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