You can feel Mauri Wingate’s energy before you even really know her. A bubbly, effervescent ball of positivity, wisdom and love, her energy is contagious. But beneath all that light is an even more compelling depth.
Mauri is someone you can go deep with very quickly. She has a way of making people feel safe, seen and heard, and she uses that skill in her life’s work.
In many ways, she has become the woman she desperately needed as a girl. Raised in the South Bay, in the same Riviera home where she lives today, Mauri remembers feeling things deeply from a young age.
“I had very big feelings,” she says. “I remember being 5 and 6 years old and having what we would call a panic attack, but not having the language for it.”
She remembers feeling different and desperately wanting to belong. “I always felt like there was something wrong with me,” she says. “I didn’t have anybody giving me the tools to work through that.”
Those feelings eventually manifested in perfectionism, anxiety and a complicated relationship with her body. By age 13, Mauri was hospitalized at UCLA for anorexia, anxiety and depression. It was an extraordinarily dark chapter for such a young girl, but somewhere inside that darkness came a moment of remarkable clarity.
“I remember looking at the barred windows and thinking: I’m going to do whatever I need to do to get out of here. And when I do, I’m going to use this to help other girls like me.”
It would take years for that promise to fully reveal itself. Mauri describes the years that followed with startling honesty. On the outside, she was the high achiever: the straight-A student, editor-in-chief of her high school newspaper, psychology major at Occidental College. Inside, she was still struggling with eating disorders, addiction, anxiety, relationships and an incessant need for validation.
“I think we don’t belong until we belong to ourselves,” she says—an idea that gets to the heart of Mauri’s story. Because belonging—to our bodies, to ourselves, to one another—is really at the center of it all.
Her turning point came in her early 20s when she realized, quite simply, “Nothing changes if nothing changes.” She got sober and, almost accidentally, embarked on what she now calls her self-love journey. For the first time, she began choosing herself.
“I realized it’s not just karate. I want to teach all of this. I want to share what I’ve learned about self-love and confidence with other girls.”
She took herself to coffee and lunch. She hiked alone. She deepened her spirituality. She discovered CrossFit and, with it, an entirely new relationship with her body. After years of chasing a number on a scale, she started chasing strength.
“I had never felt in love with what my body could do instead of what it looked like,” says Mauri, who began to understand that self-love wasn’t some elusive feeling you suddenly arrived at. “It’s all the small steps that you do for yourself every single day.”
And somewhere along the way, love found her too. Mauri first met her now-husband, Josh, when she was 18 and working at a karate school in Santa Monica. He was 13 years older and in a much different stage of life, but Mauri remembers seeing him and having an inexplicable certainty.
“I was like, how does he not know that we’re going to get married and have babies one day? How does he not know that we’re soulmates?”
Years of friendship followed before their relationship became something more. Josh is one of the greatest believers in the work Mauri has created and sometimes, Mauri admits, believed in her more fiercely than she believed in herself.
That work began almost organically. After years of teaching children martial arts, Mauri realized she wanted to give girls more than physical strength. She wanted to give them all the tools she had spent years collecting for herself: movement, mindfulness, breath work, self-defense, journaling, confidence, sisterhood, mindset and, perhaps most importantly, a safe place to tell the truth.
“I realized it’s not just karate,” she says. “I want to teach all of this. I want to share what I’ve learned about self-love and confidence with other girls.”
Through Girls emPOWERment Experience, Mauri works with girls, teens and adult women in intimate groups and one-on-one mentorship, empowering them, as she puts it, “to be their own heroes.” She incorporates talking and listening, yoga and weight lifting, meditation and self-defense, breath work and journaling.
Girls can text her. Call her. Reach out between sessions. She works closely with parents too, understanding that real change rarely happens in isolation.
“I can tell my story as a coach,” she explains, pointing out that she isn’t trying to be a therapist. “They feel like, ‘Oh, she really sees me, and she really gets it because she’s been through it.’”
Today, Mauri is also a wife and mother, and motherhood is expanding her understanding of the women she serves. Her daughter, she says, is her “mirror and my little teacher.” Her work is growing to include mothers and adult women. At the same time, Josh has created Young Men’s emPOWERment Experience—bringing many of the same principles of vulnerability, emotional awareness and strength to boys and men.
Next Mauri hopes to establish a physical South Bay space where movement, martial arts, mindfulness, coaching and community can coexist, and where children and adults can gather, feel safe, get strong and simply belong.
It took years, but Mauri has discovered her own potential and turned her pain into purpose. Now she holds up a mirror—one girl, one woman, one conversation at a time—and helps others see the same things for themselves.
