In 1986, after seven years as editor-in-chief of Esquire, Phillip Moffitt gave it all up to pursue his inner life.

Even as he was turning the mens magazine from a money loser into an award-winning success, and becoming friends with such illustrious writers as Gay Talese and Truman Capote, Moffitt felt nagged by a question: Is this really what I want to be doing with my life?

Was I going to accumulate magazines? he asked himself. Was I going to accumulate money? Was I going to accumulate fame? None of those things appealed to me. What I really wanted was a sense of meaningfulness in my life.

So Moffitt sold the magazine and became a Buddhist meditation teacher.

Today, Moffitt, 68, lives in the San Francisco Bay area, where he is co-guiding teacher at Spirit Rock Meditation Center. He travels the country teaching meditation at retreat centers, such as Southern Dharma in the North Carolina mountain town of Hot Springs.

This month, hell speak in Charlotte and lead a guided meditation at a special meeting of the Insight Meditation Community of Charlotte. The free event is at 7:30 p.m. Oct. 17 at Park Road Baptist Church, 3900 Park Road. (See http://www.insightmeditationcharlotte.org.)

Even before he came to Esquire, Moffitt had been practicing yoga, and while there, he added Buddhist meditation to his routine. What he wanted, he said, was to focus on his inner life.

I sold Esquire at the age of 40 and stepped into a completely different world, said Moffitt, who has written two books, Emotional Chaos to Clarity and Dancing With Life. (See http://www.dharmawisdom.org.)

When he left the magazine, he said other people in leadership positions came to him and said, I want to make changes in my life. How did you do that? So he began offering workshops and created the Life Balance Institute, where he trains professionals how to skillfully make transitions in their lives.

In Charlotte, he said, hell focus on how we can choose non-suffering in life rather than doing things that make ourselves miserable. Life is hard enough on its own. But our relationship to lifes challenges adds so much suffering.

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Buddhist meditation subject of Charlotte talk

In an age of smartphones, instant messaging and 24/7 availability, it's increasingly hard to find time to step away and reconnect with one's self, especially in fast-paced tech hubs like Silicon Valley.

But before you lock your smartphone in a closet for an hour a day, check out some of the apps and websites available for learning and practicing the ancient art of meditation and the more contemporary mindfulness-based stress reduction.

You don't need a new gadget to meditate -- all the equipment necessary comes pre-installed in the product -- you.

But some meditation and mindfulness trainers are using technology in interesting ways. They range from simple meditation timers to complete courses.

"It's almost using the enemy's weapons against them," said Dada Nabhaniilananda of the Ananda Marga Yoga & Meditation Center in Los Altos Hills. He's developing a meditation app with some computer science grad students, and plans to have it available in several languages.

Classes in mindfulness practices have become popular at some of Silicon Valley's signature tech giants, where Los Altos mindfulness-based psychotherapist and educator Rene Burgard conducts training. "There are more teachers of this in the San Francisco Bay Area than any other place in the world except Toronto, I'm told," Burgard said.

The apps and a growing awareness of the benefits of meditation are helping expand the practice in a big way, according to mindfulness pioneer Jon Kabat-Zinn, who founded the Center for Mindfulness at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center in 1979.

Kabat-Zinn's website is one of the oldest commercial websites, launched in 1998 when the World Wide Web was still in its swaddling clothes. Now, colleagues in Sweden have developed apps containing Kabat-Zinn's series of guided meditations.

"The idea is basically to make this as widely available as possible so people can practice the meditation on a regular basis in their own lives," Kabat-Zinn said.

A molecular biologist, Kabat-Zinn began researching mind and body interactions for healing in 1979, working with patients experiencing chronic pain "who were falling through the cracks in the health care system."

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