Most wellness leaders do not work with the unconscious mind on purpose. Olivia Ramirez Smith does.
She is a Master Neurolinguistic Practitioner (NLP) and a certified specialist in Mental and Emotional Release (MER). MER is the methodology developed by Tad James to help clients clear long-held emotional patterns at the level beneath conscious thought. Olivia Ramirez Smith holds those certifications not as decoration but as the working core of how she helps women heal.
That is unusual in the wellness space, where most coaches either stay above the unconscious entirely or dabble in it without the training to be safe. Olivia Ramirez Smith has put in the hours. She uses the tools the way a clinician would.
The tools have a purpose. Many of the women who find their way to Olivia Ramirez Smith’s books, films, retreats, and one-on-one work are not stuck because they lack discipline or willpower. They are stuck because something they have been carrying for ten, twenty, or forty years has not been allowed to move. Old grief. Old resentment. Old expectations of themselves that no longer apply. The expectations are not the problem. The fact that they live below conscious access, where talking about them does not reach, is the problem.
NLP and MER are the methods Olivia Ramirez Smith uses to reach below that line.
Her framing of the work is straightforward. Women cannot think their way out of patterns that were never installed by thinking, so the practice has to reach the layer beneath conscious thought. The body and the unconscious. The two layers that earthing already addresses on the physical side, and that NLP and MER address on the cognitive side. Pairing the two is the central design choice of everything Olivia Ramirez Smith has built.
The book, The Mother Earth Effect, lays out the physical practice and the science. The film she co-produced, The Earthing Movie, makes the same case visually. The methodologies she is certified in operate the layer above. Together, the layers reinforce each other. A woman whose nervous system has been settled by daily grounding is much more available to process old emotional material. A woman who has cleared old emotional material is much more able to feel the difference grounding makes.
At her Sole Rooted retreats in Joshua Tree, that pairing becomes a six-day experience. Mornings of barefoot grounding on warm desert sand. Afternoons of guided process work. Evenings of sound healing and reflection. Twelve women at a time, every one of them vetted in a one-on-one Zoom call with Olivia Ramirez Smith before they are invited. The whole arc of the retreat is designed around what she has learned will make a difference. Physical practice that regulates the body. Cognitive practice that releases what the body has been protecting. Time for both to integrate.
The work she does is not therapy. Olivia Ramirez Smith does not present it as such. It is something else. A structured practice for women who have done enough therapy, talked through enough years, and are ready for an approach that works at a level talk did not reach.
NLP and MER are old enough now to have a serious evidence base of their own. Olivia Ramirez Smith respects that base. She uses the methods within their scope. She does not promise what the methods cannot deliver. She does deliver, however, what the methods are good at. The actual release of patterns that women have been carrying for too long.
That is the work behind the Sole Rooted experience, behind the bestselling book, behind the title “The Earthing Ambassador.” Old pain, finally, allowed to be released.
