Breath is our time
We are teachers and mentors for individuals and groups to create healthy lifestyles and organizations. Since 2020 we mostly work online and support professionals and businesses. We also dedicated a lot of time to dealing with the side effects of current medical recommendations that go against all logic, science and the basics of a natural lifestyle, and with great risks.
The most important thing for us is to walk our talk (which is rare also in our sector.) Bodily wisdom does not come from more information, it must be felt and lived before it can be fully understood and conveyed as a teaching. Our deep commitment to understanding natural healing is grounded in the affirmative belief that the body is never wrong, but only ever responding to the environment it lives in. Authenticity is very important for us, something you will hear in our classes - autentico is our signum - because that's where health starts.
Normally we operate in Spain and in Thailand, but we have also done activities in many other countries, including Germany, France, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Morocco, Sweden, England and the US. Presently we are in Thailand where we have our own open venue and gardens next to a nature reserve, allowing animals to roam freely. It's as thermodynamically* efficient as possible. Fresh air and water is a good start for a healthy life.
As much as we focus on modern research and methods, we continue to study and research ancient scripts and languages, as it inspires our thinking. This is where you come in, as we want to enlighten ourselves and those who want to learn from us. Our wish is to understand all healing modalities and why ancient ones have been so terribly misinterpreted and/or twisted and censured to find the truth that the original healers and scribes wanted to convey.
Thanks for spending time on our site.
Who are we?
We each enjoyed a measure of conventional success in both the public and private sectors globally before turning our attention and entrepreneurial skills to work in service of nature itself - life - and the hope it brings us. Having learned more than we imagined, and having been asked to support and report more of all we learned, we now live 100% outdoors (in Thailand) in pursuit of an innovative, healthy lifestyle in which the exploration of life in all its amazing forms is our most intriguing and satisfying activity. By becoming truly healthy, life becomes a miracle, in spite of the challenges it brings.
We love it, all of it, in all its forms. Even the stub-tail macaques, sometimes.
Ayurvedic and Orthomolecular Practitioner / MBA
Expert Body Health, Naturopathy
Cristina has devoted 25 years of her life to understanding natural health, drawing on research in Nutrition Studies, Bio-Chemistry, Medical Sciences, Ayurveda, Orthomolecular Medicine, Naturopathy, Acupuncture, Chinese and other traditional systems with numerology. The result is an incredible, highly accurate and intuitive sense of what each guest needs to be healthy on all levels. Prior to founding O·live in Spain in 2011, she enjoyed a successful management career in the telecom sector as a BI Macro Strategist and Brand Manager. She served on several government boards in her field and as an expert on the SSE board for entrepreneurs. Words' and logos' meaning is important to her, but Asian philosophy helped her understand they are always relative and any other view is often the base of dis-ease.
Cristina (EC) has an MBA in Economics from the University of Stockholm with Economic History and languages. She has certificates and trainings in Nutrition (Sweden/USA), Orthomolecular Medicine (Spain/USA), Ayurveda (Sweden/India) and other holistic methods such as Bio-decodification (Spain), Medical Acupressure (Spain) and a Masters in Ashtanga Yoga (Stockholm/Spain/India). At Olive we live what we teach because it feels so good and it works so well. It's light, sustainable and as kind as possible, beginning with ourselves, every day and hour, as part of and not separate from evolution and our history as members of the genus homo.
In between the classes and assessments, Cristina studies with her never ending curiosity and ability to dig deeper. For the moment her interest goes to studying the source texts, etymology of and ancient languages such as Pali, Sanskrit and more. Her other love is the meridians and the microbiome (she talks about it as God!), and working on the grand theme of her life - a book about motherhood and its low status in competitive cultures, and the consequences that brings for health and the planet Earth. If God (her biome) gifted her with something it is her ability to see the big picture, both in bodies and in societies.
Prior to devoting herself to health, Cristina worked for many years as a BI and market strategist in the mobile telecom sector, and the skills she derived would come in handy later in life when researching mainstream medicine and health care. A turning point in her life came and with those tough times she would realize the flaws in existing medicine and research, as so many others before her.
- "You can show anything with so-called science. It's all about the method so be sure you pick the right one if you want the truth." ~ Cristina
She jumped off the career wheel at the very top (Nordic Brand Manager for Telia Mobile) and started a new career in 2004. She studied and worked with the foremost experts within Orthomolecular Medicine and Acupuncture and at health and detox retreats for eight years before starting O·live and EC?Ayurveda.
Cultural Anthropologist
Expert Mind Detox & Mind Health
Ray joined Olive in 2012, after decades of experience in academia, government and the private sector. He's visited more than 40 countries and worked with leaders of many of the world's largest companies. He is often referred to as the "questioner," the "big-picture guy," the "go-to-guy," and the "smartest guy around" ("within a radius of fifty centimeters", would be his comment back). His formal education grew around Cultural Anthropolgy, and the question of meaning.
Ray has an MA in Cultural Anthropology from Brandies University, with specialties in Anthropological Linguistics, Semiotics (non-essentialism), Semantics, Sociology, Psychology and Social Psychology. He has taught Anthropology, Sociology, Psychology, Linguistics and English at universities in the USA, China, Lesotho, Saudi Arabia and to individuals and private organizations in other parts of the world. He has studied meditation in Nepal, Tibet and Thailand, and familiarized himself with all the religious and spiritual traditions of the times, as well as the people who practice and believe in them and their languages (an integral part of how we perceive our world).
He spent ten years working in the Saudi Government as a Communications Advisor to the Governor and Chairman of the Board of SAGIA, during which time he met many heads of states and private sector leaders, including the Chairman and CEOs of the word's largest and most profitable companies, in some 40 countries. In all his strategic roles he was "the listener and the idea man."
He and Cristina created the Olive 08 Mind Detox Dialogue, a method which has helped hundreds of people from all over the world answer the most basic questions about themselves, by first learning to question the most basic assumptions. In only seven days we can guide a rigid, cemented idea into the sparkling flow of a healthy, creative life.
*The Second Law of Thermodynamics.
In brief, when energy is transformed, as in doing pretty much anything one does in life, some energy is always lost, i.e., wasted, and the natural tendency of any isolated system over time is to degenerate into a more disordered state.
That means, there are health costs to every action, but also that some actions are less costly than others. A vegan diet is the most energy efficient start to the most energy efficient and therefore healthy lifestyle one can imagine, and best solution to degeneration into more disordered states.