Margaretha Montagu - Dr Margaretha Montagu

19 July 202612 July 2026

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

Crossroads Conversations

When I first started hosting Camino de Santiago walking retreats in rural Gascony, the French Tuscany, I assumed I would be the one doing most of the teaching.

I couldn’t have been more wrong.

Over the years, dozens of people have arrived at my farmhouse carrying backpacks, walking boots, and lives that had gradually become much too heavy. Some were still working. Some had retired. Some were rebuilding after loss, illness or divorce. Others simply couldn’t explain why they felt so restless.

They thought they had come to walk a couple of sections of the Camino.

In the end, they became MY teachers. The CrossRoads Conversations blog post series explores what my guests have taught me over the last twenty-odd years.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The difference isn’t the path beneath their boots.

It’s what the path makes possible.

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

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

What now?

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

The Camino removes many of those distractions.

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

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

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

Walking the Camino on your own provides exactly that.

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

Someone realises they are more tired than they dare admit.

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

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

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

Not miraculous interventions.

Moments of clarity.

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

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

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

What there is, however, is time.

Time to breathe.

Time to think.

Time to notice.

Time to intentionally imagine a different future.

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

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

Perhaps you’re standing at a crossroads yourself.

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

You can email me at MargarethaMontagu@gmail.com.

5-day/4-night “Press Pause” Nervous System Regulation Retreat – If your soul is craving fresh air, meaningful movement, and a chance to reconnect with nature and connect with horses, join me on a powerful, natural reboot for your body, mind, and spirit. Same content as the 3-day retreat, spread over 5 days. And an extra day of walking. No extreme fitness requirements. No forced bonding. No pressure to have a breakthrough. For one or two guests travelling together.

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

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

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“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

17 July 20268 August 2026

Blindsided: The Lies Society Tells Us About Success

I don’t think success is the problem.

I think our definition of success is.

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

Get good grades.

Find a respectable job.

Earn enough to buy a house.

Buy a bigger house.

Retire comfortably.

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

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

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

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

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

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

This may be the most damaging lie of all.

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

Then life intervenes.

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

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

The second lie is that busier means better.

We’ve somehow turned exhaustion into a competitive sport.

“How are you?”

“Terribly busy.”

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

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

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

It doesn’t.

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

Both of those dreams are equally worthy.

Our mistake is believing only the first one deserves applause.

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

School.

Career.

Marriage.

Promotion.

Retirement.

Neat.

Predictable.

Orderly.

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

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

Perhaps the detours weren’t detours.

Perhaps they were part of the path.

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

Sometimes you are, for a while.

Then the horizon quietly moves.

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

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

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

Are you surrounded by people you love?

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

Do you laugh often? Out loud?

Do you notice the seasons changing?

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

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

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

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

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

16 July 20268 August 2026

Your Thoughts won’t untangle themselves while you’re sitting in a Chair

How Walking Helps Untangle Thoughts That Talking Never Did

Crossroads Conversations

When I first started hosting Camino de Santiago walking retreats in rural Gascony, the French Tuscany, I assumed I would be the one doing most of the teaching.

I couldn’t have been more wrong.

They thought they had come to walk a couple of sections of the Camino.

In the end, they became MY teachers. The CrossRoads Conversations blog post series explores what my guests have taught me over the last twenty-odd years.

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

Not advice.

Not answers.

Not someone to tell them what they should do next.

Just time out.

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

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

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

Sometimes you need to move to make that happen.

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

Should I retire?

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

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

Is it too late to start over?

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

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

Solving some of our problems takes time.

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

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

That is deliberate.

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

To have a conversation with themselves.

At first, many people find this uncomfortable.

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

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

Walking in nature creates a different kind of connection.

There is a rhythm to it.

Left foot.

Right foot.

Breathe.

Be present.

Repeat.

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

It reminds me of shaking a snow globe.

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

The Camino does something similar.

It doesn’t magically provide answers.

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

But they do provide direction.

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

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

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

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

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

These moments are rarely dramatic.

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

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

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

The Camino has been teaching people this for centuries.

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

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

You can email me at MargarethaMontagu@gmail.com.

15 July 20267 July 2026

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

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

I’m so fed up with that.

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

“I just need to find myself.”

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

Where exactly are we supposed to have left ourselves?

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

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

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

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

At first glance, that sounds perfectly sensible.

Until you stop to think about it.

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

I hope not.

Life changes us.

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

At least, that’s the idea.

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

We haven’t lost it at all.

We’re simply outgrowing it.

Think about children for a moment.

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

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

We assume something has gone wrong.

What if something has gone right?

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

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

But, “Who am I evolving into now?”

That question opens entirely different possibilities.

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

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

I have some reassuring news.

It doesn’t.

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

What a waste!

Because the difference isn’t age.

It is, amongst other things, curiosity.

Curiosity keeps us open to growth.

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

“I’m an accountant.”

“I’m a doctor.”

“I’m a parent.”

“I’m retired.”

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

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

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

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

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

That version of you has already done their job.

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

Give yourself permission to evolve.

Read widely.

Walk often.

Spend time in nature.

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

After all, answers rarely arrive when we chase them.

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

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

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.

14 July 202614 July 2026

Family Secrets and The Letter That Was Never Read

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

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

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

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

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

4 June, 1943

Henri —

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

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

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

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

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

— C.

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

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

She found Henri.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Family Secrets July 2026 © MargarethaMontagu

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

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

14 July 202612 July 2026

Office Drama in Four Acts

There’s a particular kind of tired that has nothing to do with sleep. It’s the tiredness that comes from lugging something around — a decision, a conversation you haven’t had yet, a truth you’re not sure is yours to tell — folded up small enough to fit in a pocket, but never quite small enough to forget it’s there. A weight that doesn’t show up on any scale, that follows you from the school run to the meeting room to the quiet kitchen at 2 a.m., where it lies there quietly reminding you it hasn’t gone anywhere.

Workplace stress rarely announces itself as a crisis. It arrives, instead, as a hundred small postponements — I’ll deal with it tomorrow, I’ll say something next week — each one perfectly reasonable on its own, until one day you look up and realise you’ve been carrying the same unfinished things for months. Priya’s letter is a bit dramatic, granted (most of us aren’t quietly building a case against corporate fraud over our morning coffee). But the shape of her week — the rehearsing, the almost-saying, the letting Thursday’s version of the problem get heavier than Monday’s — will feel uncomfortably familiar to anyone who’s ever contemplated a difficult conversation, working up the nerve to dive in.

The letter lived in the zip pocket of Priya’s blazer, folded into eighths, four pages of 12-point Calibri titled Re: Falsification of Q3 Safety Inspection Reports — and by Wednesday it had started to feel less like paper and more like something with a pulse.

She knew exactly what was in it. She’d written it. Cross-referenced it, in fact, against eleven pressure-test logs that Gary had signed off as nominal when the raw sensor data — the data nobody but Priya seemed to have actually opened — put three of those valves well past the point where “nominal” stopped being a word you were legally allowed to use. She’d checked it twice. She’d checked it a third time at eleven p.m. on a Tuesday, alone in the office, telling herself she was staying late for the Henderson deck, which was a lie so thin even the vending machine seemed to see through it.

What she hadn’t done was hand it to anyone.

Wednesday, she made it as far as his doorway.

“Got a sec?” she said, one hand resting flat against the zipper, as if she could keep the letter still by force of will alone.

Gary looked up, radiating the harried cheer of a man who had never once suspected he might deserve consequences. “For you? Always. Unless it’s Henderson, in which case, no, never, that account is cursed, and I am but a humble mortal.”

“Not Henderson.”

“Then sit, sit.”

She sat. She didn’t unzip the pocket. Instead, she asked, with the studied casualness of someone absolutely not building a case, how the March inspections had gone — whether the valve numbers had come back clean, whether corporate had flagged anything.

“Basically fine,” Gary said, already reaching for his phone, already half a sentence into something else. “Give or take. You know how it is.”

She did not know how it was. She knew, precisely, in numbers, how it was not fine — and for one long second she almost said so, mouth half-open around the shape of eleven valves, Gary — when his phone lit up with a name that made him swivel his chair away from her, voice dropping into the register men use for calls they don’t want overheard in a glass office. Corporate’s asking about March again, he murmured. No — no, tell them the file’s still being finalised.

Priya sat very still. The letter, against her ribs, suddenly felt less like a document and more like evidence someone might come looking for.

Thursday, she didn’t go near his office. She didn’t need to. At 4:50, walking past the print room with a coffee she didn’t remember pouring, she saw Gary’s assistant leaving with a banker’s box, and heard, through the half-open door, the particular hush of two people trying to sound unbothered on a phone call about retention policy and what exactly gets archived versus what gets, you know, cleaned up.

She stopped walking. She did not go in for a refill.

Back at her desk, she opened her email and found, sitting quietly in her Sent folder from three weeks ago, the original message where she’d flagged the sensor discrepancy to Gary directly, cc’ing no one, because at the time she’d still believed in giving people the chance to fix their own mistakes. Gary had never replied. Now she understood why: he hadn’t needed to. He’d simply started making the problem disappear one archived file at a time, and if she waited even one more day, there might be nothing left to attach her letter to. No inspection logs. No sensor data. Nothing but her word against a soufflé that had, morally speaking, collapsed weeks ago.

The letter was no longer a warning. It was a deadline.

Friday morning, she wore the blazer again, and this time, when she zipped the pocket shut she did it the way you’d holster something.

She didn’t stop at Gary’s office. She walked straight past the glass wall — he looked up, halfway to a wave, and something in her face made the wave die before it finished — and kept going, toward the elevator, toward the fourteenth floor, toward Legal, where a woman named Denise she’d never spoken to was about to become, in the space of one conversation, the only person standing between eleven faulty valves and whatever came next.

The elevator doors opened. Behind her, distantly, she heard Gary’s door open too — heard him say her name once, not unkindly, almost like a question — and she did not turn around.

Some letters you deliver. This one, she realised, stepping inside and letting the doors close between them, she’d been carrying so someone could finally stop him before there was nothing left to prove he needed stopping.

The doors sealed shut. The letter, folded in eighths, sat exactly where it had all week — except now, for the first time, it felt lighter.

I can’t promise a walk through the French countryside will hand you the courage Priya found in that elevator. But I can tell you that most of what we carry seems to weigh a good deal less by the second or third day of putting one foot in front of the other, with nothing to do but walk, and no one expecting anything from you except to show up for dinner.

If there’s something you’ve been folding into eighths and carrying around for longer than you’d like to admit, you’re always welcome to come and walk it out. Drop me an email at MargarethaMontagu@gmail.com— I’d love to hear from you.

13 July 20267 July 2026

Why Some of Your Best Thinking Happens While You’re Walking

Have you ever noticed that some problems shrink once you start walking?

The problem itself hasn’t changed. The difficult conversation still needs to happen. The diagnosis hasn’t disappeared. Your bank account hasn’t magically recovered. Yet somewhere between the first few hundred metres and the next bend in the path, your mind begins to loosen its grip.

You breathe a little more easily.

You stop rehearsing imaginary arguments.

You notice the birdsong, the breeze, the scent of wildflowers or freshly cut hay.

Without quite knowing how, you begin to think clearly.

I’ve always found that fascinating.

With my medical background, I do appreciate the science. Walking increases blood flow to the brain, reduces stress hormones and encourages the release of chemicals that improve mood and cognitive function. It’s hardly surprising that we often think more clearly after a walk than after another hour spent worrying in the same chair.

But I suspect there’s something else going on too.

Walking changes our perspective in more ways than one.

When we’re anxious, our world closes in on us. Our attention narrows until all we can see is the problem directly in front of us. We go round and round the same thoughts like a hamster on a wheel, hoping that one more lap will somehow produce a different answer.

It rarely does.

Walking interrupts that pattern.

The rhythm of placing one foot in front of the other has a calming effect that sitting still often doesn’t. The body is moving forwards, and somehow the mind begins to believe that moving forwards is possible too.

Perhaps that’s why walking has been part of the human story for so long.

Pilgrims have walked in search of meaning.

Philosophers have walked while thinking.

Poets have walked while writing.

Countless ordinary people have gone for “a walk to clear my head” without ever reading a scientific paper explaining why it works.

Sometimes instinct gets there before research does.

One of the things I’ve observed over the years is that answers rarely arrive when we chase them. They tend to appear when we create enough space for them to catch up with us.

That’s why I encourage people not to fill every walk with podcasts, phone calls or endless scrolling. There is nothing wrong with those things in moderation, but they don’t leave much room for your own thoughts to emerge.

Silence can feel surprisingly uncomfortable at first.

Then something changes.

The mental noise begins to settle, rather like muddy water left undisturbed. The questions that seemed impossibly tangled became a little clearer. Not always because you’ve found the answer, but because you’ve finally found the right question.

I see this time and again. In my Camino de Santiago walking retreat guests and in myself.

Someone arrives convinced they need to make a huge decision immediately. They spend a couple of days walking quietly through fields, forests and sleepy villages, and by the end of the week, they’re asking completely different questions.

Their circumstances haven’t necessarily changed.

They have.

I think that’s because walking reminds us of something we often forget during difficult times.

Life is lived one step at a time.

Not twenty miles at a time.

Not five years at a time.

One step.

When we’re facing a life quake, a change, challenge or crisis, it’s tempting to believe we must have the whole plan ready before we can begin. We want certainty before we take action. Unfortunately, life is rather stingy with certainty.

What it usually offers instead is the next step.

And then the one after that.

Looking back, most of the important changes in my own life didn’t begin with a grand master plan. They began with a conversation, an unexpected opportunity, a quiet realisation or quite literally a long, slow walk.

Only in hindsight did the path make sense.

Perhaps that’s the greatest lesson walking has to teach us.

You don’t need to see the entire journey before you take the first step.

You simply need the courage to trust that the path will reveal itself as you keep moving.

After all, every destination, no matter how extraordinary, begins in exactly the same way.

With one foot in front of the other.

12 July 202612 July 2026

Nature Doesn’t Solve Our Problems. It Changes Our Perspective.

CrossRoads Conversations

When I first started hosting Camino de Santiago walking retreats in rural Gascony, the French Tuscany, I assumed I would be the one doing most of the teaching.

I couldn’t have been more wrong.

They thought they had come to walk a couple of sections of the Camino.

In the end, they became MY teachers. The CrossRoads Conversations blog post series explores what my guests have taught me over the last twenty-odd years.

It would make wonderful marketing if I could tell you that spending two days walking the Camino de Santiago will solve all your problems.

Unfortunately, it won’t.

You may still have a difficult boss, a challenging marriage, an uncertain retirement, grown-up children who insist on making their own questionable decisions, and a tax return waiting for you when you get home. The Camino, for all its many gifts, has yet to develop a talent for dealing with bureaucracy.

What it does, however, is something rather more subtle.

It changes how we see our problems.

Over the years, I’ve hosted dozens of people at my little farmhouse in southwest France. They come from all walks of life, although many have one thing in common: they have reached a point where life feels heavier than it used to. Some are standing at a crossroads. Others have recently lost someone they love, are adjusting to retirement, recovering from illness, or simply wondering when life became so relentlessly complicated.

And then they spend two or three days walking sections of the Camino de Santiago along the historic Le Puy route.

Alone.

People are often surprised when I tell them that I don’t walk with my guests. Surely, they ask, wouldn’t it be more supportive if I accompanied them?

Perhaps.

But over the years, I’ve discovered that people don’t usually need someone beside them telling them where to put their feet.

The red-and-white arrows do a perfectly good job of that.

What people often need is the freedom to notice their thoughts.

One of the unexpected things I’ve learned is that nature has an extraordinary way of restoring perspective.

Not because it whispers the answers.

Not because trees possess secret therapeutic powers.

And certainly not because vineyards spend their evenings discussing existential philosophy.

It happens because nature gently reminds us that we are part of something much bigger than the small, noisy world we’ve built around ourselves.

On the Camino, life becomes beautifully simple.

You walk.

You breathe.

You notice.

The warm scent of pine drifts through the air. Swallows skim low over fields of ripening wheat. Cicadas provide the soundtrack on hot summer afternoons. In autumn, the vineyards glow gold and crimson beneath impossibly wide Gascon skies. Even the silence has texture.

Without really trying, your attention shifts.

Yesterday, you were replaying an awkward conversation for the seventeenth time.

Today, you’re wondering how many people have walked this same path before you.

Yesterday your inbox felt like a national emergency.

Today, you’re watching a line of ants carrying crumbs many times their own size and thinking they seem remarkably organised.

Nature has an amusing way of exposing our exaggerated sense of urgency.

It quietly reminds us that the seasons continue regardless of whether we’ve answered every email.

The vines don’t panic because it’s already Tuesday.

The oak trees don’t compare themselves to the walnut trees.

The sunflowers don’t spend their mornings worrying whether they’re blooming too early in the season.

Only we humans seem to have perfected the art of exhausting ourselves by measuring our worth according to how busy we are.

I’ve noticed something else over the years.

Guests rarely return from a day’s walking announcing that they’ve solved every problem in their lives.

What they do say is remarkably consistent.

“I can see things more clearly.”

“I think I know what I need to do.”

“It doesn’t feel quite so overwhelming anymore.”

The problems haven’t disappeared.

Their perspective has changed.

And changing your perspective is a remarkably empowering activity.

It offers enough distance from everyday life for us to see patterns that were invisible when we were caught up in them.

Perhaps that’s why I never promise my guests that the Camino will change their lives.

Instead, I tell them something much simpler.

Walk.

Pay attention.

See what happens.

Because while nature may not solve our problems for us, it has an extraordinary gift for helping us remember that we are usually stronger, wiser and more resourceful than we believed when we first laced up our walking boots.

And sometimes, that change in perspective is all we need.

Could you do with seeing life from a different perspective?

If you think you—or someone you care about—might benefit from stepping away from the noise of everyday life and spending a few days walking the Camino de Santiago through the peaceful countryside of southwest France, I’d love to tell you more about my small-group Camino de Santiago walking retreats.

Sometimes the greatest change begins not with finding new answers, but with looking at old questions from a different perspective.

You can email me at MargarethaMontagu@gmail.com.

11 July 20268 August 2026

Crossroads Conversations: Why So Many Retreat Guests Leave With Less

When I first started hosting Camino de Santiago walking retreats in rural Gascony, the French Tuscany, I assumed I would be the one doing most of the teaching.

I couldn’t have been more wrong.

They thought they had come to walk a couple of sections of the Camino.

In the end, they became MY teachers. The CrossRoads Conversations blog post series explores what my guests have taught me over the last twenty-odd years.

Why So Many Guests Leave With Less

One of the first things I notice when guests arrive at my little farmhouse in the Gers isn’t their smiling faces. It’s their luggage.

Some people pull up with suitcases that suggest they’re headed to the North Pole for six months, not to a five-day retreat in the sun-warmed southwest of France. A bag for clothes. A bag for shoes. A bag for “just in case.” Every year, I watch another wheel snag on the gravel, and another guest laughs and says, “I think I brought a bit too much, maybe?”

I know that feeling. Most of us do. We pack for sunshine and for rain, for elegant dinners and impromptu barbecues, for books we’ll never crack open and snacks we’ll never eat. Travelling light, it turns out, does not come naturally to the human species.

Until we decide to walk the Camino.

During my Camino de Santiago walking retreats, guests spend two or three days on foot along the historic Le Puy route. The walks are unguided — deliberately so. I’ve come to believe that people find their way through life more easily when they’re trusted to find their own way along a path, rather than being herded down it.

Before setting off, I nudge them gently: take only what you truly need. Water. A picnic. A waterproof, if the sky looks moody. Maybe a notebook. That’s more or less it.

And somewhere between those first uncertain steps and the end of the day’s walking, something quietly shifts. Carrying a lighter backpack has a funny way of reminding you that other things in life have gotten unnecessarily heavy, too.

Not everyone who arrives here is grieving or burnt out. Some are wondering what comes after retirement. Some, despite having hit a successful stride in their careers, still feel oddly restless. Some have recently lost someone dear. Others just have that nagging sense that life has become far more complicated than it needs to be.

After hundreds of crossroads conversations, I’ve noticed a pattern: the heaviest things people carry are seldom visible.

Expectations. Old disappointments. The pressure to keep achieving. Guilt. Regret. Responsibilities that quietly stopped belonging to them years ago. The belief that they need every answer before they’re allowed to take the next step.

Unlike an overstuffed suitcase, none of that gets left behind in the bedroom. It comes along for the whole walk.

The Camino has a gentle way of bringing this into focus. It doesn’t solve anything, and it certainly doesn’t perform miracles. What it does is make space — enough space for people to finally notice what they’ve been hauling around without ever questioning it.

I never set out to host retreats for people standing at life’s crossroads. And yet, somewhere along the way, I realised that’s precisely who kept showing up on my doorstep. Doctors, teachers, business owners, engineers, artists, retirees, parents, grandparents. Different stories, remarkably similar undertone: I can’t keep going on like this.

The Camino rarely answers that outright. Instead, it asks a quieter question:

What are you still lugging around that you should be leaving behind?

Not your responsibilities, obviously. Not the people you love. But perhaps the unrealistic expectations. The relentless busyness. The need to prove yourself, again and again. The habit of dragging yesterday into tomorrow.

If there’s one thing dozens of guests have taught me, it’s this: people usually arrive believing they need to add something to their lives. More confidence. More certainty. More purpose. More answers.

Far more often, they leave having let go of something instead.

A few unnecessary burdens stay behind on the Camino. Like the stone many people bring from home to leave on the path.

If you (or someone you know) are carrying more emotional baggage than you’d like to admit — and you suspect a few days on the Camino de Santiago might help you set some of it down — email me at MargarethaMontagu@gmail.com

10 July 20267 July 2026

Stop Asking “What Should I Do?” Start Asking “Why Should I Do It?

Whenever people find themselves at a crossroads, they almost always ask the same question.

“What should I do?”

Should I leave my job?

Should I move house?

Should I retire?

Should I end the relationship?

Should I start a business?

Should I walk the Camino?

They’re perfectly reasonable questions, and I’ve asked many of them myself over the years. The trouble is, they often assume that the answer lies somewhere outside us, waiting to be discovered like a missing sock behind the washing machine (how did it even get there?)

Life, inconveniently, is rarely that obliging.

When people come to me during a major life transition, they often hope I’ll tell them what to do next. After all, I’m a doctor. Surely I must have a diagnosis, a treatment plan and perhaps a prescription to make the whole business a little less complicated. When they say “complicated”, most actually mean “terrifying.”

I’m afraid life doesn’t work like that. Mine certainly doesn’t.

In medicine, the correct diagnosis usually comes before the treatment. If someone has a pain in their chest, we don’t immediately prescribe medication and hope for the best. We first figure out what is causing the pain.

Oddly enough, we often do the exact opposite when it comes to life’s bigger questions. We rush towards decisions before we understand what is causing the pain.

No wonder so many people find themselves climbing ladders that are leaning against the wrong wall.

I suspect that is why major life crises can feel so unsettling. They don’t just force us to make decisions; they force us to question the assumptions that shaped the decisions we’ve already made.

Perhaps the better question isn’t, “What should I do?”

Perhaps it’s, “What really matters to me?”

The answers aren’t the same.

Imagine two people who both decide to leave demanding careers.

From the outside, they’ve made the same decision.

One leaves because they’re running away from stress. Six months later, they discover that stress has an irritating habit of following them wherever they go.

The other leaves because they have become clear about the kind of life they want to live. They value time with family, meaningful work, good health and mornings that don’t begin with checking emails before breakfast.

Their decision looks identical.

Their motivation couldn’t be more different.

Purpose has a remarkable way of simplifying complicated decisions. It doesn’t necessarily make them easy, but it gives them direction.

When we know what truly matters, saying “yes” becomes simpler because we’re also prepared to say “no”.

Without that clarity, every opportunity looks equally tempting. Every path seems equally uncertain. We spend months comparing options when the real issue isn’t choosing between them. It’s that we haven’t decided what sort of life we’re trying to create in the first place.

I’ve seen this happen on countless occasions.

People arrive feeling desperate for answers, convinced that changing jobs, moving house or booking a one-way ticket to somewhere with better weather will solve everything. Sometimes those changes are exactly what’s needed.

Sometimes they aren’t.

More often than not, what changes first is not their postcode but their perspective.

Once people reconnect with what gives their life meaning, the practical decisions begin to fall into place. Not because life suddenly becomes simple, but because they finally have a compass.

I’ve always preferred a compass to a map.

A map tells you exactly where to go, but it only works if someone else has already walked the route. A compass is different. It doesn’t tell you every twist and turn. It simply helps you keep moving in the right direction, even when the path disappears from view.

Purpose works in much the same way.

It won’t spare you from uncertainty. It won’t eliminate difficult choices or guarantee that every decision will be the right one. What it will do is help you navigate those moments with greater confidence because your choices are anchored in something more solid than convenience.

So, if you’re standing at one of life’s many crossroads, wondering what to do next, resist the temptation to rush towards the nearest answer.

Instead, pour yourself a cup of tea, take the dog for a walk, sit beneath a tree or spend an afternoon somewhere quiet. Then ask yourself a different question.

Not, “What should I do?”

But, “What kind of life do I want to wake up to each morning?”

The answer may not arrive immediately.

But when it does, you’ll probably find that the next steps are clear.