Elise was part of at the retreat was working through my Purpose Pivot Protocol online course, a structured process for people at life’s crossroads who need more than inspiration, they need a map. The course combines nervous system education, values clarification, narrative reframing, and practical strategies for designing the next chapter of your life with intention. If a week in France isn’t possible right now, the Protocol is a powerful place to start.

The Purpose Pivot Protocol – drawing inspiration from the Camino de Santiago, this transformative course guides you through a proven framework to recalibrate your authentic purpose and create a meaningful and fulfilling next act. Get immediate access

5 FAQs: What You Need To Know

Honest answers to the questions you might feel slightly embarrassed to ask

Q: I’m not a “writer.” Will journalling in nature still work for me? Yes. Journalling as a healing practice has nothing to do with writing ability. You’re not being assessed. No one will read it. If you can write “I don’t know where to begin,” you have, in fact, begun. The nervous system doesn’t care about your vocabulary. It responds to honesty.

Q: How long do I need to be outside for this to make a difference? Research suggests that even twenty to thirty minutes in a natural environment produces measurable physiological changes. That said, the quality of your presence matters more than the clock. Half an hour of genuine attention, feet on the ground, eyes off the screen, is worth more than two hours of distracted nature-adjacent sitting.

Q: What if I start writing and can’t stop, or it gets too overwhelming? This is a real possibility, and it’s worth knowing in advance: you are in charge of the pace. If something difficult surfaces, you can write “I need to stop here” and stop. You can look up. You can breathe. You can walk. Nature journalling is not an excavation exercise designed to unearth everything at once. It’s a conversation with yourself, and like any good conversation, you can change the subject when you need to.

Q: My life is genuinely chaotic right now. Is this the right time? Possibly the best time. When everything external is in flux, developing an internal anchor, a practice that helps you hear your own signal through all the noise, is particularly valuable. You don’t need calm circumstances to begin. You need five minutes, somewhere green, and a pen.

Q: How is this different from just going for a walk? A walk is wonderful. A walk is also relatively easy to do while staying completely inside your own head, replaying conversations, planning ahead, managing mentally. Writing interrupts that loop. It asks you to slow down, to translate experience into language, and that translation process is where self-awareness lives. The combination of physical movement and written reflection is distinctly more powerful than either alone.

Conclusion

You did what you needed to do to get through. You managed. You adapted. You sourced your safety from wherever you could find it, from being indispensable, from being agreeable, from making sure no one around you felt uncomfortable, and it worked, after a fashion, for as long as it needed to.

But you’re here now. Past the acute crisis. Standing at the edge of something new, and wondering, perhaps, why you don’t feel relieved.

The safety you were looking for was never out there to begin with. Not really. It was always supposed to live in here, in your own body, your own knowing, your own capacity to trust your own experience. Life interrupted that capacity. Now is when you begin to rebuild it.

“The next chapter doesn’t begin when everything finally feels safe. It begins the moment you decide that your own truth is worth more than everyone else’s comfort.” , Dr Margaretha Montagu

A Gentle Invitation: An Esprit Meraki Camino de Santiago Retreat

Perhaps you’re ready for something more than an afternoon in the park.

Imagine walking ancient pilgrim paths through the extraordinary landscape of southwest France, the golden light, the quiet vineyards, the long views that put everything, somehow, in proportion. Every evening, a storytelling circle with other thoughtful, capable people who have also been through something real, and who are also, like you, ready for what comes next.

This retreat is not a walking holiday with some workshops attached. It’s a structured, supported, carefully held space. People like Elise. People like you. You’ll walk, write, reflect, and reconnect, with yourself, with others, and with the quiet inner knowing that’s been waiting patiently underneath all the “fine.”

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.

And Finally: A Question Worth Sitting With

What is one thing your body has been trying to tell you that your mind has been very politely ignoring?

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

Author Bio: Dr Margaretha Montagu – described as a “game changer”, “gifted healer”, “guiding light” and “life-enriching author” – is an experienced medical doctor, a certified NLP practitioner, a medical hypnotherapist, an equine-assisted psychotherapist (EAGALAcertified) and a transformational retreat leader who guides her clients through life transitions – virtually, or with the assistance of her Friesian and Falabella horses, at their home in the southwest of France.

References

1. 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.
2. Pennebaker, J. W., & Beall, S. K. (1986). Confronting a traumatic event: Toward an understanding of inhibition and disease. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 95(3), 274–281.
3. Hunter, M. R., Gillespie, B. W., & Chen, S. Y.-P. (2019). Urban nature experiences reduce stress in the context of daily life based on salivary biomarkers. Frontiers in Psychology, 10, 722.
4. Smyth, J. M., Johnson, J. A., Auer, B. J., Lehman, E., Talamo, G., & Sklar, N. J. (2018). Online positive affect journaling in the improvement of mental distress and well-being in general medical patients with elevated anxiety symptoms: A preliminary randomised controlled trial. JMIR Mental Health, 5(4), e11290.
5. Bratman, G. N., Anderson, C. B., Berman, M. G., Cochran, B., de Vries, S., Flanders, J., Folke, C., Frumkin, H., Gross, J. J., Hartig, T., Kahn, P. H., Jr., Kuo, M., Lawler, J. J., Levin, P. S., Lindahl, T., Meyer-Lindenberg, A., Mitchell, R., Ouyang, Z., Roe, J., Scarlett, L., … Daily, G. C. (2019). Nature and mental health: An ecosystem service perspective. Science Advances, 5(7), eaax0903.