For twenty years Olivia Ramirez Smith ran a med spa in Victorville, California, and could not account for something she saw every week.
The women who came through New Image and J. Michaels were doing everything they had been told to do. They ate reasonably. Some of them exercised. They had read the same articles everyone reads. And they were depleted in a way that none of it touched.
Olivia Ramirez Smith had fifty people on staff and two decades of appointments to draw on, and the pattern held. Something was missing from the standard list, and she didn’t know what it was.
The question sat unanswered for a long time.
What eventually answered it came from Clint Ober, who had spent years on the research into what happens when a human body makes direct contact with the surface of the earth. Ober did the foundational work and the invention that followed. Olivia Ramirez Smith read it and recognized the shape of her own missing variable.
The women she had been treating had engineered contact with the ground out of their lives without ever deciding to. Rubber soles, sealed floors, days spent indoors from one climate-controlled box to the next. It was the one item nobody had on the checklist because nobody had thought to put it there.
She founded The Mother Earth Effect LLC to close that gap, and she was past sixty when she did it.
The company has produced books, a documentary, retreats, indoor grounding products, and a donation program that has grounded twenty thousand firefighters. Every one of those formats answers the same question she carried out of Victorville.
She was sixty-one when she started building in earnest, which puts her outside the founder profile the wellness industry rewards. Olivia Ramirez Smith was born in January 1962 in Coolidge, Arizona, and she had already run one company to fifty employees before she began this one.
The advantage of founding late is that the twenty years of observation are already done. She did not need a discovery phase. She had been running one since 1999 without calling it that.
The documentary came first in reach. She co-produced The Earthing Movie, featuring Clint Ober, Strategic Partner, and it has reached over 8 million global views. Giving it away was the fastest route to a person who had never heard the argument.
The books came next. Her bestselling The Mother Earth Effect pairs the research she advocates with twenty-one contributing women and a foreword by Mariel Hemingway. Before it, she was one of the co-authors of Sacred Spaces: Subtle shifts for Mind, Body, and Home Transformations, the Colleen Avis collaboration that hit number one and won the Books for Peace International Award. Two number one best-sellers, both of them shared credit.
Then Sole Rooted, six days in Joshua Tree with twelve women, for the part that will not transmit through a page.
The certifications came along the way. Master Neurolinguistic Practitioner (NLP). Mental and Emotional Release (MER) specialist. Olivia Ramirez Smith went and got trained in the clinical layer she kept running into, because a woman whose body settles and whose old patterns stay intact will be back where she started by spring.
None of this was a career plan. It was a working question that took twenty years to answer and has taken another decade to build around.
The title she is known by around the world, The Earthing Ambassador, came from other people. Olivia Ramirez Smith did not pick it. She was too busy answering the question.
More on Olivia Ramirez Smith’s books, the Sole Rooted retreat and her work as The Earthing Ambassador at her official site.
