By Ethan Maurice | May 18, 2025
Back in March in the midst of a near-magic trip cruising around on scooters, watching sunsets, and exploring Mexico’s Pacific Coast, I sat up on the roof of this Mexican mansion one night to connect with my friend Peter for a podcast-style interview on his wellness cross-training platform Empowermend.
Note: Peter follows curiosity in this conversation. It’s something I noticed him doing at WONDER WANDER a few years ago, asked about, and he beautifully explained. Curiosity is a fantastic lead for conversation, as your curiosity will naturally lead you to the places of greatest personal interest.
Exploring the roots of my experience, we quickly bumped into my brush with death at sixteen, and mortality and relating to the unknown became the focus of our conversation. Curious? Give it a listen:
How Peter and I Met (is Wild):
Peter is one of my favorite people. Back in 2013, we lucked upon each other in the gym of a church in eastern Kentucky (scroll to bottom of the link for a photo of us youngins), while pedaling bicycles across the United States.
I mostly remember Peter for athletic feats: he was the first person I ever saw do a one-arm pull-up, and the morning after a grand night of goofing off with him and his friends, my brother and I watched them pedal up a mountain road so steep we had to walk our bikes, and that was it — we literally never saw them again!
Fortunately, Peter and I had friended each other on Facebook. Five years later, he saw my post about the first WONDER WANDER and made the leap to apply and attend. We’ve shared four of five WONDER WANDER’s since and a wide variety of other inner and outer adventures all over the place.
Peter is an explorer, a healer, and lives a life that inspires mine. After a decade as a successful software engineer, he took to the road, van life, and ended up landing in Austin, TX where he reinvented his life, picking up a plethora of wellness practices. He is now a certified teacher of yoga, meditation, breathwork, circling, and a massage therapist (the dude’s a holistic wizard).
Peter’s rolled all these practices into a platform called Empowermend. Today, he fosters wellness online and locally in Austin. Want a dive down a cathartic and wild rabbit hole? Subscribe to his newsletter and see if he’s still offering free, hour-long online somatic breathwork classes (last one I did was a trip).
