Dr Margaretha Montagu – described as a “game changer”, “gifted healer”, “guiding light” and “life-enriching author” – is a certified transformational retreat leader who guides her clients towards their most meaningful and fulfilling lives, particularly when navigating life transitions – virtually, or with the assistance of her Friesian Horses, at their home in the southwest of France.
How a Long Walk Can Short-Circuit Your Existential Crisis
I’ve been wondering about two things.
Firstly, why nearly all of my Camino de Santiago walking retreats guests, often weary from the demands of modern life when they arrive, within just two or three days of treading this ancient path, experience what I call “life-changing incidents and insights.” Secondly, why do they come back again and again to walk the same sections of the Camino, here in the sun-blessed southwest of France?
Why does this specific path act as such a potent catalyst for change? Is it merely the fresh air and stunning scenery? I think, maybe, it’s due to a hair-raising cocktail of pattern disruption, neurological recalibration, and a psychological state known as liminality. It’s not just a walk; it’s a physical, psychological and spiritual reset button, served with a side of unexpected camaraderie and, if you’re lucky, a fresh and flaking butter-drenched croissant.
You Remove Yourself From Your Own Story, because Sometimes, All You Need is a New Path (and a Good Pair of Socks)
Most of us spend our lives as unreliable narrators of our own stories. The same worries, the same misunderstandings, the same people whose opinions we care too much about — they form a kind of echo chamber that we mistake for reality.
The moment you step onto the Camino, you’re out of that echo chamber. Your usual props are gone. You’re in a foreign country, you don’t speak the language particularly well, or at all, your phone has no service, and the only thing on your agenda is to put one foot in front of the other and secure a bed at the end of the day’s walk.
Our modern lives are often lived on autopilot. We wake up, check our phones, commute, work, scroll, sleep, repeat. Our brains are constantly engaged in a relentless barrage of micro-decisions and digital distractions, leaving little room for genuine introspection.
The Camino, even in short bursts, offers a radical, almost jarring, disruption to this pattern. Suddenly, the urgent emails, the incessant notifications, the endless to-do lists—they all fade into the background. Your KPIs (key performance indicators) for the day become delightfully simple: follow the arrows, find water and somewhere to have a wild wee, and get yourself to the next charming village. This forced simplicity is a precious gift. When the brain is liberated from the relentless cognitive (over)load of daily life, it finally has the time, the glorious, unburdened bandwidth, to wander, to reflect, and to process information on a much deeper level.
Distance — literal, physical distance — is one of the oldest tools we have for gaining perspective. It’s why we “need space” in relationships, why therapists ask you to imagine watching your life from the outside, why the best decisions are rarely made in the room where the problem lives.
This is precisely when those “insights” begin to bubble to the surface.
So you might find yourself grappling with a profound existential question about your life’s purpose, only to realise the most pressing decision of the moment is whether to take the scenic route or the slightly shorter, muddier path. Or perhaps a deep spiritual revelation will strike you while you’re trying to decipher the subtle differences between two types of local cheese. These moments, where the mundane meets the magnificent, are the heart of the Camino’s charm. It’s a gentle reminder that sometimes, clarity arrives not in grand pronouncements, but in the quiet spaces between steps.
The Camino Effect: Why Your Brain Loves Long Walks (Even When Your Knees Don’t)
When you engage in physical activity, especially sustained walking, your body produces more BDNF, or Brain-Derived Neurotrophic Factor. Think of it as “Miracle-Gro” for your neurons. This incredible protein promotes neuroplasticity—the brain’s ability to reorganise itself by forming new neural connections—and encourages the growth of new brain cells. So, while you’re busy admiring the rolling hills of Gascony, your brain is literally getting smarter, more adaptable, and more open to new ideas.
Then there is the activation of the Default Mode Network (DMN). This is the brain’s “daydreaming” network, responsible for introspection, memory retrieval, and creative problem-solving. While our busy modern lives often suppress the DMN, the rhythmic, meditative act of walking allows it to flourish. This is why so many people experience those “aha!” moments on the Camino—the solutions to long-standing problems, the creative sparks, the sudden clarity about a life decision. Your brain, finally given permission to process, connects disparate ideas and serves up insights you didn’t even know you were seeking.
En plus, the left-right-left rhythm of walking helps to synchronise the brain’s hemispheres. This bilateral stimulation can create a unique state of consciousness, often compared to the effects of EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing) therapy, helping individuals process old traumas or deeply ingrained emotional patterns. It’s a gentle, natural way to untangle the knots in your mind, one step at a time.
Liminality, a term coined by anthropologist Victor Turner, describes a state of being “in-between.” On the Camino, you shed your everyday identity. You are no longer defined by your job title, your social status, or your usual roles. You are simply “a pilgrim.” This threshold state, neither here nor there, is a sacred space of transition, deconstruction, and ultimately, reconstruction. It’s a temporary suspension of the rules, where defenses drop, and genuine self-discovery becomes not just possible, but almost inevitable. It’s where you learn that the person you thought you were might just be a costume you’ve been wearing.
There’s a peculiar intimacy that develops on the Camino. You meet someone at a retreat, walk together for four hours, share a lunch of bread and cheese, and somehow end up discussing your marriage, your career, your relationship with your father. Then you walk ahead, and you may never see them again. So you don’t need to manage the other person’s opinion of you. You don’t need to be the version of yourself that your colleagues or family expect.
This is not a malfunction. It’s a feature.
Southwest France’s Secret Sauce: How Even a Mini-Camino Can Lead to Maxi-Metamorphosis
It seems to me that the Camino is a metaphor for life. You are, quite literally, on a path. You have to keep moving. You can’t see what’s around the next bend. Sometimes you take a wrong turn and have to double back, and somehow the detour ends up being the most interesting part. Some days it’s beautiful. Some days it rains sideways and your boots are soaked and you question every life choice that led to this moment.
Sound familiar?
The Camino externalises something we usually experience only internally. The abstract — “finding your way,” “the journey of life,” “one step at a time” — becomes concrete and embodied. And when something abstract becomes concrete, it becomes workable.
I believe this is why even a short section of the Camino — two or three days, as my 5-day retreat guests walk — can carry the weight of something much more. Because the insight isn’t really about the miles. It’s about the permission. The path gives you permission to see your life as a journey with a purpose: not a problem to be solved, but a route to be walked.
The intensity of an experience isn’t always proportional to its duration. These shorter sections offer a potent blend of pattern disruption, physical activity, and communal connection, allowing my guests to quickly shed their everyday burdens and open themselves to incoming insight. The stunning landscapes, the rich gastronomy (a well-deserved reward after a day’s walk!), and the warm, genuine hospitality of the region act as powerful sensory anchors, helping to solidify the insights gained.
The Camino, with its centuries of footsteps and its unofficial motto Ultreïa (roughly: “onward, ever onward”), carries a quietly radical message. The point is not to arrive. The point is to walk with attention. To notice. To let the path teach you what you need to know, in the order it decides you need to know it.
This is a profoundly countercultural idea in a world obsessed with destinations, outcomes, and optimised results. But it’s also, if you’ve ever had a sleepless night of so-called “productive worry,” a deeply liberating one.
What if the confusion you’re in right now is not a failure? What if it’s a section of the path you haven’t walked before?
The people who come home from the Camino changed are not, in my experience, the ones who found The Answer. They’re the ones who stopped being afraid of The Question. They walked far enough to remember — or discover for the first time — that not knowing where you’re going is not the same as being lost..
So, perhaps it’s time to lace up your boots, step out of your comfort zone, and onto the path. Even if it’s just for a few days, you might just discover that the person you’re meant to be has been waiting for you all along, just a few steps down the road.
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.
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.
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.
There are books you read, and then there are books that read you. Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist belongs firmly, defiantly, and rather magically in the second category. Published in 1988 and since translated into more than 80 languages, it has sold well over 320 million copies worldwide — a number so staggering that the mind goes a little wobbly trying to picture it. That’s not a readership. That’s a movement.
I first read The Alchemist right around the time I started hosting my retreats — those glorious, muddy, blister-inducing, soul-expanding weeks where book lovers and Camino hikers converge in the most improbable and wonderful combination imaginable. I remember sitting with the novel in the evenings after long walking days, reading by lamplight, and thinking: this is it. This is the book. Not just a book for a reading list. Not just a book to recommend in passing. The one book. The book I want every single guest who came through my doors to read.
And so that’s exactly what I did. The Alchemist is now not merely on the recommended reading list for my retreats — it is the book I ask all my guests to bring with them. Every one. No exceptions. Not because I’m bossy (well, not only because of that), but because I have witnessed, retreat after retreat, how profoundly this small, deceptively simple story amplifies the Camino experience. There is something almost alchemical — and yes, I use that word deliberately — in what happens when a person reads this book with aching legs and wide open eyes and endlessly rolling landscape ahead of them.
“I don’t live in either my past or my future. I’m interested only in the present. If you can concentrate always on the present, you’ll be a happy man. Life will be a party for you, a grand festival, because life is the moment we’re living now.”― Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist
So, what is it about? On the surface, The Alchemist tells the story of Santiago, a young Andalusian shepherd boy who has a recurring dream of treasure buried near the Egyptian pyramids. Encouraged by a mysterious old king, he sells his flock and sets off across the Sahara, encountering merchants, alchemists, wars, and love along the way. It is, technically, a quest story. But calling The Alchemist a quest story is a bit like calling the Camino de Santiago a walk. Technically accurate. But completely inadequate.
What Coelho has written is a fable about the courage it takes to listen to your own heart. Santiago’s journey is every reader’s journey: the moment you decide to pursue what your soul is calling you toward, the universe (in Coelho’s philosophy, quite literally) rearranges itself to help you. He calls it the Personal Legend — the thing you were born to do, the dream you carry, the treasure that is uniquely and irreversibly yours. The book asks whether you are brave enough to go looking for it. And whether, when you find it, you’ll recognise it.
“Il existe deux choses qui empêchent une personne de réaliser ses rêves : croire qu’ils sont irréalisables, ou bien, quand la roue du destin tourne à l’improviste, les voir se changer en possible au moment où l’on s’y attend le moins.” Paulo Coelho – Le démon et Mademoiselle Prym
It is a short book. You can read it in an afternoon. But it will live in you for years.
My retreat guests who arrive having read The Alchemist walk differently. There’s a particular quality of attention that settles over them. They notice things — the angle of afternoon light on the vineyards, the kindness of a stranger at a waymarker, the peculiar grace of being lost and then found again — with a kind of heightened receptivity. As though the book has tuned them to a frequency they didn’t know existed. That I didn’t know existed.
I’ve had guests tell me that reading The Alchemist before or during the Camino felt like receiving a set of instructions in an hitherto unspoken language they suddenly realised they’d always understood. One guest described walking into Santiago de Compostela with tears streaming down her face, the final lines of the novel running through her head. Another told me, over a cup of herbal tea in the courtyard, that the book had made her rethink her entire career — not dramatically, not overnight, but quietly and permanently, the way the best books always do.
The evenings we’ve spent discussing this book are, honestly, among my happiest memories as a retreat host. There is something particularly rich about discussing The Alchemist in a place where people are already doing the very thing the book describes — following a call, walking toward something they can’t quite name, discovering that the journey is as meaningful as the destination. The conversations go deep, fast. People who met at breakfast are confessing their unlived dreams by dinner.
“Everything tells me that I am about to make a wrong decision, but making mistakes is just part of life. What does the world want of me? Does it want me to take no risks, to go back to where I came from because I didn’t have the courage to say “yes” to life?” ― Paulo Coelho, Eleven Minutes
Got to tell you about the moment that made me feel, rather briefly but unforgettably, like the luckiest person in the literary world. Several years ago, I tweeted about The Alchemist — something heartfelt and probably slightly overenthusiastic, as my tweets about books tend to be. And Paulo Coelho replied. Directly. To me. I won’t pretend I was cool about it. I was not cool about it at all. I may have made a sound that alarmed the horses. It was a small moment in the grand scheme of things, but it felt like a little wink from the universe — the kind of synchronicity that The Alchemist itself is entirely full of, and which you begin, after enough Caminos and enough re-readings, to take almost for granted.
If you haven’t yet read The Alchemist, I want to gently and firmly insist that you do. And if you have read it — read it again. It is a different book at different points in your life, which is perhaps the truest mark of a great one.
Coelho’s wider body of work is rich and worth exploring in full. His novels include The Pilgrimage, The Valkyries, The Fifth Mountain, Eleven Minutes, The Zahir, The Witch of Portobello, Veronika Decides to Die, The Winner Stands Alone, Aleph, Adultery, The Spy, and Hippie. Each has its own flavour and preoccupation, but they share a common beating heart: the conviction that human beings are capable of transformation, that love is the most serious business there is, and that the life you long for is not as far away as you think.
His autobiographical novel The Pilgrimage is particularly worth mentioning in the context of my retreats, as it documents his own walk of the Camino de Santiago in 1986, an experience he later described as a personal spiritual turning point — and the creative catalyst that made The Alchemist possible. Reading The Pilgrimage alongside or just before walking your own Camino adds yet another layer of richness to the experience.
And for those who want to know what Coelho has been up to most recently: his latest book, The Supreme Gift, sees him adapt the classic wisdom of 19th-century missionary Henry Drummond and St. Paul, exploring the nature of love through nine elements: patience, kindness, generosity, humility, gentleness, dedication, tolerance, sincerity, and innocence. It offers a message that will help readers incorporate love into daily life and experience its transformational power — which is, when you think about it, exactly what The Alchemist has been doing quietly for nearly four decades.
The Alchemist is the kind of book that makes you want to set out. It makes you want to sell your flock of sheep, metaphorically speaking, and walk toward whatever treasure your heart has been whispering about for years. It makes the Camino feel not like a challenge to be endured, but a conversation to be had — with the landscape, with fellow pilgrims, with the oldest and most persistent parts of yourself.
Pack it in your rucksack. Bring it to the retreat. Read it by the fire. Argue about it over dinner. Let it argue back.
You won’t regret it.
“When you find your path, you must not be afraid. You need to have sufficient courage to make mistakes. Disappointment, defeat, and despair are the tools God uses to show us the way.”― Paulo Coelho, Brida
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.
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.
How walking an ancient trail in southwest France can quiet the noise of a world that won’t stop shouting
What this is: A thoughtful, grounded exploration of the Camino de Santiago effect, specifically the French routes through southwest France, remains one of the most quietly radical acts of self-renewal available to anyone carrying the weight of a world gone sideways. Plus some practical wisdom for when and how to use it.
What this isn’t: A hiking guide. A spiritual manifesto. A listicle about “ten things your Camino will teach you.” (Though there are takeaways, I couldn’t resist.)
Read this if: You’re intelligent, self-aware, overwhelmed and exhausted. If you’ve read the news one too many times this week, if you sense that what you need isn’t another productivity hack but a genuine reset, one that involves fresh air, good books, and the kind of silence that actually speaks, then yes. Pull up a chair. This one’s for you.
5 Key Takeaways
The Camino doesn’t just give you a walk, it gives you a mirror. The path strips away distraction and returns you to yourself in ways that no retreat centre, no matter how beautiful its brochure, can manufacture.
Walking at pace with your own thoughts is a lost art, and perhaps the most urgently needed one. The Camino’s rhythm, one foot, then the other, rewires stressed nervous systems better than most therapies.
Nature is not the backdrop. It is the curriculum. Ancient woodland, open skies, and the scent of thyme underfoot are doing serious neuroscientific work on your cortisol levels whether you notice it or not.
Combining walking with reading and journalling creates a rare kind of integration. Insights don’t just arrive; they settle. They become yours.
The personal shift you experience ripples outward. When you return calmer, clearer, and more grounded, the people around you, your family, friends, colleagues, community, feel that shift. One person’s renewal is never just one person’s story.
Introduction: Something Happens When We Stopped Moving
Stressed, Overwhelmed, and Running on Empty? What 1,200 years of pilgrimage wisdom can teach you about slowing down, tuning in, and finding yourself again
SOMEWHERE between the twenty-fourth news alert of the morning and the third doom-scroll session before noon, most of us lost the plot. Not our personal plot, necessarily, though that too sometimes. The larger plot. The one where humans were supposed to be okay, where the world was, if not exactly fine, at least manageable.
It isn’t anymore, is it?
And here you are, smart, resourced, thoughtful, a person who has already tried things, the meditation app that dinged at you like a passive-aggressive life coach, the digital detox that lasted until Tuesday, the long weekends that left you more depleted than when you arrived. You’re not broken. You’re not weak. You are simply, profoundly, and entirely understandably overwhelmed by the weight of a world that has stopped making sense.
The ancient pilgrims who first walked the routes to Santiago de Compostela weren’t running away from anything. They were walking towards something. Clarity. Grace. The still, small voice that gets drowned out by modern life’s relentless static. They had the right idea.
This article is an invitation to consider that the oldest roads in Europe might still be the fastest route back to yourself. Not because walking is magic (though it is, a little), but because the Camino de Santiago, particularly through the golden landscapes of southwest France, offers something increasingly rare: the conditions under which transformation can actually happen.
By the time you finish reading, you’ll understand why the path itself is the greatest teacher you’ve never met, and what happens when you combine it with nature, silence, and the kind of companionship that doesn’t require you to perform.
The Story of Miriam Devereux: “I Thought I Was Going on Holiday. I Didn’t Realise I Was Going Home.”
Miriam Devereux, fifty-three, secondary school librarian, devoted grandmother, and self-described “professional worrier,” stood in her bedroom on a Tuesday evening in early autumn and stared at the pile of books on her bed. Seven books. For a five-day retreat. She had culled the list three times already.
“I might finish them all,” she said aloud, to nobody in particular.
Her cat, Biblio, regarded her with the eloquent contempt only cats can embody.
She had found the retreat almost by accident, the way the important things usually arrive, sideways, through a link in a newsletter she almost deleted. Book Lovers’ Binge Reading and Camino de Santiago Hiking Retreat. Southwest France. Five days. Small group. She had read the description, standing at the kitchen counter with cold tea and the BBC news playing in the background, reporting on something she could no longer bear to listen to.
She had booked it before she reached the third paragraph.
The morning they set out, the sky was the particular shade of pale gold that only exists in the Gers at six in the morning. Miriam’s boots were new and she felt faintly ridiculous, like a woman playing at being an adventurer. The group was small, three other people who had each arrived carrying their own invisible baggage alongside their actual packs. A retired architect from Edinburgh. A teacher from Amsterdam who hadn’t slept properly in eight months. A woman named Rosa who said she was “between lives” and meant it literally.
Miriam initially thought the pace was too slow. Then, after twenty minutes, she realised it wasn’t slow at all. It was realistic. It was the pace at which you could actually look at things.
And there was so much to look at.
The light fell differently here, filtered through oak canopies that had been growing since before anyone alive had been born. The path smelled of damp earth and wild thyme and something else, something harder to name, like the memory of every person who had ever walked this way before. The sound of her own breathing, steady and even, began to crowd out the background noise she had been carrying in her chest for months.
She didn’t speak for the first hour. Neither did anyone else. Nobody needed to.
They walked through a landscape so unreasonably beautiful it almost felt like an argument. Rolling hills dissolving into morning haze. Ancient churches half-buried in wildflowers. A donkey watching them from a field with the considered expression of a philosopher who had seen worse and was not particularly impressed.
By that evening, Miriam had finished the first thirty pages of the novel she’d brought, a sweeping, generous story about belonging and starting over. The words had gone in differently than they usually did. Less like consumption and more like nourishment.
By day three, something had quietly shifted. The architecture of her anxiety, the elaborate, load-bearing structure she had spent years building and maintaining, the one propped up by news cycles and catastrophic thinking and the nagging sense that to stop worrying was somehow irresponsible, that structure was developing cracks. Not collapsing. Changing shape.
In the evenings, curled in deep chairs with their books and notebooks, the group talked about what they were reading, about what they were thinking, about the strange and particular relief of walking without a final destination that needed to be reached today. The Camino, they discovered, has a disarming way of making the journey itself feel like the point.
Miriam’s notebook was filling up. Not with resolutions, she had made and broken too many of those to bother, but with observations. A line from her book that had made her breath catch. A question she hadn’t known she had, about what she actually wanted her next decade to look like.
On the last morning, she woke early and sat on the terrace of the farmhouse with coffee and her journal, watching the mist lift from the valley below. The world, that same battered, bewildering world, was still out there. But she was different within it. Quieter. More anchored. Less at the mercy of it.
Monsieur Biblio, she thought, was going to be very confused by the new version of her.
She smiled. Opened her book.
When One Person Changes, Everything Changes
Miriam’s story, while hers alone, is also entirely universal. The Camino de Santiago effect has been doing this to people for over a thousand years, and what’s striking is not merely the personal transformation it catalyses, but the scale of the ripple effect that transformation creates.
We live in a moment of collective stress that is not just political or economic but deeply psychological. The World Health Organisation has described a global mental health crisis. Studies track sharp increases in anxiety, depression, and what researchers now call “eco-anxiety,” a specific, mounting dread about the state of the natural world. Many of us are not simply stressed. We are running on depleted systems, trying to show up fully for our families, our work, our communities, from tanks that are approaching empty.
The Camino, particularly when experienced in the context of a thoughtfully structured retreat that combines walking with reading, journalling, and immersion in nature, offers something that is genuinely reparative. Not a fix. Not a cure. A recalibration.
Research is increasingly clear on the mechanisms involved. Walking in nature reduces cortisol. It activates the parasympathetic nervous system. Bilateral movement (left, right, left, right) has been shown to process stored emotional material in ways that parallel certain therapeutic modalities. Add the cognitive stimulation of reading, the reflective depth of journalling, the social glue of small-group conversation, and you have a genuinely potent combination.
But the impact doesn’t stop at the individual level.
When Miriam returned home, her husband noticed. Her students noticed. Her book group noticed. She was different, not in a disruptive or performative way, but in the way of someone who has been reset to their actual factory settings, more patient, more present, more genuinely curious.
This matters because stressed people, depleted people, make stressed and depleted communities. The reverse is equally true. One person who has genuinely rested, renewed, and reconnected returns to their relationships, their workplace, their neighbourhood, and they change the temperature of those spaces. They ask better questions. They listen more. They model something that others lean towards, even without knowing why.
The Camino has a phrase: Buen Camino. Good path. It’s what pilgrims say to each other as they pass. What strikes newcomers is how genuinely it is meant. The Camino creates a temporary community held together by shared effort and shared direction. Something of that generosity, that fundamental goodwill towards fellow travellers, tends to come home in the pilgrim’s rucksack.
In a world that is very good at making us feel powerless, the Camino reminds us that meaningful change, the kind that lasts and the kind that spreads, nearly always begins with a single person deciding to walk a different path.
Literally, in this case. But you know what I mean.
5 Mistakes that Limit the Camino de Santiago Effect
Mistake 1: Treating it like a fitness challenge rather than a reset. The Camino is not primarily about mileage. It is about attention. People who arrive determined to “crush it” often miss what the path is actually offering. Walk at a pace that allows you to see. Your step count is not the point.
Mistake 2: Leaving your phone in your pocket, not in your bag. Accessibility is the enemy of presence. The research on even the sight of a smartphone reducing cognitive capacity is unambiguous. Put it away. The news will still be there when you return, unchanged in its capacity to exhaust you.
Mistake 3: Waiting until you’re ready. There is no “ready.” If you’re waiting until the world settles down, until work calms, until the kids are older, until the timing is perfect, you will wait indefinitely. The Camino doesn’t ask you to arrive prepared. It asks you to arrive. The preparation happens on the path.
Mistake 4: Packing too much and expecting too little. This applies to actual luggage (the rule of thumb is “halve what you think you need, then halve it again”) and to emotional expectations. People who arrive hoping for a specific outcome often have a harder time than those who arrive open and curious. The path gives what is needed, not always what is wanted.
Mistake 5: Walking alone in a group. One of the great gifts of a small-group retreat is the people you meet. Resist the temptation to use the communal setting as a backdrop for a solo experience. The conversations at the farmhouse table, the shared observations on the path, the books passed from hand to hand, these are part of the curriculum too. Don’t skip them.
A Short Intention-Setting Exercise Before You Walk
Before you begin any significant journey, inner or outer, intention creates direction without demanding a destination.
Find five quiet minutes. Open your journal to a fresh page. Write the following prompts, and then answer them without editing yourself:
What am I carrying that is not mine to carry? (List whatever comes. Don’t overthink it.)
What do I most want to feel differently about when I return?
What is one thing I am willing to let the path teach me, even if I don’t know yet what that is?
What would “enough” look, sound, and feel like, for me, right now?
What small act of kindness to myself would make this journey feel like a gift rather than an achievement?
Fold the page. Carry it with you. Don’t read it again until the last day of your walk.
Further Reading: Books That Walk With You
Five Books for the Path, and the Path Back
1. The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho Coelho was writing about the Camino before most people knew what it was. This slim, luminous fable about following signs, trusting the journey, and the strange perfection of detours is the ideal companion for anyone setting foot on a pilgrimage route. Chosen because its simplicity is deceptive and its timing, whenever you read it, always seems exactly right.
2. Wild by Cheryl Strayed Not the Camino, but the same fundamental story: a woman in pieces, a long trail, and the discovery that the path will sort you out if you let it. Strayed’s raw, brilliant memoir is a masterclass in what it means to walk your way back to yourself. Chosen because it is unflinchingly honest about the mess that precedes transformation.
3. Walking the Camino: A Modern Pilgrimage to Santiago by Carlos G. Valles A quieter, more contemplative account of what the path actually feels like from the inside, across days of blisters and beauty and unexpected grace. Chosen because it captures the spiritual dimension of the Camino without requiring any particular religious framework to access it.
4. Last Child in the Woods by Richard Louv Louv’s landmark book about nature-deficit disorder is technically about children but is also, unmistakably, about all of us. Reading it before (or on) a walking retreat sharpens your awareness of what you’ve been missing and why it matters. Chosen because it articulates, with beautiful precision, what happens to human beings when we lose regular contact with the natural world.
5. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard Dillard’s Pulitzer Prize-winning meditation on attention, presence, and the extraordinary density of the ordinary world is essentially a masterclass in the kind of seeing the Camino demands of you. Walk, then read this. Or read it, then walk. Either way, your eyes will be different. Chosen because it is, quite simply, one of the most luminous pieces of writing about paying attention that exists in the English language.
P.S. If you’d like a daily, practical companion for the kind of change the Camino initiates, Embracing Change, in 10 Minutes a Day by Margaretha Montagu offers exactly that: gentle, effective, ten-minute practices that support genuine transformation without requiring you to overhaul your entire life at once. Find it here.
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.
Stop second-guessing yourself. Start owning your success. This book gives you the step-by-step roadmap to break free from imposter syndrome, build unshakable confidence, and finally believe you deserve every bit of your success. You ARE Good Enough!
A Gift Included in Every Reading Retreat
Reconnect With Nature: A Guided Journalling Course Inspired by Horses
Because the work of reconnecting with the natural world doesn’t have to end when you return home, every Book Lovers’ Binge Reading and Camino de Santiago retreat includes free access to the online course Reconnect with Nature: A Guided Journalling Course Inspired by Horses.
Created to deepen your relationship with the natural world through reflective writing and the wisdom of horses (genuinely one of nature’s most emotionally intelligent teachers), this course continues the work the path began. Think of it as the follow-up lesson for when you’re back at your desk and the world is being noisy again.
5 FAQs: What People Are Really Asking About the Camino Right Now
Q: Do I have to be religious to walk the Camino de Santiago? Absolutely not. The Camino’s origins are Christian pilgrimage, but its present reality is magnificently diverse. Walkers include atheists, agnostics, practitioners of every tradition, and a large number of people who describe themselves simply as “searching for something.” The path asks for feet, not faith. Though the faith part often arrives uninvited, and tends to be rather welcome when it does.
Q: How fit do I need to be? Fit enough to walk for several hours at a comfortable pace over varied terrain. Not athlete-fit. Not even particularly sporty. The retreats are designed for people in ordinary, middle-of-life physical condition who want a meaningful experience, not a punishing one. You will be surprised by what you are capable of, in the best possible way.
Q: Is it safe to travel solo as a woman? The Camino has an extraordinarily strong culture of looking out for fellow pilgrims. Small-group retreats add an additional layer of community and support. Many women report that a walking retreat in southwest France, with a small group and experienced guide, feels safer and more genuinely nourishing than almost any other kind of travel they’ve done.
Q: What if I want to read and walk, not just one or the other? Then you’ve found exactly the right retreat. The Book Lovers’ Binge Reading and Camino de Santiago retreats are specifically designed to weave walking and reading together throughout the day, morning walks, afternoon reading, evening conversation, reflection and journalling. They are for people who love both and have been waiting for someone to combine them properly.
Q: I’ve tried retreats before and came back feeling great for a week, then slid back. How is this different? That slide is real, and it’s common. What tends to create lasting change isn’t just the peak experience of the retreat itself, but the tools and practices that continue it. The journalling course included with the retreat, the books you carry home, the intention you set on the path, these are designed to extend the work beyond the five days. You won’t be the same person who slid back, because you won’t be relying on the same mechanisms.
Conclusion
There is a quality of attention that only walking can generate. Philosophers knew it. Poets knew it. Ancient pilgrims, shuffling through rain and sun and the particular loneliness of the long middle stretch, knew it in their bones.
What the Camino de Santiago offers, in its ancient, quietly insistent way, is not escape from the world but return to yourself within it. The path asks nothing except that you show up, put one foot in front of the other, and be willing to be surprised.
In a world that is generating more noise, more fear, more complexity than most of us were designed to process, that invitation is not a luxury.
It is a necessity.
“A pilgrim is someone who is on the way, and knows it. Most of us spend our lives not knowing we are on the way. The Camino teaches you this, and that is why it is not a destination but a transformation” , adapted from the tradition of the Camino
Gift Yourself Five Days
You’ve been carrying the weight of a world you can’t fix. You’ve been reading the news and feeling the particular exhaustion of caring about things you cannot control. You’ve been looking for something, not a solution exactly, but a place to put it all down for a while and remember who you are underneath the noise.
The Book Lovers’ Binge Reading and Camino de Santiago Walking Retreats in the south-west of France are five days of walking ancient pilgrimage routes through landscapes of almost absurd beauty, reading without guilt, talking with people who get it, and writing your way into the clarity you’ve been looking for.
Small groups. Farmhouse stays. Books passed hand to hand. Morning walks and afternoon pages. Evening conversation that matters.
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.
Ready for a Retreat? Take the Quiz
Not sure if a walking and reading retreat is right for you, or if you need something a little different first? Sign up for the newsletter and take the Ready for a Retreat? Quiz, a quick, honest gut-check that will tell you exactly where you are and what kind of renewal might serve you best right now.
Do you dream of escaping your stressful life to raise a herd of goats or grow sunflowers in the south of France? Then you may be ready for an Esprit Meraki retreat. Get access to this “very serious” quiz to help you figure out how urgent your need for a change of scenery is, when you subscribe to my monthly newsletter.
If you could put down one thing you’ve been carrying, just for five days, what would it be? And what might become possible if you did?
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
Bratman, G. N., Hamilton, J. P., Hahn, K. S., Daily, G. C., & Gross, J. J. (2015). Nature experience reduces rumination and subgenual prefrontal cortex activation. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 112(28), 8567–8572.
Oppezzo, M., & Schwartz, D. L. (2014). Give your ideas some legs: The positive effect of walking on creative thinking. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 40(4), 1142–1152.
Ulrich, R. S., Simons, R. F., Losito, B. D., Fiorito, E., Miles, M. A., & Zelson, M. (1991). Stress recovery during exposure to natural and urban environments. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 11(3), 201–230.
Shapiro, F. (2001). The role of eye movement desensitisation and reprocessing therapy in bilateral stimulation and trauma processing. Journal of Clinical Psychology, 58(12), 1547–1558. (See also broader research on bilateral stimulation and walking as embodied memory processing.)
Li, Q., Morimoto, K., Nakadai, A., Inagaki, H., Katsumata, M., Shimizu, T., … & Kawada, T. (2007). Forest bathing enhances human natural killer activity and expression of anti-cancer proteins. International Journal of Immunopathology and Pharmacology, 20(2 Suppl 2), 3–8.
Written with warmth, a little mischief, and the genuine conviction that the Camino de Santiago still leads somewhere worth going.
A perfectly good cup of coffee, one careless comment, and suddenly your brain is directing a full-length drama. Enter the fast reset—a small shift with a surprisingly big impact.
If you have met me, you will know that I’m serious about coffee. It’s not that I drink ten cups a day. I probably have no more than three, but it’s the best quality coffee I can afford to buy. It’s not that I’m addicted, not really, I just appreciate good coffee.
A Minor Betrayal, Served Hot
So imagine what it felt like when I’d just handed a friend a cup of coffee I made with genuine care — the best extra corsé beans, a double espresso, a little noisette with just a nuage of full-fat milk, the perfect sipping temperature and an aroma to get up for on a Sunday morning. And without missing a beat, without even a courtesy sip, they say: “Oh, thanks, but I’m more of a grand crème sort of person.” What? As in drowning that preciously, lovingly nurtured coffee flavour in gallons of cream?
Such a casual comment. Unthinking. Unbothered. As if she didn’t just audit my entire raison d’etre. I smile, and sip my perfect coffee. But internally? An in-depth review has begun. By lunch I’ve got it on endless replay. By mid-afternoon I’m Googling speciality coffee certifications, not entirely as a joke. By dinner I’ve decided I need a better (more expensive) coffee machine, different beans, less corsé, and possibly different friends.
The Olympic Sport of Overthinking
Most of us are experts at replaying such moments. And moments much worse than that. A perceived insult. A slight. A (possible) misunderstanding. We retell ourselves the story. For days. Weeks. Months. Years. We ask ourselves why did they say that and what did they mean by that until the original event, which maybe lasted five seconds, has been extended into a six-hour conversation with your inner critic.
Enter: The Fast Reset (Stage Left, Slightly Out of Breath)
Ironically, it was the coffee incident that led me to discover the fast-reset.
The “fast reset” is the art of recovering your composure before your imagination writes a wildly unhelpful sequel: you’ve been rattled, possibly been mildly dramatic about it, and then—through a deliberate shift like reframing—you return to yourself before the situation turns into a full-length, endlessly-repeated emotional soap opera.
Resetting is not pretending you’re fine when you aren’t. It’s not toxic positivity, or slapping a smile over something that obviously hurt. It’s not the infuriating advice to “just don’t let it bother you” — as if that were ever a useful instruction.
What It Actually Looks Like in the Wild
A real reset looks more like this:
You notice something’s off. Maybe your jaw is tight. Maybe you’ve reread the same paragraph four times. Maybe you’ve been a little snappier than usual, and you know it, and you don’t particularly like it. You stop. You acknowledge it — yeah, that thing she said this morning really got to me. You let yourself feel it briefly and honestly, without adding too much drama. And then, gently, deliberately, you put it down. You let it go.
You get back on track.
Not because it didn’t matter. But because you’ve decided the rest of your day matters more.
The Secret of Unshakeable People
This is what the people who seem unshakeable actually do. They FEEL it. They just don’t pitch a tent at that point in time.
Fast-resetters feel the frustration without becoming the frustrated person. They notice the bad mood the way you’d notice bad weather — real, inconvenient, temporary, and not a reflection of how the rest of the week will go.
They also tend to have what you might call an “exit ritual” — a small, almost mundane action that signals to the brain that a moment is over. A walk around the block. Splashing cold water on their face. Making a cup of coffee with slightly more ceremony than necessary. It sounds too simple to be real, but that’s precisely the point. The brain recognises and responds to patterns. When you consistently pair a small action with the intention to let go, that action eventually becomes the letting go.
Apparently. I’m still practising.
A New Philosophy: Feel It, Then Promptly Move On
Fast-resetting is a mindset shift, really — from “I’ll feel better once I’ve processed this properly” to “I’ve felt it. I’m done. Now moving on.”
There’s an almost stubborn power in this. In deciding that one bad moment doesn’t get to determine the rest of your day, week, month, etc.. In treating your own peace as something worth protecting, rather than something that gets eroded by whatever the day throws at you.
A Difficult Habit to Break
I can see exactly how valuable this skill could be. I understand the logic, I believe the science, and I am fully on board in principle. The problem is that I’m also someone who has been doing the precise opposite for four decades, which means my neural pathways are basically seasoned veterans at this point: highly trained, deeply committed, and completely unimpressed by my new intentions. You don’t rewire forty years of habit with a deep breath and a good attitude.
Like most skills, it no doubt gets easier the more you practise. I’ll have to do a LOT of practising to change this habit.
But I will, because my energy definitely isn’t endless, and I want what I spend it on, to matter.
Many of my Camino de Santiago walking retreat guests struggle with this. When you walk the Camino, for hours on end, sooner or later your brain might start rerunning past insults, arguments, disappointments, misunderstandings. You end up marinating yourself in a bad mood with real dedication, real craftsmanship even. And fast-resetting? Let’s just say it becomes a serious challenge, every step of the way.
Lots of time to practice, walking the Camino.
The Energy Audit You Don’t Need
Every time you replay an argument you can’t change, you spend energy. Every time you let a ten-second inconvenience simmer for three hours, you waste energy. Every time you carry a morning mood all the way into your evening, your energy gets depleted — and you spend it on something that’s already past history, that you cannot alter, that is frankly not worth making out the invoice.
Some things ARE worth sitting with, processing properly, talking through. But the unappreciated coffee? The terse reply? The plan that didn’t work out? Those have a natural expiry time, and it’s a lot shorter than we tend to give it.
Resetting fast isn’t indifference. It’s prioritisation. It’s the decision that your afternoon is more valuable than your grievance. That your presence — with yourself, with the people you love, with the work you care about — is worth more than the story of what went wrong at breakfast.
Reframe if you need to, as in “their behaviour says more about them than about me,” or whatever works in that specific situation. Then let the moment pass. Fretting about it uses up to much of your energy. Let it go.
Again and again and again.
I’d love to hear your thoughts on fast resetting – have you mastered the art? Or are you, like me, stil practising?
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.
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.
This post first appeared on my Substack as“Blind to what matters most”
Early one March morning, I was standing at the kitchen window holding a cup of coffee I kept forgetting to drink. This was really not the way I usually treat my coffee. Usually, my coffee gets all my attention. 100% of it.
Outside, the horses were grazing with that unhurried, total commitment most of us only manage when scrolling our phones. The grass was just starting to grow again. It was early spring, that hopeful and slightly indecisive season where the earth isn’t quite sure of the sun’s commitment yet. The light was soft, the air still, and the horses were doing what horses do best: absolutely nothing of consequence, and somehow everything that matters. One of them lifted her head, chewed thoughtfully, and blinked in my direction as if to say, You again — still overthinking things, I see.
Guilty as charged. I was thinking of something I read: that the amount of good in your life depends on your ability to notice it. I’m obsessed with stress management, as a preventative strategy, and have been for decades. I was carefully dissecting this statement because it seemed to me that noticing the good in our lives could help us cope better with stressful situations. Like the current ever-escalating international conflict.
It struck me, not for the first time, how much of the good things in life goes unnoticed. Not because it’s hidden. But because some of us are so magnificently, so committedly, so almost professionally focused on everything that’s wrong, that the good in our lives doesn’t stand a chance.
A few weeks ago, I hosted a small Booklovers’ Binge Reading retreat, that includes walking short, specially-selected sections of the Camino de Santiago (I didn’t actually force that spreme bit of alliteration, it happened quite naturally.)
People arrive with different stories, but there’s usually a shared undercurrent — the need to escape a world of never-ending and always escalating demands. Sarah, though, could name it. She could name everything that was off, in considerable detail, with supporting evidence and an expected timeline.
Within four hours of arriving, she had generously shared that her room was “too cold,” the path outside was “uneven in a way that felt deliberate,” the other guests were “a loud lot,” dinner was “fine, but.” She delivered all of this not with malice but with the weary authority of someone who has appointed themselves the quality control department of lived experience, and takes the role very seriously.
By the next morning, the group had developed a kind of affectionate tolerance for her. Whenever Sarah drew breath, there was an almost imperceptible collective bracing — accepting, but bracing.
On the first evening, we were sitting around the table after dinner, conversation flowed easily, someone making a joke about the bread, there is always, without fail, a moment on every retreat where the bread becomes a subject of passionate interest — when Sarah said, in exactly the same tone she’d used to report the uneven path:
“I don’t think I can feel anything anymore.”
The table went quiet. Not awkwardly. Attentively.
“I used to enjoy things,” she added, as though this were a further complaint to log. “Small things. But now everything just sort of passes me by. Like I’m watching my own life through a dirty window.”
Yes, Sarah, we noticed.
If you’ve felt that, and more people have than would ever admit it, you’ll recognise it immediately. Not sadness exactly, not the dramatic, operatic kind that at least has the decency to announce itself. More like a low-grade internal dimming. Someone has quietly turned down the brightness on your experience of life, and you didn’t even notice it happening.
What gave me pause, though, was the irony. Here was a woman with a gift for noticing, who could detect a drop in room temperature, an imperfect hem, a passive-aggressive email, from fifty paces — and yet the actual texture of her life, the warmth of it, the colour and smell and small daily grace of it, was passing by her entirely unregistered.
She wasn’t failing to notice. She was noticing selectively. And with tremendous dedication.
This is a dangerous habit. It’s stress-inducing. Because your helpful RAS (reticular activation system), clocking that you are focusing on negative things, will help you notice more negative things, while making the good things invisible, and so significantly increase your stress levels.
The following morning, we walked the Camino de Santiago. The air was sharp and clean in that way that makes you feel briefly virtuous just for breathing it. The light came at a low angle through the ancient oak trees, the kind of light that makes even mud look designer-inspired. Birds were doing their chaotic, joyful thing in the hedgerows. It was, objectively, a rather beautiful morning.
Sarah found the stile “unsafe.”
I watched her over the next hour or so (not clinically, though old habits die hard) and noticed how she moved through the landscape. Alert, observant, taking everything in. But like a building inspector rather than a tourist. Every stone wall assessed for structural integrity. Every cloud considered for its inconvenience potential.
We stopped at a spot I particularly love, where your thoughts either settle or finally catch up with you. People drank water, stretched, and one person became bafflingly obsessed with the perfect length of their walking ticks. Sarah stood slightly apart, scanning the horizon with the expression of someone expecting to find something disappointing, and not wanting to be caught off guard by it.
I walked over. We stood in silence for a moment, which is always a more generous thing to offer than people realise.
“What do you see?” I asked eventually.
“That fence needs attention,” she said, without hesitation.
I waited.
“Also, the path is quite rutted further on. Someone should do something about that.”
I waited a little longer.
“What else?” I said.
She paused. Looked again. And I watched something interesting happen — not a transformation, nothing so tidy as that, but a kind of very slight recalibration, like a lens shifting fractionally into focus.
“So many different shades of green,” she said, somewhat reluctantly.
“Go on.”
“Those yellow flowers are quite pretty. Not the right time of year for them, surely. A bit presumptuous.” She paused. “But pretty.”
This, I told her, is wild mustard. It doesn’t care much about timing.
“And it’s very quiet,” she said, after a moment. Not as a complaint, for once. Just as an observation. “Not uncomfortably quiet. Just… soothingly quiet.”
Learning to notice the good things in your life again is a gradual process.
Over the following days we kept returning to it, gently, the way you might keep turning a plant toward the light. At breakfast, I remarked that the coffee was rich and satisfying. Sarah considered this, then agreed it was “better than expected.” At dinner, the candles threw soft gold light across the table and someone laughed so suddenly and so genuinely that the whole room caught it, and Sarah smiled — a real smile, not a smirk. On the walk the next morning, the air smelled of wood smoke and she stopped, breathed it in, and said nothing at all.
Progress.
By the final day, something had shifted, ever so slightly. She was still Sarah — she noted, correctly, that the breakfast eggs were slightly overdone, and she had THOUGHTS about the font I used to pen the retreat schedule — but she was also present in a way she hadn’t been at the start. At one point, she looked out across the valley, the light coming soft and golden over the hills, the horses visible in the distance like slow, contented punctuation marks, and she said, almost to herself:
“I think I’ve been so busy finding what’s wrong that I stopped seeing what isn’t.”
Which is, in my experience, one of the more stress-disolving things you can discover about yourself. An acknowledgement considerably harder to make than it sounds.
I think what is actually going on is that we’ve been sold the idea that gratitude is a practice — something you do each morning in a journal with a tasteful linen cover. Three things I’m grateful for. And maybe that works for some people. But for others, and I’d wager for more of us than we’d like to admit, it feels hollow. Forced. Like clapping on command.
The amount of good in your life does, to a surprising extent, depend on your ability to see it. Not perfectly, not constantly, but often enough that life doesn’t slip past unnoticed while you’re busy attending to everything else. So what can you do?
What works best for me, and it is so effective that I teach it to all my retreat participants, whether they are attending a basic 5-day Camino de Santiago Hiking Retreat or an all-singing-all-dancing Camino de Santiago Crossroads retreat, is the 5 Senses Mindfulness Exercise, with a twist of my own: take a moment to notice 5 things you can see, that you are grateful for, 4 things that you can feel, that you’re grateful for, 3 that you can hear, 2 that you can smell and 1 that you can taste, all things that you are grateful for, at this specific moment in your life.
There you are: an extremely powerful stress-busting gratitude exercise that also retrains your RAS to notice the good things in your life.
Stress destroys Lives. To find out what you can do to safeguard your sanity by taking my insight-giving quiz, subscribe to my mailing list.
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.
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
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.
You don’t need to be religious, athletic, or spiritually enlightened to benefit from walking the Camino. You just need to show up.
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.
Slowing down is not falling behind. The Camino will teach you this. Repeatedly. With great kindness on the occasional steep hill.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Kaplan, S. (1995). The restorative benefits of nature: Toward an integrative framework. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 15(3), 169–182.
Berman, M. G., Jonides, J., & Kaplan, S. (2008). The cognitive benefits of interacting with nature. Psychological Science, 19(12), 1207–1212.
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.
Holt-Lunstad, J., Smith, T. B., & Layton, J. B. (2010). Social relationships and mortality risk: A meta-analytic review. PLOS Medicine, 7(7), e1000316.
The ancient tradition that turns a simple rock into a radical act of release, and what it means for your overstretched mind
Why do hikers carry a stone on the Camino de Santiago? You choose a stone before you leave home, and you load it, consciously and deliberately, with whatever has been weighing you down: a grief, a fear, a chapter of your life that needs closing. You carry it in your hand or your pack for days, feeling its weight, letting it do what abstract worry never quite manages, which is to give your burden a shape you can actually hold. Then, at a chosen point along the route, you set it down and walk away without it.
What this is: A deep dive into the stone-carrying tradition and other meaningful Camino de Santiago rituals, why they matter more than ever right now, and how they could quietly rewire the way you see your life.
Read this if: You’re exhausted by the noise of the world, quietly wondering if there’s a more intentional way to live, and you suspect that somewhere between your to-do list and your doomscrolling habit, you may have misplaced yourself.
Put Down Your Phone. Pick Up a Stone.
5 Key Takeaways
The stone-carrying ritual is not mere superstition — it is a practised, psychologically grounded act of intentional release that has helped pilgrims process grief, anxiety, and overwhelm for centuries.
Camino traditions work because they are embodied — you don’t just think about letting go; you physically do it, and that distinction matters enormously for stressed nervous systems.
You don’t have to walk 800 kilometres to access the transformative power of the Camino — even a 3-day section in the beautiful southwest of France offers the full depth of the experience.
The traditions of the Camino are a masterclass in communitybuilding— the buen camino greeting, the hospitalero welcome, the shared table: small rituals that remind us we are not as alone as we feel.
Reading and walking together is not an indulgence — it is one of the most evidence-supported combinations for restoring cognitive clarity, emotional resilience, and a sense of purpose and meaning.
Introduction
What a 1,000-year-old pilgrimage practice teaches us about letting go, starting over, and finding your footing again
SOMEWHERE on a dusty path in rural France, a woman stopped walking, reached into her backpack, pulled out a good-sized pebble and placed it on a cairn beside the trail.
She had carried it from home. She had written a single word on it in black marker the night before she left: fear.
She stood there for a moment, breathe in deerly, and then out, and walked on without it.
Sound a little woo-woo? Perhaps. But she slept better that night than she had in eight months.
The Camino de Santiago has been doing this sort of thing for over a thousand years. Long before wellness retreats, breathwork coaches, or productivity podcasts told us we needed to “release what no longer serves us,” pilgrims were picking up stones, carrying burdens made tangible, and choosing, deliberately, to put them down.
And in a world that currently feels like it is spinning slightly faster than any of us signed up for, that ancient practice is suddenly looking extraordinarily relevant.
Since I ask all my retreat guests to bring a stone from home (or to pick up a stone on their first walking day), I want to explain why I do that, and at the same time talk about a couple of the Camino’s most meaningful traditions, starting with the stone-carrying ritual, and unpacking why they resonate so deeply with people who are stressed, overstretched, and quietly yearning for something more grounded. We’ll also look at how a 5-day reading and walking the Camino retreat in southwest France might be exactly the kind of reset your mind and body are asking for, whether you know it yet or not.
Eleanor’s Stone (Or: How a Divorced Florida Mum Found Herself in Rural France, Arguing with a Rock)
Eleanor Marsh did not want to carry a blasted stone.
She was forty-seven, recently divorced, the sole parent of two teenagers who communicated exclusively in eye-rolls and the forensic examination of empty cereal boxes, and she had just compressed five days of existence into a carry-on to fly from Tampa to Toulouse. The last thing she needed was a travelling rock.
“It’s a Camino tradition,” her friend Daphne had said, with the alarming brightness of someone about to volunteer you for personal growth. “You carry a stone that represents a burden. Then you leave it on the path.”
Eleanor had stared at her. “Daphne. I have two teenagers, a mortgage, and a Pinterest board full of aspirational sourdough recipes from my divorce era. I am not short of burdens. I wouldn’t know which one to choose.”
The instruction arrived a week before the start of the retreat.
“Find something that fits in your palm,” said the retreat host, radiating the calm authority of someone who has gently outmanoeuvred many sceptics into having meaningful experiences despite themselves. “You’ll carry it. On the final day, you’ll leave it behind.”
Eleanor stepped into her garden and looked down. An innocent piece of rock looked back up at her—smooth, palm-sized, with the quiet confidence of an object about to become deeply symbolic, whether she liked it or not. She picked it up. It was cold, dusty, and offensively heavy for something with no job description.
She carried it for three days.
By day two, she’d named it. Not out loud—she wasn’t unwell—but privately, she called it “Gravis,” which lacked poetry but excelled in accuracy. The divorce. The financial untangling. The teenagers, particularly the fourteen-year-old who had recently informed her that she “just didn’t get it,” a critique so comprehensive it left no room for appeal.
She turned the stone in her fingers as she walked, the path unspooling through oak woods that smelled of damp earth and fallen leaves. Beside her, a retired schoolteacher from Edinburgh named Ruth walked in companionable silence. Eleanor, who had made a minor career out of filling silences, discovered—somewhat suspiciously—that she didn’t need to. This silence was different. It had texture. It didn’t need managing.
On the last afternoon, the path climbed to a ridge, and there it was: a weathered heap of pale stones left by pilgrims who had come this way before, each one having carried something heavy and, at this exact spot, decided they were done with it.
The host had explained the ritual. Some people write on their stones. Some say a few words. Some simply let go.
Eleanor looked at the stone in her hand. She thought about the two years of quiet, grinding grief that had followed the end of her marriage. Not the cinematic kind—no dramatic collapses—just the daily, unglamorous business of recalibrating a life that had not consulted her before changing shape. She thought about how tired she was of being the one who held everything together. And, if she was honest, how quietly proud she was that she had.
She kneeled.
She placed the stone carefully in the middle of the pile so it wouldn’t roll off.
(She remained, at her core, a woman who did things properly.)
Then she stood up, and something that had been lodged between her shoulder blades for two years slowly dissolved.
No speech. No fanfare. Just… gone.
She breathed in.
She breathed out.
She walked on, her hands empty, her rucksack lighter, and somewhere in the valley below, a bell rang for no particular reason, which felt, frankly, terribly appropriate.
The Camino de Santiago’s Ancient Traditions, Unpacked
The stone-carrying custom is one of the Camino’s most powerful traditions, but it is far from the only one. The whole pilgrimage is, in a sense, a living museum of meaningful ritual, each tradition a small, embodied act of intention that has survived centuries because it works.
The Stone Ritual (Cruz de Ferro)
Traditionally, pilgrims carry a stone from home and leave it at the Cruz de Ferro (the Iron Cross), one of the Camino’s most iconic waymarkers, high on the meseta plateau in Spain. The symbolism is ancient and layered: you are carrying a burden, making it physical and portable, and then choosing, at a specific moment and place, to release it.
What makes this so neurologically interesting is that the act of physically putting something down appears to help the brain register the emotional release in a way that purely mental intention-setting often does not. Embodied ritual engages the body and the mind simultaneously, which is precisely why it cuts through in a way that “just deciding not to worry” rarely does.
The Scallop Shell (La Concha)
The scallop shell is the universal symbol of the Camino pilgrim. Its grooved lines converge at a single point, representing the many routes of the Camino converging on Santiago. Pilgrims wear or carry it to identify themselves to fellow walkers and to the communities along the route. It is also, importantly, a symbol of hospitality: villages and towns along the Camino have for centuries welcomed shell-bearers with warmth and practical generosity.
In a time when many of us feel increasingly atomised, the simple act of wearing a symbol that says I am a pilgrim, I am on a journey and having strangers respond with warmth is quietly revolutionary.
Buen Camino
This simple greeting, offered to every pilgrim you pass, translates roughly as “good way” or “have a good Camino.” It is said to strangers, to people you will never see again, to those who are clearly struggling and those who are clearly thriving. It is a ritual affirmation that the journey matters, that the person walking it matters, and that the community of walkers, however temporary, holds space for each of its members.
In a world of curated social media interactions and carefully managed professional encounters, the unguarded warmth of buen camino between strangers on a mountain path is, for many pilgrims, one of the most unexpectedly moving experiences of the entire journey.
The Pilgrim’s Credential (La Credencial)
The pilgrim’s passport, stamped at churches, cafés, and shelters along the route, is both a practical document and a growing record of the journey. Each stamp says: I was here. I kept going. Filling a credential page by page is a tangible, accumulating evidence of perseverance that resonates deeply with people who have been feeling scattered or purposeless.
The Camino Effect Ripples Outward
Here is what the wellness industry rarely tells you about transformative experiences: they do not stay neatly contained within the individual.
Eleanor went home from the retreat and, within a fortnight, had reorganised her relationship with the news. Not by disengaging from the world, but by becoming more deliberate. She started reading long-form journalism instead of scrolling headlines. She joined a community book group. She began, slowly, to talk more honestly with her soon-to-be adult children about what she was finding difficult, and found that they were relieved to have the conversation.
This is not coincidence. Research consistently shows that experiences which restore our sense of personal agency, connection, and meaning, precisely what the Camino traditions facilitate, tend to have cascading social effects. When one person in a family or community finds their footing again, the quality of their relationships improves. They listen better, panic less, and model a kind of grounded resilience that others around them begin to absorb.
Communities benefit too. The Camino itself is evidence of this: the villages and towns along the route have been economically and culturally sustained by the pilgrimage economy for over a thousand years. Local culture, food, architecture, and hospitality have all been shaped by the tradition of welcoming strangers on a journey.
When you walk, you are not just helping yourself. You are participating in one of the longest-running acts of communal trust and mutual care in human history.
And perhaps that, in a fractured and frightening world, is the most radical thing you can do.
5 Mistakes to Avoid on Your Camino (or Your First Retreat)
1. Treating the Stone Ritual as Optional
If your guide offers a stone practice, do not skip it because it feels “a bit much.” The people who lean into the rituals consistently report more meaningful experiences than those who observe them ironically from a safe emotional distance. You came this far. Pick up the stone.
2. Overloading Your Schedule
The Camino’s power lies in its spaciousness. If you arrive at a retreat and immediately fill every gap with podcasts, messages, and plans, you have, in a sense, just brought your normal life along for a walk. Resist. The emptiness is the WHOLE point.
3. Comparing Your Experience to Others’
Someone else will cry at the Cruz de Ferro. Someone else will feel nothing and then sob quietly over dinner two days later. Someone else will have a profound insight on day one and spend days two through five mildly bored. All of this is completely valid. The Camino gives you what you need, not what you planned.
4. Neglecting Your Body in Service of Your Mind
You are walking. Wear proper footwear. Stay hydrated. Eat the cheese. The body and the mind are not separate on the Camino, and some of the most significant mental and emotional shifts happen specifically because your body is tired and fed and moving. Do not power through physical discomfort as though the real retreat is happening above the neck.
5. Rushing Back to “Normal” at the End
The integration period after any transformative experience is as important as the experience itself. Build in transition time before returning to full work and social intensity. Write in your journal. Walk in your neighbourhood. Let what happened settle before the noise rushes back in.
Intention-Setting Exercise: The Stone Practice (Anywhere, Any Time)
You do not need the Camino to do this. You need five minutes and a stone.
Find a stone. Any stone. A pebble from your garden, a smooth river rock, a piece of gravel from the car park. It does not need to be beautiful or significant. It just needs to be physical and present.
Hold it in both hands. Close your eyes.
Name what you’re carrying. Not to fix it, not to analyse it. Just name it. Anxiety about the news. Grief. Exhaustion. A fear you’ve been circling for months. Speak it aloud, if you can. Let the stone hold it for you.
Walk with it. Even if only around the block. Feel its weight. Let it be a companion rather than a problem.
Choose your moment to put it down. A park, a garden, a river. Set it down with intention. Say, if it feels right: I leave this here. I walk on.
Notice what’s in your hands now. They are empty. And empty hands can hold new things.
Further Reading: Books That Illuminate the Camino Experience
1. I’m Off Then: Losing and Finding Myself on the Camino de Santiago by Hape Kerkeling A German comedian’s unexpectedly tender account of walking the Camino through exhaustion, faith, and self-discovery. Funny, honest, and quietly profound, this is the book that introduced millions of readers to the pilgrimage. Chosen for its warmth and accessibility, particularly for those who are new to the Camino and approach spiritual subjects with a healthy dose of scepticism.
2. The Pilgrimage by Paulo Coelho Before The Alchemist, Coelho wrote this semi-autobiographical account of his own Camino journey. It is less polished than his later work and all the better for it, raw, searching, and full of the specific rituals and practices encountered on the Way. Chosen for its direct engagement with the symbolic dimensions of the journey and its honest portrayal of resistance, doubt, and breakthrough.
3. Walking Home: A Poet’s Journey by Simon Armitage Though this follows England’s Pennine Way rather than the Camino, Armitage’s account of walking with a rucksack and his own thoughts is one of the finest meditations on what long-distance walking does to the inner life. Chosen for readers who respond to literary quality and who want to understand the specific relationship between walking and creative thinking.
4. The Way is Made by Walking by Arthur Paul Boers A deeply considered account of a Mennonite pastor’s Camino journey, exploring what pilgrimage means in a secular age and why embodied practice matters for spiritual and psychological wellbeing. Chosen for its thoughtful engagement with the intersection of faith, community, and the traditions of the Way.
5. Pilgrim Strong: Rewriting My Story on the Way of Saint James by Kathy Elkind A middle-aged woman walks the Camino alone after a period of personal upheaval and discovers not just the trail but a new understanding of her own resilience. Chosen for its direct relevance to the audience: people in midlife, under pressure, looking for evidence that a significant reset is possible.
P.S. If the idea of intentional, incremental change resonates with you, do take a look at Embracing Change — in 10 Minutes a Day by Margaretha Montagu. It is a generous, practical companion for anyone navigating a period of transition, and pairs beautifully with the kind of reflection that a retreat experience tends to open up.
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.
Every guest at the reading retreat receives free access to Reconnect with Nature: A Guided Journaling Course Inspired by Horses, an online course that uses the wisdom of horses and the grounding practice of nature journaling to deepen your connection with the present moment. It is a quietly extraordinary complement to the walking and reading experience, and many retreat guests find themselves returning to it long after they are home.
5 FAQs: The Carry a Stone on the Camino de Santiago Tradition and What People Are Really Asking
Q: Do I have to be religious to take part in the stone-carrying tradition? Not even remotely. The Camino has been a pilgrimage route in the traditional religious sense for over a thousand years, but the majority of today’s walkers approach it as a personal, philosophical, or simply restorative journey. The stone ritual is meaningful to atheists, agnostics, and people of every faith. It is about intention and release, not doctrine.
Q: Does the stone have to come from home, or can I find one on the trail? Traditionally, pilgrims bring a stone from home to symbolise that they are carrying something specific from their previous life. However, many walkers find a stone along the route that speaks to them, and this is equally valid. The significance lies in your intention, not the stone’s postcode.
Q: What do people write on their stones? Common choices include a fear, a name of someone who has died or is ill, a word representing something to be released (grief, anger, resentment, anxiety), or a single intention for the journey ahead. Some people leave their stone blank. Some write a sentence. Some draw a symbol. There are no rules.
Q: What happens at the Cruz de Ferro if I am only walking a section of the Camino? The stone tradition has expanded well beyond the Cruz de Ferro. On shorter Camino sections and guided retreats, cairns or designated stopping points fulfil the same function. The ritual is the point, not the precise geography.
Q: Can children take part in the stone tradition? Absolutely, and they often engage with it more naturally than adults do. Children tend to be less self-conscious about symbolic acts, and many families have found the ritual a meaningful way to process difficult emotions or transitions together.
Conclusion
Here is what a thousand years of pilgrimage tradition has quietly known, and what neuroscience is now beginning to confirm: the body is not a vehicle for carrying the mind from one worry to the next. It is, in fact, a participant in healing.
When you walk, you think differently. When you carry a physical weight and set it down with intention, you give your nervous system something to do with the abstract freight of anxiety and grief. When you follow yellow arrows through ancient countryside, reading beside a fire at the end of the day, exchanging buen camino with strangers who will become, briefly, your community, something in you remembers itself.
You are not just a mind in distress about the state of the world. You are a person with feet and hands and a capacity for wonder that the noise of daily life has been slowly crowding out.
The stones you carry are real. And so is the path.
“The longest journey is the journey inward.” Dag Hammarskjöld
Take the Next Step (Literally)
If you have read this far, something in you recognised itself in these pages. Perhaps in Eleanor’s story. Perhaps in the idea of a path with red-and-white arrows and no algorithm. Perhaps simply in the thought of five days with good books, good company, and the kind of quiet that actually restores rather than merely pauses.
The 5-Day Book Lovers’ Binge Reading and Camino de Santiago Hiking Retreat in the southwest of France was created precisely for people like you: thoughtful, well-read, stretched too thin, and quietly ready for something different. Small groups. Carefully chosen books. Walking on ancient pilgrim paths through one of France’s most beautiful landscapes. Excellent food and unhurried evenings. And the kind of conversation you have been craving with people who mean it.
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.
You do not have to walk 800 kilometres. You just have to say yes to five days.
Not sure which kind of retreat is right for you right now? Take the Ready for a Retreat? Quiz when you sign up for the newsletter, and find out where you are on the path — and what kind of journey your mind and body are actually asking for.
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 would you write on your stone? And, perhaps more importantly, are you ready to put it down/let it go/leave it behind?
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
Bratman, G. N., Hamilton, J. P., Hahn, K. S., Daily, G. C., & Gross, J. J. (2015). Nature experience reduces rumination and subgenual prefrontal cortex activation. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 112(28), 8567–8572. (Demonstrates that walking in nature, as opposed to urban environments, significantly reduces maladaptive self-referential thought, directly relevant to the stress-relieving effects of Camino walking.)
Pilcher, J. J., Stanton, J. D., & Morris, D. M. (2020). The effects of walking on cognitive functioning and mental health outcomes: A systematic review. Health Psychology Review, 14(3), 371–394. (Reviews evidence for walking’s effects on anxiety, depression, and cognitive clarity — the physiological basis for the Camino experience’s documented benefits.)
Park, B. J., Tsunetsugu, Y., Kasetani, T., Kagawa, T., & Miyazaki, Y. (2010). The physiological effects of Shinrin-yoku (taking in the forest atmosphere or forest bathing): Evidence from field experiments in 24 forests across Japan. Environmental Health and Preventive Medicine, 15(1), 18–26. (Provides robust evidence for the physiological relaxation response triggered by immersion in natural forest environments, underpinning the science of why Camino environments reduce stress hormones.)
Verghese, J., Lipton, R. B., Katz, M. J., Hall, C. B., Derby, C. A., Kuslansky, G., Ambrose, A. F., Sliwinski, M., & Buschke, H. (2003). Leisure activities and the risk of dementia in the elderly. New England Journal of Medicine, 348(25), 2508–2516. (Groundbreaking study demonstrating that reading and other cognitively engaging leisure activities significantly reduce cognitive decline — supporting the evidence base for the reading-and-walking retreat combination.)
van Tilburg, M. A. L., Vingerhoets, A. J. J. M., & van Heck, G. L. (1996). Homesickness: A review of the literature. Psychological Medicine, 26(5), 899–912. (While focused on homesickness, this paper explores the profound human need for a sense of belonging and the psychological disruption caused by disconnection from community — directly relevant to why the Camino’s communal rituals, including the buen camino greeting, provide such meaningful psychological repair.)
My “After the Reinvention: Doing Your Thing” 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 pointof 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 Challenge – 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.
For the exhausted, the overwhelmed, the overstimulated, and the quietly desperate for a different kind of life
I know we are nearly halfway through April, but it’s not too late. Should you want to, you can still make this year a slow year.
A slow year is a conscious, deliberate choice to organise a year around intensity and authenticity rather than velocity — protecting pockets of undisturbed rest, unhurried experience, and real focus, and treating these not as rewards to be earned once everything else is done, but as non-negotiables woven into the fabric of daily life.
It draws from the broader Slow Movement philosophy and stands as a quiet rebellion against the cult of productivity and the relentless urgency of our fast-paced modern life — not by doing less, necessarily, but by doing what actually matters, at a pace that allows you to be fully present.
The intentional living trend that’s less about doing less — and more about doing what actually matters
What this is: A practical guide to embracing the “slow year” — not as a romantic notion you flirt with in January and abandon by mid-February, but as an actual, lived experiment in doing life at a more reasonable pace. The kind where you still get things done (you are not, contrary to popular existential dread, turning into a moss-covered bench), but you stop behaving as though every email is a small emergency and every goal must be achieved before lunch.
It’s about learning how to move through 2026 with a steadier nervous system, clearer priorities, and the quiet, radical decision not to sprint just because everyone else has laced up their metaphorical running shoes and is charging toward burnout with impressive enthusiasm. There will be no rigid rules, no sanctimonious finger-wagging, and absolutely no requirement to churn your own butter unless you feel a deep and personal calling to do so.
What this isn’t: Not a lecture about digital detoxing delivered by someone who secretly checks their phone under the table. Not a minimalism manifesto that suggests you can solve existential angst by owning exactly seven objects (three of which are beige). And certainly not another breathless productivity system that promises you “more time” and then quietly fills that time with… more productivity.
You will not be asked to wake up at 4:30am, journal for an hour, meditate for another hour, drink something green and morally superior, and then optimize your circadian rhythm while listening to a podcast about optimizing your circadian rhythm. This is not about doing less so you can do more. It’s about doing what matters, at a pace that doesn’t make you question your life choices every Tuesday afternoon.
Read this if: You’re weary of the noise — not just the literal kind, but the constant, low-grade urgency humming in the background of modern life. You’ve opened the news recently and felt that peculiar mix of concern, disbelief, and a sudden desire to lie down in a dark room with a cup of tea and no Wi-Fi. Read this if you’ve started to suspect that “keeping up” is a game with no finish line, no prize, and slightly questionable rules.
Read this if there’s a quieter, wiser part of you (often drowned out by notifications and other people’s expectations) gently suggesting that there might be a different way to live a year. One with more pauses. More presence. Fewer self-imposed deadlines that were, if we’re honest, never agreed upon by anyone except your inner overachiever. Read this if you’d like to end 2026 not feeling like you survived it by clinging to the side, but like you actually inhabited it — fully, deliberately, and without needing a recovery period.
5 Key Takeaways
A slow year is not about doing less. It’s about doing things that genuinely matter — with more presence, less panic.
Intentional slowness is a radical act in a culture addicted to urgency, and choosing it requires nerve.
Nature, story, and stillness are not luxuries. They are, according to a growing body of research, genuinely restorative to a stressed nervous system.
Community and shared experience amplify the benefits of slow living far beyond anything you can achieve alone on a yoga mat.
Small, consistent rituals — a morning walk, a real book, a conversation without a screen — compound quietly into something that changes you.
Introduction
The world is, at present, exhausting, in the “I opened Twitter before my first coffee and now I need to lie down” sense. Climate headlines. Political upheaval. Cost-of-living squeezes. A relentless news cycle that seems to operate on the assumption that you actually want to feel terrible, all the time.
And here you are. Smart, resourceful, not new to hard seasons, and yet — something in you is fraying at the edges. The old strategies are not quite cutting it anymore. The weekend reset doesn’t hold till the end of Tuesday. The to-do list lengthens overnight. The things that used to light you up now barely register.
You are not broken. You are overstimulated, over-scheduled, and chronically under-nourished by the things that actually matter.
This article is about a different kind of year. A slow one. And no, that doesn’t mean quitting your job and moving to a yurt (although, honestly, some days). It means something more nuanced and more intentional than that.
Part One: The Story of Andrew Garnier, or How a Man Who Fed Everyone Finally Fed Himself
A Retreat in the French Pyrenees, Late October
Andrew Garnier had not eaten a meal sitting down in eleven years.
Not a proper one. Not the kind where you taste what’s in front of you, where you notice the weight of the fork or the particular way a good wine opens up after ten minutes in the glass. He was the chef. He plated. He tasted in fractions, a brush of sauce on a fingertip, a fragment of crust stolen mid-service, a half-spoonful of something that needed more acid. He fed three hundred people a week in his restaurant, Sel Gris, and had held his Michelin star for six consecutive years. He did not, as a rule, eat.
He slept four to six hours. He communicated mostly in imperatives. His sous-chef had started leaving printed notes on his office door rather than speaking to him directly, which Andrew had noticed and chosen not to examine too closely.
It was his older sister, Céleste, who staged the intervention. Not dramatically — she was not a dramatic woman — but firmly, in the way that only a sibling who has watched you slowly disappear can manage. She booked the retreat. She told him the dates. She said, with a precision that remined him of their mother: “You are not well, Andrew. You are just very busy, which is not the same thing.”
He drove to southwest France on a Tuesday in October, telling himself he would check the restaurant group chat every two hours.
He checked it twice the first day. Once the second. After that, he forgot.
The farmhouse surprised him. Not because it was beautiful, though it was, but because of the silence. Andrew Garnier had not stood in silence since he could remember. His world was constructed of sound: the clatter of a professional kitchen, the low roar of a full dining room, the perpetual percussion of a phone that never stopped vibrating on a countertop. Here, in the courtyard, with his bag still in his hand, he could hear a woodpecker somewhere in the trees. He stood there longer than was strictly necessary, listening.
There were three other guests. A retired cardiologist from Lyon who had recently survived a health scare that had, as he put it with elegant understatement, “clarified his priorities considerably.” A secondary school teacher from Cork who had not read a novel in three years and was embarrassed about it. A middle-aged architect from Stockholm who walked like someone recently released from a long captivity — which, in a sense, he had been.
Andrew, who spent his professional life emitting confidence and authority, found that in this company, he had very little to emit. They did not know him. They did not care about his star. They passed the bread and asked him how he’d slept.
It was strangely magical.
On the first morning, they walked a stretch of the ancient Camino de Santiago — a pilgrimage route worn smooth by a thousand years of seeking feet — through woodland already turning amber and copper, the air sharp with the smell of cold earth and pine resin. Andrew, whose daily exercise consisted of moving very fast between a pass and a stove, found the pace disorienting at first. There was no urgency. There was no destination beyond the next ridge.
Andrew crouched and rubbed a sprig of thyme between his fingers. He held his hand to his face and breathed in. A smell he had used ten thousand times, reduced to a technique, abstracted into a menu. And here it was, growing out of a rock in the Pyrenees, wild and indifferent and extraordinarily alive.
Something in his chest made a sound it had not made in a long time. Not a crack. Something gentler. Something splitting open.
In the afternoons, they read. Real books. Andrew, who had not finished a book in two years, had packed three, optimistically. He chose a novel at random — The Old Ways by Robert Macfarlane — and by page thirty he was unreachable. Not gone. More precisely located than he’d been in months. He read for three hours and noticed it had happened only because his tea had gone cold.
Dinner that evening was a long, cheerful affair. A paella, a local favourite, roasted root vegetables, cheeses from a nearby farm, a wine from just over the Spanish border. Andrew ate it. All of it. At a table. Sitting down. The cardiologist poured him a second glass without asking and he did not check his phone.
Afterwards, they sat by the fire and talked. Not networking. Not pitching or impressing or managing. The teacher from Cork said she’d been so tired she’d stopped being able to tell the difference between sadness and exhaustion. The architect said he’d built beautiful spaces for other people to inhabit and had somehow neglected to inhabit any himself. Andrew said almost nothing, but listened with the full, still attention he usually reserved for a dish that wasn’t working.
On the fourth morning, before breakfast, he sat alone with his journal in the paddock, watching the horses move in the early mist. There is something about a horse at rest — the weight and warmth of it, the absolute unhurried presence — that refuses to be rushed by. You cannot multitask near a horse at rest. It will have none of it.
Andrew wrote for an hour. Not a menu. Not a staffing rota. He wrote about his father, who had cooked Sunday lunch every week of his childhood without fanfare or ambition, and how the smell of a roasting chicken could still, if he let it, make him feel genuinely safe. He wrote about what he had wanted, at twenty-two, before the wanting had been overtaken by the doing. He wrote, slowly, the first few lines of a different kind of year.
He flew home on a Friday with aching legs, a finished novel, four pages of journal, and an idea for a tasting menu built entirely around the wild herbs of the Camino path. His sous-chef said he looked strange. “Strange how?” Andrew asked. She thought about it and said: “Like yourself, actually.”
He took that as the highest possible compliment.
Part Two: So, What Actually Is a “Slow Year”?
The phrase “slow year” sits within a broader cultural movement, a quiet rebellion against the cult of productivity that has colonised most of modern life.
It draws from the Slow Movement, which began with food (the Slow Food movement, founded in Italy in 1989 as a response to a McDonald’s opening near the Spanish Steps, of all the inciting incidents) and has since spread into living, travel, fashion, and the general philosophy of doing things at the pace at which they can actually be done well.
A slow year is, at its simplest, a conscious choice to organise twelve months around intensity rather than velocity. It is a year in which you decide, in advance, that you will protect pockets of genuine rest, real attention, and unhurried experience, and that you will treat these not as rewards to be earned but as non-negotiables.
This is not the same as a sabbatical, although it can include one. It is not retirement. It is not a vow of poverty or a rejection of ambition. It is closer to what the philosopher Blaise Pascal was gesturing at in the seventeenth century when he observed (and this has aged extraordinarily well) that all of humanity’s problems stem from the inability to sit quietly in a room alone.
What a Slow Year Actually Looks Like in Practice
Protected mornings. Not all of them, not always. But enough of them. A slow morning is one in which you do not immediately hand your nervous system over to other people’s agendas.
Reading actual books. Not articles. Not threads. Not summaries of books. The sustained attention required by long-form narrative is, it turns out, a genuine cognitive and emotional tonic.
Choosing presence over documentation. Less photographing the moment, more inhabiting it.
Spending significant time in natural environments. Not as exercise, necessarily — though that helps too — but as a form of recalibration. Trees are astonishingly good at this. Research agrees.
Joining a pilgrimage. Not necessarily religious, though it can be. The act of walking somewhere, with intention, over time, changes something in the brain and the body that cannot easily be replicated by a weekend spa.
Seeking genuine community. Not networking. The kind of conversation that happens when people are fed and rested and not performing.
The Ripple Effect
When one person in a household, a family, a team, a community chooses to slow down deliberately, something shifts in the ecosystem around them. We are, as a species, deeply porous. We regulate each other’s nervous systems. A calmer person makes it easier for others to be calm. A person who has stopped performing urgency gives others silent permission to stop too.
The slow year is not a selfish act. It is, in many ways, one of the most generous things you can offer the people around you. A version of yourself that is not running on fumes, not half-present, not held together by caffeine and obligation.
Communities, too, shift when their members return to a human pace. Local shops. Conversations with neighbours. The re-emergence of people who have time to show up, to help, to notice.
Part Three: 5 Mistakes to Avoid When You’re Trying to Live More Slowly
1. Treating “slow” as a binary switch
You cannot go from 0 to 60 mph to a full stop without consequences. The people who announce loudly that they are “doing a digital detox” and then relapse by Tuesday have confused an aspiration with a strategy. A slow year is built in increments. One protected morning. One real walk. One book finished without guilt. Small and consistent beats dramatic and short-lived.
2. Waiting for permission
No one is going to give you a slow year. Your employer will not schedule it. Your family’s needs will not spontaneously reduce. The news will not become less alarming. If you are waiting for circumstances to align before you begin living more intentionally, you are going to wait a very long time. You choose it, in spite of the evidence.
3. Going it alone
Slow living done in isolation tends to feel self-indulgent and collapses quickly under social pressure. Community is load-bearing. Shared meals, shared walks, shared stories, shared laughter — these are not optional extras. They are the structure.
4. Confusing slowness with passivity
A slow year is not about achieving less. Some of the most creative, productive, and influential people in history were radical slowpokes by modern standards. Darwin took long daily walks. Wordsworth composed while walking. Keats wrote letters. Depth and output are not arch enemies. Slowing down often unlocks capacities that busyness has been suppressing.
5. Ignoring your body
The mind wants to intellectualise this. To read the books, think the thoughts, perhaps make a vision board. But the body is the instrument. Chronic stress lives in the tissues. Walking in nature, physical tiredness from real exertion, the weight and warmth of a real meal eaten slowly — these reach parts that no amount of journaling reaches alone. Don’t outsource the physical. Include it.
A Short Intention-Setting Exercise: Your Slow Year Manifesto
Answer these three questions, longhand if you can:
1. What am I most hungry for, that I haven’t been getting? (Not achievements. Qualities of experience. Think: stillness, beauty, laughter, depth, freedom, belonging.)
2. What one thing, if I protected it consistently this year, would change how I feel most days? (A morning walk? An hour of reading before bed? A weekend monthly without commitments?)
3. Who would benefit if I became calmer and more present? (Write the names. Let that be your motivation on the days when you feel like you don’t have “time.”)
Recommended Reading: 5 Books for Your Slow Year
1. In Praise of Slowness by Carl Honoré (2004) The book that essentially launched the modern slow movement. Honoré, a self-confessed speed addict, travels the world examining cultures and communities that have pushed back against the cult of fast. Rigorous, funny, and quietly life-altering. An essential primer.
2. The Nature Fix by Florence Williams (2017) Williams travels to Finland, Japan, and South Korea to investigate why time in nature makes humans measurably healthier and happier. The science is robust, the writing is beautiful, and you will want to be in a forest within twenty minutes of opening it.
3. How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy by Jenny Odell (2019) Part manifesto, part art criticism, part ecological love letter — this book is for the thoughtful person who suspects that reclaiming attention is actually a political act. Demanding and rewarding in equal measure.
4. The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry by John Mark Comer (2019) Do not be put off by the subtitle. This is a sharp, honest, and beautifully observed book about what chronic hurry costs us at the deepest level, and what a different pace might restore. Written with faith as its frame, but with insights that reach well beyond any one tradition.
5. Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times by Katherine May (2020) Written in the aftermath of a family crisis, Wintering is about the seasons of withdrawal that every life contains — and how to move through them with more grace than dread. Tender, wise, and full of lovely, slow sentences.
PS: If you’re looking for a practical, day-by-day companion for the kind of inner shifts a slow year invites, my book Embracing Change — in 10 Minutes a Day is exactly the kind of quiet, grounded guide you need. It won’t shout at you. It won’t give you a seven-step system. It will, gently and consistently, help you move.
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.
Q1: Is a “slow year” realistic for someone with a demanding job and family responsibilities? Yes — with one significant caveat: it will not happen by accident. You will need to decide, in advance, that certain things are protected. You don’t need a sabbatical or a six-figure savings pot. You need three or four genuine anchors in your year — experiences or rituals that are slow, nourishing, and non-negotiable. The rest can be ordinary. The anchors change everything.
Q2: I’m not sure I can “do nothing.” I get anxious when I’m not productive. Is slow living for me? Possibly more for you than for anyone else. The anxiety you feel about stillness is the symptom, not the verdict. Most people who describe themselves as “unable to relax” are not constitutionally incapable of it — they are deeply habituated to urgency. That habituation can change. It usually changes first in the body, on a walk or in a chair by a fire with a good book, before the mind catches up.
Q3: How is a reading retreat on the Camino different from just going on holiday? A holiday is typically about escape — different scenery, same self. A retreat offers something more structural: a container in which something can actually shift. The combination of purposeful walking (the Camino is one of the oldest pilgrimage routes in the world), extended reading, good food, and genuine community creates conditions for a kind of recalibration that a week in Tenerife, lovely as it is, tends not to.
Q4: Do I have to be religious to walk the Camino? Absolutely not. The vast majority of Camino walkers today describe themselves as non-religious. The path is ancient, yes — and that antiquity gives it a weight and a quality of silence that is palpable regardless of belief. What it asks of you is simply your feet and your attention. That’s enough.
Q5: I’ve been stressed for so long I’m not sure I know what “restored” feels like. Is that normal? Entirely. Chronic stress normalises itself. You stop remembering what baseline feels like and start mistaking exhaustion for personality. Many people who attend retreats report being surprised by the return of things they’d forgotten: curiosity, appetite (for food, ideas, company), a capacity for genuine joy. These things didn’t go anywhere. They were just buried under the noise.
Conclusion: The Year Ahead
There is a version of 2026 that looks very much like 2025. Fast, loud, anxious, and over before you could catch your breath.
And there is another version.
One with mornings that belong to you. Long walks on ancient paths through oak and bracken. A book so absorbing you miss your stop. A meal that took two hours because the conversation was too good to rush. A sky full of stars above a stone farmhouse in southwest France, the smell of woodsmoke in the air, and the quiet, settled knowledge that you are, finally, somewhere real.
You get to choose which version you’re in.
The world will not slow down for you. But you — smart, capable, weathered, ready — can choose a different pace. Not as an escape from your life. As a deeper entrance into it.
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.
But Are You Ready for a Retreat?
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.
Not sure if now is the right time, or which retreat is the right fit? Take the Ready for a Retreat? Quiz when you sign up for my newsletter, and find out exactly what kind of slow experience your particular form of tired is calling for.
References
Bratman, G. N., Hamilton, J. P., Hahn, K. S., Daily, G. C., & Gross, J. J. (2015). Nature experience reduces rumination and subgenual prefrontal cortex activation. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 112(28), 8567–8572.
Kabat-Zinn, J., Massion, A. O., Kristeller, J., Peterson, L. G., Fletcher, K. E., Pbert, L., … Santorelli, S. F. (1992). Effectiveness of a meditation-based stress reduction program in the treatment of anxiety disorders. American Journal of Psychiatry, 149(7), 936–943.
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.
Selhub, E. M., & Logan, A. C. (2012). Your brain on nature: The science of nature’s influence on your health, happiness and vitality. Journal of Affective Disorders, evidence reviewed in book-form but founded on peer-reviewed studies; see also: Ulrich, R. S. et al. (1991). Stress recovery during exposure to natural and urban environments. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 11(3), 201–230.
Aspinall, P., Mavros, P., Coyne, R., & Roe, J. (2015). The urban brain: Analysing outdoor physical activity with mobile EEG. British Journal of Sports Medicine, 49(4), 272–276.
The science and soul of slow friendship — and how to cultivate it before you burn out completely
Slow friendship is a way of relating to others that prioritises depth, authenticity, and genuine presence over speed, intensity, or obligation. Rather than rushing into closeness or holding friends to unspoken expectations, it allows connection to unfold naturally over time, giving both people the freedom to show up as their full, imperfect selves without fear of judgment or abandonment. It’s less about constant contact and more about the quality of care — a kind of friendship that doesn’t demand perfection, weathers change and contradiction, and treats the bond itself as something sacred.
What this is: A thoughtful, insight-giving look at “slow friendship” — the quietly radical art of building reciprocal, gloriously unhurried connections in a world that has somehow decided relationships should function like a quarterly performance review. (Spoiler: they shouldn’t. You are not a KPI. Your friendships are not a pipeline. There will be no bonus for “exceeding expectations in emotional availability.”) This is about the kind of connection where someone remembers what you told them last time, asks the follow-up question, and — in a move so subversive it borders on scandalous — does not check their phone while you’re answering.
What this isn’t: A lecture about putting your phone down. (You know. I know you know. Your screen-time report knows. We are not here to reopen that particular wound.) It is also not a listicle of “5 easy ways to make friends as an adult,” illustrated with stock photos of improbably radiant people laughing at salad — the kind of advice that is both technically correct and spiritually unhelpful, and that makes you want to lie down in a darkened room with a cold cloth on your forehead and reconsider your subscription to modern life.
Read this if: You are exhausted — not just tired, but existentially, soul-deep tired — by the daily onslaught of world events you cannot fix and cannot stop refreshing. If you are vaguely, embarrassingly lonely despite being perpetually, aggressively connected. If you have recently looked at your phone, noted seventeen unread messages across four group chats, and felt not warmth but a low-grade administrative panic. If you suspect your closest friendships have been quietly downgraded to sporadic voice notes and the occasional heart-react, and that somewhere along the way you stopped being known and started being… managed.
And if — just if — you are willing to entertain the mildly inconvenient, deeply appealing possibility that the remedy might involve the French countryside, a stack of novels that do not improve your CV in any measurable way, a pair of walking shoes, and the company of a small, well-chosen group of humans who have absolutely no interest in optimising you.
5 Key Takeaways
Slow friendship is not a lifestyle trend — it’s a biological necessity. Your nervous system is quite literally designed for face-to-face, unhurried connection. Anything less is a workaround, a short-term solution.
Quality over quantity is not a consolation prize. Research consistently shows that two or three genuinely close friendships have a more profound effect on wellbeing than a crowd of pleasant acquaintances.
Slow friendships are built in the margins — shared silences, shared meals, shared miles. You cannot rush them, and you absolutely cannot replicate them on a screen.
The world feels less terrifying when you feel genuinely witnessed by another human being. Slow friendship is, among other things, an extraordinarily effective antidote to news-cycle anxiety.
You don’t have to overhaul your entire life to experience this. Sometimes, one intentional week is enough to remind you who you are — and who you want to be close to.
Introduction: You Are Not Broken. You Are Just Under-Befriended.
You’re sitting with your phone in hand, having just scrolled through the news (mistake), then through social media (bigger mistake), then through three different WhatsApp group chats that are too busy and at the same time entirely devoid of anything you actually need to know. You are, by every modern metric, connected. You have notifications. You have followers. You have a contacts list so long it scrolls for what feels like several business days.
And yet.
There is a specific, hollow, slightly uncomfortable kind of loneliness that sits in the chest of people who are, technically, never alone. A loneliness that has nothing to do with being unloved and everything to do with never being truly known. Never sitting across from someone who looks at you, unhurried, and asks not “how are you?” but “no, really — how are you?“
That loneliness? It has a name now. And its antidote has one too.
Slow friendship is what happens when two people actually show up for each other — slowly, consistently, with attention and genuine interest. It is the opposite of the connection our culture has been selling us. And it is, it turns out, exactly what our overstimulated, under-nourished nervous systems are quietly screaming for.
I have been giving this a lot of thought, and for me, a slow friendship is a kind friendship. A friendship based on being kind to each other, must, it seems to me, have kindness as its foundation.
In this article, you’ll discover what slow friendship actually is, why it matters more than ever right now, and — no pressure — why a week walking an ancient pilgrim trail in the French countryside, surrounded by good books and excellent company, might be precisely the slow-friendship catalyst you didn’t know you needed.
The Story: How Sophie Marchand Accidentally Found Her Herself
Sophie Marchand was, by most external measures, doing extremely well.
She had a successful freelance consultancy, a flat she’d renovated herself in Toulouse, a book club that met monthly (mostly), and a social calendar that looked, from the outside, positively enviable. She had friends. Plenty of them. There was Camille, who she’d known since university and still texted on birthdays. There was the work crowd, perfectly nice, always up for a drink. There was the yoga group, the neighbours she waved to warmly, the LinkedIn connections she’d met at conferences and promised to “catch up with properly asap.”
Sophie, in other words, had the architecture of a rich social life. What she did not have, at the age of fifty-four, was anyone she could call at eleven o’clock on a Tuesday night when the news had done its worst and the walls were closing in.
She didn’t let herself think about that too hard.
Then the year turned particularly grim. The geopolitical situation, which she’d been monitoring with the anxious vigilance of someone who reads three newspapers a day, grew grimmer still. Her work, though steady, felt increasingly purposeless. And one evening, sitting in her beautiful renovated flat, eating reheated pasta alone and watching a documentary about a problem she neither cared nor could do anything about, Sophie Marchand had a very small, very quiet, very significant meltdown.
She didn’t sob dramatically. She simply put down her fork, looked at the wall, and thought: I am so tired of feeling like this, and I have no idea who to call.No one to talk to.
It was her sister who found the retreat. “You need to get out of your own head,” her sister said, in the way only sisters can, “and you need to do it somewhere beautiful, with books, and without your laptop.” She sent a link. Sophie looked at it for three days before booking.
The morning she arrived in southwest France, Sophie was still not entirely sure what she’d signed up for. She’d imagined something slightly awkward — enforced bonding, trust falls, sharing circles. She’d prepared herself with the resigned practicality of someone who has attended enough corporate team-building events to have lost all faith in group activities.
What she found instead was this: an ancient farmhouse scented with lavender and old wood, a stack of novels on every available surface, a long table set for dinner under the evening sky, and six women she had never met, all of whom had arrived carrying, she would later understand, a version of the same weight she was carrying.
They didn’t talk about their feelings on the first night. They talked about books.
Specifically, they talked about which fictional character had annoyed them most profoundly, who had cried at the end of A Little Life (everyone, immediately, no contest), and whether there is such a thing as a beach read that is also genuinely literary. The conversation ran past midnight. The wine was very good. Sophie laughed, properly — the kind of laugh that starts somewhere deep and a bit rusty — for the first time in longer than she could accurately remember.
The next morning, they walked.
The Camino de Santiago path here was not punishing — it was inviting. Sun on limestone. The smell of wild thyme released by their footsteps. The particular silence of countryside that has been walked for a thousand years and does not feel the need to explain itself. Sophie fell into step with a woman called Nadia, a secondary school teacher from Bristol who had the extraordinary gift of asking questions and then actually waiting for the answer.
“What do you miss?” Nadia asked, somewhere around the second kilometre.
Sophie opened her mouth to say something sensible and found, to her slight alarm, that what came out instead was the truth: “I miss feeling like I matter to someone. Not in a work way. In a person way.”
There was a pause. Nadia nodded. “Yes,” she said simply. “Me too.”
That was it. That was the whole conversation. But something unlocked.
Over the next four days, something remarkable happened — not loudly or dramatically, but in the way that real things tend to happen: slowly, cumulatively, in the spaces between. It happened over shared meals, where the food was simple and exceptional and no one looked at their phones. It happened on the trail, where conversations deepened naturally when you were walking side by side instead of facing each other across a table. It happened during the afternoon reading hours — that glorious, guilt-free stretch of time set aside specifically for sitting somewhere beautiful with a novel and absolutely no agenda — when someone would occasionally read a passage aloud and someone else would say “oh god, yes,” and something true would hang briefly in the warm air between them.
By the final evening, something had shifted. Not everything — Sophie still had the freelance consultancy, the flat, the world in its current state. But she had also, somehow, acquired three women whose WhatsApp messages she actually wanted to open. Women who, when they asked how she was, meant it. Women who had seen her, unhurried, over four days of walking and reading and bad puns at dinner, and had decided they liked what they saw.
She had, without quite meaning to, made slow friends.
So What Exactly Is Slow Friendship? And Why Does It Matter So Much Right Now?
The phrase “slow friendship” is relatively new but the concept, of course, is as old as humanity. For most of our existence, friendship was inherently slow. You knew people over years. You saw them regularly, in person, for extended stretches of time. You knew their kitchen and the way they laughed and what they looked like when they were sad and trying to hide it.
Then, somewhere between the industrial revolution, the internet, and the particular social upheaval of the last decade, friendship got optimised. It got faster, flatter, and significantly more scalable. We acquired hundreds of connections we couldn’t quite distinguish from friendships, and we began, slowly, to confuse activity for intimacy.
Slow friendship is the deliberate counter-movement to that. At its core, it is simply this: choosing quality over quantity. Prioritising the sustained, reciprocal, unglamorous, enormously rewarding work of truly knowing someone — and letting yourself be known.
The researcher Brené Brown has called deep human connection “the purpose of human existence.” The psychologist Robin Dunbar, whose famous “Dunbar’s number” suggests we can maintain meaningful relationships with only around 150 people (and genuinely close ones with far fewer, perhaps five), has argued that the quality of our close friendships is one of the most reliable predictors of both mental and physical health. Loneliness, meanwhile, has been declared a public health crisis in multiple countries, with effects on mortality comparable to smoking fifteen cigarettes a day.
None of this is small.
What makes slow friendship particularly urgent right now is the specific texture of modern anxiety. The world is genuinely frightening in ways that are hard to process alone. Climate change, political polarisation, economic uncertainty, the relentless algorithmic amplification of everything terrible — these are not small concerns, and the appropriate response to them is not, unfortunately, refreshing your news feed one more time.
The appropriate response, it turns out, is human connection. Specifically, the kind of loyal, trusting,lasting connection that makes you feel that whatever is happening out there, you are not facing it in a void. That someone knows you. That you matter to a specific set of people in a specific, irreplaceable way.
That, in its simplest form, is what slow friendship offers.
How Slow Friendship Ripples Outward
Here is what makes it particularly worth pursuing: the benefits of slow friendship do not stay contained within the friendship itself.
When Sophie returned to Toulouse, she was different. Not dramatically, not in ways she could have listed efficiently in a presentation — but different. She initiated a long-overdue honest conversation with Camille, who, it turned out, had also been feeling the distance between them and was quietly devastated by it. She started a small, informal neighbourhood supper club, six people, monthly, no phones at the table. She became, by her own account, a kinder and more present teacher in the workshops she ran.
This is not coincidence. When we feel genuinely connected, we become more generous, more patient, more courageous. The felt sense of being known and valued is, quite literally, regulating to the nervous system. It reduces cortisol, increases oxytocin, and makes us significantly more capable of showing up well for the other humans in our lives.
Slow friendship, in other words, is not a private luxury. It is, in the most practical sense, a contribution to the people around you.
5 Mistakes to Avoid on the Path to Slow Friendship
1. Treating depth as something that happens automatically with time. Years of knowing someone does not automatically produce closeness. Many people have long-term friends they have never been truly honest with. Slow friendship requires intentionality — the willingness to move beyond the surface, even when that feels uncomfortable.
2. Expecting it to look like your twenties. Adult friendship rarely involves spontaneous three-hour phone calls or staying up till four in the morning solving the world’s problems (lovely as that was). Slow friendship in midlife tends to look quieter — more deliberate, more scheduled, and no less meaningful for it.
3. Confusing digital contact with actual connection. Liking someone’s Instagram post, texting a birthday emoji, being “in touch” — is about maintenance, not nourishment. They are the difference between keeping a plant alive and actually tending a garden.
4. Waiting for the perfect moment to invest. The “I’ll reach out when things settle down” phenomenon is responsible for more slowly dying friendships than any falling-out. Things do not settle down. Reach out anyway.
5. Underestimating the power of shared physical experience. Walking together, eating together, reading in comfortable silence together — the body participates in friendship, not just the mind. Some of the most profound bonding happens not through talking about things but through doing things side by side. This is partly neurological: shared physical experience synchronises nervous systems and builds trust in ways that conversation alone cannot.
A Short Intention-Setting Exercise: The Friendship Inventory
Find a quiet ten minutes. Make tea. Sit outside.
Take a piece of paper and write down three names. Not your most popular friends, or your most useful ones — but the people with whom, if you’re honest, you most want to build or deepen a genuine slow friendship.
For each name, write one sentence: What specifically am I not giving this friendship that I could?
Then write one small, concrete action you could take in the next seven days.
That’s it. You are not reinventing your social life. You are planting three seeds.
Further Reading: Books Worth Bringing on the Trail
1. Big Friendship: How We Keep Each Other Close by Aminatou Sow and Ann Friedman A candid, generous exploration of what it actually takes to maintain a deep female friendship over many years and across distance. Chosen because it names the unspoken work of adult friendship without sentimentalising it — and because it will make you want to call your oldest friend immediately.
2. The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters by Priya Parker An extraordinary book about how the spaces and occasions we create shape the quality of our connections. Essential reading for anyone who wants to understand why some gatherings nourish and others merely fill time.
3. Lost Connections: Why You’re Depressed and How to Find Hope by Johann Hari Though broader in scope than friendship alone, Hari’s rigorous and compassionate examination of disconnection and its consequences is deeply relevant here. He argues, persuasively, that meaningful connection is not a luxury but a fundamental human requirement.
4. The Lonely Century: Coming Together in a World That’s Pulling Apart by Noreena Hertz A meticulously researched account of the loneliness epidemic and its wide-ranging consequences. It is sobering in the best possible way — and makes a powerful case for why slow friendship is not indulgence but necessity.
5. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer Not about friendship in the conventional sense, but profoundly about connection — to nature, to community, to the slow and reciprocal relationships that sustain life. It will change the way you walk through the world. Which makes it perfect walking retreat reading.
P.S. If you are finding that the world’s current pace is making it genuinely hard to hear your own thoughts, let alone tend your friendships, you might also find Embracing Change – in 10 Minutes a Day a practical companion. It’s designed for exactly that: small, daily moments of intentional reflection that add up to something real.
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 reading retreats include, at no extra cost, access to the Reconnect with Nature: A Guided Journaling Course Inspired by Horses online course. Horses, it turns out, have a great deal to teach us about presence, about reading non-verbal cues, and about the kind of patient, attentive connection that slow friendship requires. (They are also, for the record, far less anxious about the news than we are, and there is something instructive in that.)
Q: Is slow friendship just another name for having a best friend? Not quite. Slow friendship is more of a quality than a specific category — it describes friendships characterised by depth, reciprocity, and unhurried attention. You might have a best friend you’ve never been entirely honest with (common!) and a slow friendship with someone you see only once a year but with whom you go genuinely deep. The pace and intention matter more than the label.
Q: What if I’ve let my close friendships slide and it feels too late to recover them? It almost certainly isn’t too late. Research on “rekindled friendships” (yes, this is a studied phenomenon) suggests that reconnecting with a close friend after a long gap can re-establish emotional intimacy relatively quickly — because the foundation is already there. A handwritten note, a direct and honest message, an invitation to do something specific together — it takes courage, but rarely as much as we fear.
Q: Can you build slow friendships online? Partially. Digital connection can maintain and even deepen a friendship that has been established in person. What it struggles to do is create one from scratch — because so much of the neurobiological trust-building that underlies deep connection requires physical presence. Voice, eye contact, shared physical experience — these are not optional extras. They are how we are wired.
Q: I’m introverted. Does slow friendship work for me, or does it still require a lot of socialising? Slow friendship is arguably made for introverts. It is the opposite of exhausting surface-level networking. A small number of deeply known people, seen at a manageable frequency, in meaningful rather than performative contexts — this is introvert friendship done well. Many introverts find group retreats surprisingly natural precisely because the setting is structured, purposeful, and conducive to going deep rather than wide.
Q: How do I find potential slow friends as an adult when I’m not in an environment that naturally creates them? This is genuinely hard, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something. The most reliable approach is to seek shared experiences over shared interests — not a book club where everyone reads the same book and makes small talk, but an immersive, extended experience where people are stripped of their usual social performance and allowed to be real. (A five-day walking and reading retreat, for instance. Just as a completely random example.)
Conclusion: The World Is Rushing Blindly Ahead. Slow Down.
There is an old Celtic concept, anam cara, meaning “soul friend” — a companion who sees you fully, without judgement, and in whose presence you can be entirely yourself. The Irish poet and philosopher John O’Donohue described the anam cara relationship as one in which “all masks fall away and you can be as you really are.”
We are living in an era that specialises in masks. We perform busyness, optimism, resilience, curatedness. We perform being fine. And then we go home and feel quietly hollowed out by the performance.
Slow friendship is the counter-performance. It is the quiet act of saying: I am here. I am not rushing. I want to know you, and I am willing to be known.
As O’Donohue wrote: “When you really feel understood, you feel free to release yourself into the trust and shelter of the other person’s soul.”
Here’s a question worth sitting with: When did you last allow yourself to be truly known by someone — not your edited, coping, doing-fine version, but the real, unguarded, slightly-overwhelmed-by-it-all version? And who in your life might be waiting for the same invitation from you?
If something in this article landed — if you recognised that hollow, over-connected loneliness, or felt a flicker of longing for the kind of friendship where you don’t have to perform — then perhaps it’s time to try something different.
The 5-Day Booklovers’ Binge Reading and Camino de Santiago Hiking Retreat in southwest France is designed for exactly this. Walking an ancient path, reading without guilt, eating well, sleeping deeply, and spending unhurried time with a small group of thoughtful women who arrived, like you, carrying the weight of the world and ready to put some of it down. No agenda other than to read, walk, reconnect — with nature, with stories, and with the kind of slow, real friendship you didn’t know you were starving for. Your nervous system will thank you. So will your future self.
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.
Take the Quiz: Are You Ready for a Retreat?
Not sure if this is right for you? Sign up for the newsletter and take theReady for a Retreat? Quiz— a short, surprisingly accurate self-assessment that will tell you exactly where you are, what you need, and whether a week in the French countryside might be it.
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
Holt-Lunstad, J., Smith, T. B., & Layton, J. B. (2010). Social relationships and mortality risk: A meta-analytic review. PLOS Medicine, 7(7), e1000316. Landmark meta-analysis of 148 studies demonstrating that adequate social relationships increase the likelihood of survival by 50%, directly supporting the claim that friendship quality is a health imperative.
Dunbar, R. I. M. (2018). The anatomy of friendship. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 22(1), 32–51. Dunbar’s synthesis of evolutionary and neurobiological research on human friendship, including evidence for the cognitive limits on meaningful relationships and the characteristics of close bonds.
Cacioppo, J. T., & Cacioppo, S. (2018). The growing problem of loneliness. The Lancet, 391(10119), 426. A brief but authoritative commentary from the leading loneliness researchers, situating loneliness as a public health crisis and noting its physiological and psychological consequences.
Kok, B. E., & Singer, T. (2017). Phenomenological fingerprints of four meditations: Differential state changes in affect, mind-wandering, meta-cognition, and interoception before and after daily practice across 9 months of training. Mindfulness, 8(1), 218–231. While focused on meditation, this study’s findings on the role of interoception and sustained attentional practice are directly relevant to the quality of presence required for deep interpersonal connection.
Pressman, S. D., Cohen, S., Miller, G. E., Barkin, A., Rabin, B. S., & Treanor, J. J. (2005). Loneliness, social network size, and immune response to influenza vaccination in college freshmen. Health Psychology, 24(3), 297–306. A compelling demonstration that loneliness (rather than social network size alone) predicts immune response, illustrating the biological pathways through which the quality of connection affects physical health.
All content of this website is copyrighted. You cannot copy the content of this page
