You cannot book Sole Rooted. You can apply to it, and then you have to schedule a video call with Olivia Ramirez Smith.
That is an unusual position for a business to take. The retreat runs six days at Gaia Villa in Joshua Tree and caps each retreat at twelve women. Demand exceeds twelve. The obvious move is a second retreat, a larger villa, a booking page with a credit card field. Olivia Ramirez Smith has declined all three.
The one-on-one call is the reason.
She uses it to find out what a woman is actually bringing. Someone applies to a grounding retreat and describes what she wants from it, and thirty minutes of conversation tends to reveal whether the retreat is the right thing or whether she needs something Olivia Ramirez Smith is not qualified to provide. A group of twelve where one woman is in genuine crisis is not a retreat. It is a crisis with eleven witnesses.
Her clinical training is what makes the call worth the hour. She is a Master Neurolinguistic Practitioner (NLP) and a certified Mental and Emotional Release (MER) specialist, and both disciplines train a practitioner to hear what sits underneath a stated request. Twenty-five years of that, first at the med spa she opened in Victorville in 1999 and ran with fifty staff, then in the work that followed.
She is also protecting the group. Twelve women in a house for six days become a functioning unit or they do not, and the composition determines which. Olivia Ramirez Smith is selecting a room where a woman will say the true thing on day four.
The economics of refusing to scale are worse than the alternative, and she has been open about that. A larger retreat earns more. A booking page converts better than an application. Every consultant she has ever spoken to has told her the same thing.
Composition is a skill she developed at the med spa. Olivia Ramirez Smith opened New Image and J. Michaels in 1999 and spent two decades learning which women told the truth in a room and which ones performed, and a retreat is that with higher stakes and no exit.
The call also sets expectations before anyone spends money. A woman who arrives at Sole Rooted expecting a spa week has wasted six days and a considerable sum. Olivia Ramirez Smith tells her on the call what the fourth day involves, and some women decide it is not the year for it.
What she has said in return is that the work stops working at scale, and she would rather run twelve than dilute what happens in the room.
That position runs through everything she has built. The Mother Earth Effect LLC, the company she founded and runs as CEO, gave away the documentary she co-produced, The Earthing Movie, featuring Clint Ober, Strategic Partner, which reached over 8 million global views. Her First Responder program has grounded twenty thousand firefighters at no cost to them. The wide reach happens in the formats where reach costs nothing.
Then the retreat stays at twelve.
There is a reading of this where the scarcity is the marketing. Olivia Ramirez Smith has heard it. Her answer is that she was capping attendees at twelve when nobody had heard of Sole Rooted and the waiting list was theoretical, and the cap has not moved since.
The women who make it through the call arrive knowing they were chosen. That changes how the first day goes. Nobody is sizing up whether they belong, because someone already decided that for them.
Six days later they go home with two or three things they will keep. Olivia Ramirez Smith would rather be certain about twelve than hopeful about forty.
More on Olivia Ramirez Smith’s books, the Sole Rooted retreat and her work as The Earthing Ambassador at oliviaramirezsmith.com.
