Offering access to a Stress-busting Day Retreat with Dr Margaretha Montagu and her Friesian and Falabella horses in the foothills of the French Pyrenées Mountains

A limited number of Day Retreat Passes are available for a minimum of 2 people and a maximum of 8 people. Day Retreat Passes can be booked by couples, friends, a mother/daughter, on birthdays, anniversaries, graduations, etc. or by work colleagues.

There will be no horse riding during these retreats. Everyone’s feet stay firmly on the ground.

If you would like to attend a Stress Less Day Retreat, please send an email to margarethamontagu(at)gmail.com, with ‘Day Retreat’ as its heading.

This Stress-busting Day Retreat is for you if you feel stressed, drained, exhausted and overwhelmed but don’t know what to do about it.

If you were less stressed…

You would sleep through the night without your brain scheduling a 3 am meeting to review everything that went wrong in 2019
You would say no and actually mean it — without the guilt, without the excuses, and without spending the next three days wondering if the other person is upset with you
You would stop agreeing to take on work you don’t have time for, don’t want to do, and will absolutely resent by Thursday
You would notice when people were taking advantage of your good nature — and you’d feel quietly confident enough to decline, without it becoming a whole thing
You would have relationships that give back as much as they ask — with your partner, your family, your friends, your colleagues — because you’d have enough left in reserve to actually show up for them
You would make time for yourself without it feeling selfish, stolen, or in need of justification
You would say what you mean, in the way you mean it, to the people who need to hear it — without spending an hour beforehand rehearsing how they might react
You would simply be yourself — not the curated, capable, holding-it-all-together version, but the actual you — and that would feel like more than enough

If you were less stressed, you would be less at risk of physical and mental illnesses caused or worsened by the unrelenting and escalating stress that characterises modern life.

If I offered to introduce you to a technique or two that significantly lowers your stress levels, would you be interested? Ways to combat stress that are easy to incorporate into your daily life, don’t need you to buy any fancy equipment, take 10-15 minutes a day and do not cost anything to put into practice?

I am sure you would.

That is why I created these Stress-busting Day Retreats based on equine-assisted mindfulness and equine-guided meditation for stress management.

The Benefits of these Day Retreats

Horses are extraordinarily honest communicators. They don’t do passive aggression, they don’t say yes when they mean no, and they have never once sent a follow-up email clarifying what they really meant. Spending time with them has a way of teaching us, quietly and without a single PowerPoint slide, what clear and confident communication actually feels like in the body.

A day spent in genuine contact with them — and with yourself — will leave you with skills that no workshop, webinar, or well-intentioned self-help book has managed to give you. Specifically, it could help you:

Handle conflict more effectively — because a horse has already walked you through what staying grounded in the presence of something large and unpredictable actually feels like, and it turns out most human conflict is considerably smaller than a Friesian horse
Say no without the guilt spiral and without making excuses — horses say no with their whole body and then immediately get on with their day. Revolutionary.
Build relationships that are genuinely sustaining rather than quietly draining — because you’ll have spent a day with creatures who cannot pretend, and it recalibrates your tolerance for those who can
Connect more easily with less effort — presence is the whole game with horses, and it turns out it’s the whole game with people too
Communicate with more ease and considerably more effect — when you’ve learned to make yourself understood without words, words become surprisingly powerful
Put yourself first without abandoning the people you love — horses demonstrate this boundary with cheerful consistency and zero collateral damage
Know where your limits are, and you will hold them — not aggressively, not apologetically, just clearly. Like a horse.
Leave carrying less stress in your body than you arrived with — not suppressed stress, not rebranded stress, but stress that has been genuinely, physically released somewhere between the paddock and the Pyrenees

That is not all. There is much more to this Retreat Day than a morning equine-assisted mindfulness session and an afternoon equine-guided meditation session.

Each day consists of a 2 to 3-hour morning session that includes:

A short briefing session during which we will discuss any concerns participants may have about working with the horses and during which you will find out exactly what to expect
A walking meditation session with the horses – a powerfully stress-busting meditation method that you can easily add to your day – on your way to work, for example.
An equine-assisted mindfulness session
A longer debriefing session when we discuss the experience with the horses and determine exactly to what extent the horses have helped each participant become less stressed and how they can transfer what they have learnt from the horses into their everyday lives.

And a 2 to 3-hour afternoon session that includes

A second equine-facilitated mindfulness exercise
An equine-guided meditation
A discussion of what you have learnt and achieved during your retreat day over a cup of tea/coffee/hot chocolate and pastries.

In addition, each participant receives

A pre-retreat day preparation pack via e-mail
An e-book copy of the latest edition of Dr Montagu’s book Embracing Change in 10 minutes a Day
A certificate of completion

“This was an absolutely amazing experience. Life-changing, totally. Due to a seriously unfortunate experience with horses in my childhood, horses scared me witless. Today I not only overcame that fear, I learned how to gently defend my boundaries against two humongous Friesian horses. After this, no one is ever going to make me do anything that I am not 100% committedto do. The meditation sessions were out of this world. I have meditated before, but never like this. An unforgettable experience that I very highly recommend.” S. Bradshaw

You might well walk away from this day retreat feeling more alive, energised and positive about your future and about life in general than you’ve felt in years.

Now is the time to invest in yourself and your future. Consider how much time and money you have wasted over the years on countless self-help books, self-help programs and consultations with so-called experts that never offered you a practical way of increasing your confidence and assertiveness, nor a sustainable way to manage the stress that you are suffering from.

Cost

Option 1 Morning or afternoon attendance 75€ pp
Option 2 Morning, lunch and afternoon attendance 149€ pp

You could continue to try to figure this out on your own. You can keep on desperately trying each new stress-busting or confidence-boosting method that appears on the horizon for the next two, five, ten or twenty years.

Or you could contact me to discuss the possibility of attending an equine-assisted Stress-busting day retreat.

All you have to do is:

Send an email to margarethamontagu@gmail.com with “Day Retreat” as its subject.
Include your name, your age, the size of your group and a little bit about why you are interested in my Day Retreats
Give me an indication of when you would like to attend one of these day retreats – they are usually scheduled on Fridays, but I’m flexible.

I look forward to hearing from you and even more to introducing you to the horses – they love these days!

All the best for now,
Margaretha

About Dr Margaretha Montagu

Qualifications

Dr Montagu (MBChB, MRCGP, NLP cert, Med Hyp Dip and EAGALA cert level 2) is an experienced medical doctor, medical hypnotherapist, NLP practitioner and an equine-assisted psychotherapist (EAGALA cert level II). She has worked in a variety of medical disciplines, including Psychiatry. She worked in Jersey, in the Channel Islands for 12 years, 8 and a half of these years as a General Practitioner. Dr Montagu has retired from medical practice and now shares what she has learned through workshops and public speaking in the UK, France, Holland, Belgium and South Africa and during her residential Equine Guided Growth Workshops.

Approach

In spite of these qualifications, Dr Montagu is a very down-to-earth person who has a warm, personal, active and non-judgmental approach to problem-solving. She will help you address your problems with highly structured, solution-oriented techniques with the assistance of her horses (the “real therapists” as she calls them), and she will treat you with as much respect, dignity and compassion as she treats her horses.

Experience

Dr Montagu has had extensive experience with a variety of individuals covering a wide panorama of disciplines, age, education, ethnic and cultural heritage. Her frequent attendance at professional conventions and participation in continuing education classes and seminars has greatly expanded her repertoire of therapeutic techniques. When working with clients, she draws from many modalities, including Cognitive/Behavioural Therapy, Emotional Focused Couple Therapy, Positive Psychology, Short-term Solution-Focused Therapy, Equine-assisted Experiential Learning and NLP.

Dr Montagu’s approach to equine-assisted experiential learning emphasises self-exploration and self-revelation, promoting understanding, recognition, respect, better communication and appreciation of others.

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.