LOVE YOURSELF: Fronting Life's mindfulness community and Immersive Music Experience with Mose on May 3

I made a dumb joke leading up to my lunch with Travis Mickel and Duane Ross. We were having a series of mishaps with our restaurant choices—all closed on Mondays. After I walked up to an empty option two, I called Duane and suggested (in gest) that we’d have better luck finding a mimosa…

Oh, did I mention we’re meeting to talk about things like recovery and an upcoming substance-free event? oof… I stopped my quip dead and apologized profusely for my unintentional insensitivity—but my lunch dates were swift with grace and giggles as we enjoyed our bento. 

Travis Mickel, founder of Fronting Life, is five years sober and a daily meditator. Duane Ross serves on Fronting Life’s Board of Directors as treasurer. Fronting Life is a Wilmington-based mindfulness organization that has spent five years quietly doing something radical: building community-centered wellness spaces that don't ask anything of you except that you show up. No sobriety required. No ideology required. No $30 drop-in fee. Just access.

Travis, Duane and I share laughs over lunch and talk at length about the upcoming Immersive Music Experience featuring Mose on May 3, as well as what it actually means to take care of yourself, and whether our culture is built to let you.

Duane Ross spent 15-plus years in financial services and fintech—process outsourcing, client services, 70-hour weeks, constant travel… Meditation was, in his words, the furthest thing from his mind. Not because he was opposed to it, but because the math didn't math. That hour of stillness couldn't compete with the “value” of everything else competing for his time.

The introspection that recovery demanded opened a door. He began looking inside, looking for other avenues, slowing down enough to notice what he often sprinted past. One of his favorite authors talks about paradigm shifts as a necessary piece of the journey.

"Sometimes it takes something really profound before you can have a perspective shift," Duane says. "In your mind, everything's fine, this is the way it should be, keep going down this path—until something says, hey, you need to stop and look at this. Otherwise your lenses are still on the same thing and you don't see a need to change."

Travis Mickel came from an equally fast-paced world in New York, moving through the Prada fashion circles that lightly introduced him to consciousness and mindfulness. He'd done yoga, gone to Buddhist temples while traveling, picked up pieces of the practice at Washington Square Park. But he'd never committed. He was working and partying, and the morning meditation class had no chance against whatever had happened the night before.

"Five, almost six years now, I've meditated every single day," Travis says. "And I ask everyone I mentor: what's one thing you do for yourself—only for you—every single day? Most people can't answer that."

He calls it mental hygiene. Physical hygiene, we've all got covered. Shower, brush your teeth—no one debates that. But mental hygiene? The daily act of showing yourself some form of care and love? Travis says most people have never even defined that need for themselves, let alone built it into their lives.

"It doesn't have to be what I do," he explains. "It could be five minutes, an intention, a cup of tea in the morning. But no one takes the time to show themselves they love themselves every single day. That's what meditation is for me."

Fronting Life, as Travis describes, integrates mindfulness programming into recovery spaces to complement fellowship programs and increase accessibility of wellness and mindfulness practices (yoga, sound baths, meditation) that often come at costs not everyone can afford. Early on, surprisingly, he ran into something he didn't expect: resistance from within the recovery community itself.

"There was a competitive nature," he shares. "Like, ‘Why are you doing this when we already do this?’ You'd get people on specific committees for the 12-step fellowships saying, ‘That's our lane.’" 

Travis notes that the root was also genuine fear—the worry that if people came to Fronting Life instead of their meetings, they'd lose their footing in recovery. “We're not telling anybody to stop what they're doing,” Travis corrects. “We're offering another avenue.”

The irony wasn't lost on either of us. These fellowships preach open-mindedness and willingness as core values. They are spiritual, not religious programs—"but then you're only teaching religious prayers. And when somebody wants to teach something that's literally in your own steps, you're like, no, we don't do that."

I drew a parallel to media—how for years, publications and media outlets operated in competition for advertising dollars, which tends to keep folks at a distance (intentionally or not). Since 2020, that's started to change with forming coalitions. NC Local and the Coastal Journalism Hub here, for example, have created more cross-conversation of working in this market. The competition reflex is trained, not inevitable, and none of us can do it alone. 

"Capitalist society thrives from competition," Travis adds. "There has to be a winner and a loser. What I've realized is—I try not to use the terms negative or positive. I ask what feels aligned for the individual."

I ask Travis about his greatest success stories from the past five years. Of course, the grants—the smaller ones that came through and validated the work, the many more that didn't and stung in ways he was honest about. Getting the 501(c)3. Finding venues like K2 Suites, 1602 Club on South Front Street, The Garden of Hope Recovery for outdoor meditations, and Treehouse Recovery for yoga are milestone markers leading (eventually) to a fulltime home.

“Our goal in the next couple of years is to build a mindful community center,” Travis says. “About 2,000 to 2,500 square feet, where we can hold as many people as we do on Monday nights, bring in more practitioners, and do free workshops. Everyone in the organization is a volunteer. All the teachers volunteer. It's the community supporting the community. We don't stand behind any one thing someone might educate, but we do offer access. We want to plant seeds and let you grow the oak tree. We don't offer opinions or advice for people's lives, but we do offer access.”

The small moments, however, are what continue to matter most. People who pull him aside after a session to tell him that something he said shifted the way they saw the world. Someone who just needed to know there was a safe place to go on Monday, Wednesday, and Sunday, and that it would be there. He describes it as collecting pieces of energy from the people he meditates with—a little piece of everybody, carried home.

"It's a lot of small moments with big impact," he notes. "I'm just offering words to the world, and that little seed shifted the way somebody was able to show up for themselves."

It reminds me of a young man I met at February’s I Heart ILM event, who was almost in tears holding encore's Winter 2026 print issue because the paper had been gone and now it was back—how that meant something to him in a way that was hard to articulate but clearly real. 

With these anecdotes, our table of three can’t help but muse over the potential of a society in which we measure success by impact rather than material gain. Imagine how differently we'd all behave.

The May 3 Immersive Music Experience at Plaza on Princess is Fronting Life's latest attempt to show Wilmington what sober nightlife can look like—whether someone is in recovery or just a part of a growing population of folks choosing not to drink or partake in other substances.

Mose, the headliner, is a producer and performer who headlined Envision Festival in Costa Rica—a world-building festival in the vein of indigenous, spiritual EDM. Fronting Life has worked with his label previously for a November event featuring Porangui, which drew around 200 people. This one includes: HSD Sound System, a lighting design team, roughly 12 vendors (think: arcane tie-dye, herbalists, consciousness-forward makers), and DW Alchemist running an elixirs and cacao bar—teas, tinctures, no alcohol.

Tickets are $35 for an evening of yoga, breathwork, and sound bath before opening into the musical performance. "That's what you'd pay for two yoga classes," Travis compares. "So it's actually pretty accessible."

The framing for this event is a new night out. Not a recovery event. Not a wellness retreat. A night out, reconsidered. Duane notes that already Fronting Life events tend to run about 60/40 between people in recovery and people who aren't—that mix and integration of community matters.

In New York, LA, Miami, and London, sober wellness nightlife is already a movement—warehouse venues, EDM, no alcohol, full experience. Travis sees Fronting Life as bringing it to Wilmington ahead of the curve. Nevertheless, some people genuinely wonder whether they can have fun without a drink in their hand. Some feel like they won't fit in. "I am a fun person in recovery," Travis shares. "I go out, I go to parties, I dance, I meet people, I travel around the world. I do everything I did before—as a better version of myself, because I don't need a substance to feel comfortable anywhere I go."

Fronting Life's Immersive Music Experience ft. Mose is Saturday, May 3 at Plaza on Princess. Tickets are $35. Information at frontinglife.com.