The wellness industry has a habit of discovering practices that have existed for a long time and announcing them as breakthroughs. Earthing is its latest discovery.
Five years ago, grounding was a fringe practice. Ten years ago, it was a punchline. The idea that touching the earth could improve sleep, lower inflammation, and regulate the nervous system sat squarely outside what most lifestyle journalists would write about with a straight face.
The conversation has changed. Grounding mats are on Amazon. Earthing sheets are on bedroom beds. Wellness columns now reference the practice without irony. Doctors and trainers who would not have used the word “earthing” in a sentence five years ago are recommending it to patients and clients.
Olivia Ramirez Smith was early to all of this.
She did not invent grounding. The modern practice is most directly traceable to Clint Ober, the founder of Earthing.com, who has been documenting the science for more than two decades. Olivia Ramirez Smith is Ober’s strategic partner. They continue to develop indoor earthing products together. The intellectual lineage of grounding runs through him.
But the mainstreaming of the practice has a different lineage. It runs through the books, films, retreats, and public advocacy work that Olivia Ramirez Smith has done for the past twenty years. She is the bestselling author of The Mother Earth Effect, the foreword to which was written by Mariel Hemingway. She is the award-winning co-producer of The Earthing Movie, the documentary that brought grounding to a general audience for the first time with over 8 million global views. She is one of the co-authors of the number one bestseller Sacred Spaces: Subtle shifts for Mind, Body, and Home Transformations, the Colleen Avis-led collaboration that won the Books for Peace International Award. She runs Sole Rooted, the six-day women’s retreat in Joshua Tree that takes earthing from a daily practice into a six-day immersive experience.
She is also “The Earthing Ambassador,” a title that did not exist five years ago and that wellness audiences now recognize on sight.
The combination of credentials and reach is what moved the practice. Olivia Ramirez Smith was credible to women’s wellness audiences, skeptical lifestyle journalists, brand partners and most importantly to Clint Ober, which kept the science honest. She was also credible to filmmakers, which kept the storytelling sharp. When the wellness category opened up to grounding as a legitimate practice, it opened up partly because Olivia Ramirez Smith had been at the door for years.
The mainstreaming has had downstream effects. The First Responder donation program she runs through The Mother Earth Effect LLC has grounded twenty thousand firefighters. The Sole Rooted retreats are by-invitation-only and fill at twelve women per cohort.
None of that happens without the years of work that came before grounding was popular. Olivia Ramirez Smith did not arrive at this moment. She made this moment possible.
That is the thing about being early. Early is rarely glamorous in the moment. It looks, from outside, like persistence in something nobody is paying attention to. The shift happens later, when the audience catches up and the category opens.
Olivia Ramirez Smith, the Earthing Ambassador, in retrospect was never riding a wave, she was building it.
