Left to right: Rich Ganley, CEO of The Positive Impact Alliance and Recharge Room and one of the book’s contributors, and Olivia Ramirez Smith.
Assembling a book out of men who do not overlap professionally is a slow way to work. Olivia Ramirez Smith did it on purpose, and the reason is methodological.
The Mother Earth Effect: A Body of Evidence, her forthcoming book, brings together contributors from medicine, science, athletics, entrepreneurship, military service, first response, health, and wellness. A neurologist and a firefighter have no shared vocabulary. A professional athlete and an entrepreneur measure their bodies against different standards. She wanted that spread because a pattern that survives it is worth more than one that does not.
So she asked each of them a version of the same question and waited to see what came back.
What came back was a common history. Chronic pain carried without reporting it. Sleep given up as a cost of the work. Inflammation, exhaustion, anxiety, and in several cases addiction, all of it absorbed by men whose jobs rewarded them for absorbing it. The neurologist described watching a patient arrive in a wheelchair and later walk. The former law-enforcement officer described chronic pain, PTSD, addiction, and the route back. The veteran turned firefighter described the accumulation of combat and emergency response.
Different professions. One shape.
Olivia Ramirez Smith is careful with what that means. She presents the accounts as testimony from the men who lived them, not as results a reader should expect, and she has held that position through two books, a documentary, and a decade of interviews. The practice at the center of the work is not a treatment and does not replace a physician, which she states in print and from wellness conference stages around the country.
Her interest is in what the accounts have in common, which is the moment each man stopped.
Grounding is the practice she advocates for, and it means direct contact between the body and the surface of the earth. Researchers have reported effects on sleep, on markers associated with inflammation, on circulation, and on nervous-system regulation. Known around the world as The Earthing Ambassador, Olivia Ramirez Smith has spent years translating that research for people who will never read a study, which she considers the harder half of the job.
The first responders in the book reached her through work she was already doing.
The Mother Earth Effect LLC runs a First Responder program that has grounded twenty thousand firefighters through donated indoor grounding products. That program put her in sustained contact with men working long shifts under chronic physical load, and several of them became contributors. So did Rich Ganley, CEO of The Positive Impact Alliance and Recharge Room, whose organization builds recovery spaces for first responders. She did not have to go looking for them.
Her method has not changed since her first book. The Mother Earth Effect, a number one best-seller with a foreword by Mariel Hemingway, was built the same way, on the accounts of twenty-one contributing women gathered until the repetition became the argument. Sacred Spaces: Subtle Shifts for Mind, Body, and Home Transformation, the Colleen Avis-led collaboration that won the Books for Peace International Award, was her first number one. The film she co-produced, The Earthing Movie, featuring Clint Ober, Strategic Partner, has reached over 8 million global views.
She learned the technique long before she wrote any of them. At New Image and J. Michaels, the med spa she opened in Victorville, California, in 1999 and grew to fifty staff, Olivia Ramirez Smith spent twenty years listening to people describe their lives while she worked. One conversation is an anecdote. Two thousand is data.
The new book applies the same arithmetic to a group she had not systematically studied.
Whether a reader accepts the conclusion is a separate matter, and Olivia Ramirez Smith has never asked anyone to take it on faith. The title states the terms. She collected the evidence and put it in one place, and the men who supplied it are named.
More on Olivia Ramirez Smith’s books, the Sole Rooted retreat and her work as The Earthing Ambassador at oliviaramirezsmith.com.