Sole Rooted is six days and five nights at Gaia Villa in Joshua Tree, capped at twelve women. Read the itinerary and it looks like a wellness retreat. Read the sequence and you are looking at a curriculum.
Olivia Ramirez Smith designed it in five movements, and the order is the whole argument.
The retreat opens with Unplug. Phones go down. The women arrive from lives that have trained them to check something every four minutes, and the first day is spent breaking a reflex rather than building a practice. Olivia Ramirez Smith has been direct about why this comes first. Nothing she teaches later lands on a woman who is still monitoring a group chat.
Ground follows. Barefoot contact with the desert floor, the practice she has spent two decades advocating for, done in the environment where it is easiest to do. Three and a half acres of high desert, no shoes, no schedule for a few hours. Most of the attendees report sleeping through the night for the first time in months by the end of this stretch.
Nourish comes third. Organic meals prepared on site, which sounds like an amenity and functions as instruction. Olivia Ramirez Smith uses the days when the women are eating well and sleeping well to make a point she cannot make in a book. This is what your baseline could be. You have been calling something else normal.
Open is the fourth movement and the hardest one. By the fourth day the physical work has done what it does, and the women are in a state where material they have carried for years becomes reachable. This is where Olivia Ramirez Smith brings her clinical training to bear. She is a Master Neurolinguistic Practitioner (NLP) and a certified Mental and Emotional Release (MER) specialist, and Open is where those tools go to work.
The sequencing is not decoration. MER asks a woman to go back to the origin of a pattern she has been running for twenty years. A woman who has not slept in a week cannot do that. A woman on day four of real sleep, real food, and no phone can.
Return takes the last two days, and it is the part most retreats skip. The women are going home. Home is where the pattern was built and where it will rebuild if nothing changes. Olivia Ramirez Smith spends days five and six on the practical question of what a woman actually keeps when she walks back into her own kitchen, and the answer is usually two or three small things rather than the whole retreat.
She has watched enough women leave a peak experience and lose it inside a month to build the descent into the design.
Twelve women is the ceiling and she has not moved it. The Open work requires her to track one woman’s history in real time while the rest of the attendees sit with her, and Olivia Ramirez Smith has said she has never found a version of that which survives a larger room. Entry runs through a one-on-one video call with her before anyone books.
Everything at Sole Rooted traces back to the same body of work. The grounding science she advocates and wrote about in her bestselling book The Mother Earth Effect. The documentary she co-produced, The Earthing Movie, featuring Clint Ober, Strategic Partner, which has reached over 8 million global views. The clinical methodology she has practiced since the late nineties.
The retreat is where all of it happens in the same room, to the same twelve women, in an order Olivia Ramirez Smith worked out over twenty years of watching what fails.
Unplug. Ground. Nourish. Open. Return. Six days, and the last two matter as much as the first four.
More on Olivia Ramirez Smith’s books, the Sole Rooted retreat and her work as The Earthing Ambassador at The Earthing Ambassador.
