Adam Torkildson
Ask Olivia Ramirez Smith what she does when a woman arrives at her retreat carrying twenty years of something she has never set down, and the answer has a name.
Mental and Emotional Release (MER) is a clinical protocol, and Olivia Ramirez Smith is certified in it. She is also a Master Neurolinguistic Practitioner (NLP). She has spent more than two decades using both with women who came to her for one thing and left having addressed another.
The method rests on a claim that sounds strange until you watch it work. Emotions have a location. A woman who has carried unprocessed anger since 1998 is carrying it in her body, in a pattern her nervous system rehearses without asking permission. MER finds the pattern, returns her to the first instance of it, and releases the charge at the root instead of managing the symptom at the surface.
Talk therapy works forward. A woman describes the problem, the feeling, the things she has already tried. MER works backward. Olivia Ramirez Smith asks when the pattern started. She asks what the woman learned in that moment. Then she asks whether the lesson still serves her.
Most women say no. Nobody had asked.
NLP handles the layer above. The phrases a woman repeats about herself tend to be older than the situation she is in. I am the strong one. I do not have time. I will rest when this is done. Olivia Ramirez Smith listens for those lines because they function as instructions, and the woman has been following them for decades. Change the instruction and you change what she does at six o’clock on a Tuesday when she is tired and someone needs something from her.
This is the part of her work that gets the least attention. The grounding science she advocates travels well. It photographs well. Bare feet on soil is an image anyone can hold. The clinical methodology underneath, the training she completed in the late nineties and has applied ever since, does not photograph at all.
It is also the reason the grounding holds.
Olivia Ramirez Smith makes the case that the two layers need each other. Grounding settles the body. A settled body gives a woman access to material she could not reach while her system stayed on alert. MER and NLP work on that material. A woman who releases an old pattern and then returns to a life that keeps her wired will rebuild the pattern inside a year.
So she sequences them. At Sole Rooted, the six-day retreat she runs at Gaia Villa in Joshua Tree, the physical work comes first. Barefoot walks. Breathwork. Sleep that the women have not had in months. By the third day most of the attendees had dropped into a state they last occupied in childhood, and that is when the harder conversations started.
Twelve women per retreat, a ceiling she set on purpose. MER does not work as a lecture. It requires Olivia Ramirez Smith to track one woman’s history in real time while eleven others sit in the room, and she has never found a version of that which works at thirty.
Her certifications sit in the front matter of her books and on the About Page of The Mother Earth Effect LLC website, the company she founded and runs. Readers skim them. Master NLP Practitioner. MER specialist. The letters say nothing about what the training bought her, which is twenty-five years of pattern recognition in women’s histories and a protocol for doing something about what she finds.
That is the method behind the movement. Her bestselling book The Mother Earth Effect describes the physical half. The film she co-produced, The Earthing Movie, featuring Clint Ober, Strategic Partner, carried that half to over 8 million global views.
The other half happens in a room at Joshua Tree, twelve women at a time. It does not scale. Olivia Ramirez Smith decided a long time ago that she was fine with that.
More on Olivia Ramirez Smith’s books, the Sole Rooted retreat and her work as The Earthing Ambassador at oliviaramirezsmith.com.
