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Former CEO trades Esquire magazine for a Dance with Buddhism (part one of two)

Though he'd just nurtured Esquire magazine back to financial health and popularity, Phillip Moffitt says, "I felt exiled from my own heart." Moffitt then walked away and began to dance with life's sufferings as well as its joys as a Buddhist practitioner.

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As editor-in-chief and chief executive, Phillip Moffitt resurrected Esquire magazine to financial security and popularity. But at the height of success and to the shock of friends and colleagues he sold the magazine and walked away to eventually become a Buddhist teacher and founder of Life Balance Institute. Phillip Moffitt explains his departure and subsequent path in "Dancing with Life: Buddhist insights for finding meaning and joy in the face of suffering," Rodale Press, 2008.

As one who is fascinated with and bewildered by suffering and the elusion of joy, I was eager to speak with the author who offers a unique perspective, and grateful we live in the same community. We met at his Tiburon home office across the bay from San Francisco.

Diana: Thank you for this interview.

Phillip: You're very welcome.

Diana: In the introduction of 'Dancing with Life' you speak about having lost parts of yourself in the work with Esquire. In fact you said, 'I felt exiled from my own heart.' Can you tell me what that feeling was like and what you did about the feeling?

Phillip: In those years that I was editor in chief with Esquire, I was also the chief executive officer. So, I had two jobs and it was a seven day a week situation. And with the amount of demand of attention on worldly matters – this constant demand of attention outward – I started losing what I call the inner felt sense of life unfolding inside. My life ended up being all about the outside with meeting all these obligations and creating all this work. The internal sense of I as a human being, growing in my understanding and development of what I call the mystery of life, really started feeling missing in my experience. So it wasn't that I was … the usual thing is oh, he's emotionally not available, or she's emotionally not available because they work so much. I wasn't having that kind of a challenge at all. I was available to my friends and things like that. I had a relationship and so forth. I did not have this inner sense.

Which not all people are interested in. But for those who are interested in it, and it sounds like your readers will be in to that, it's a vital part of life and life doesn't quite make sense without that feeling of the inner sense.

I use the word felt because it's palpable, it's not effervescent. There is a definite palpable felt sense of yes I'm being true to myself. I'm being authentic. There is, I am unfolding as a human being in this gift of a human life. There is an inner integrity to that and I'm being true to it and I'm serving in it. I'm giving my time to practice with it. To me this is the underlying orientation or values for all the great spiritual traditions. Whatever the form they take, there is this inner connection to the mystery.

And then people tend to put a layer of, oh well, what this is, is the mystery. Nonetheless, from their actual knowing it's still a mystery. So therefore I just stay at the mystery not so much the interpretation. So that was what was missing.

Diana: And what did you do about it?

Phillip: The first thing I tried to do, I had taken over Esquire with a very strong practice of what's called Raja yoga, which is a heavy meditative orientation towards the yoga world. So I had a very strong practice starting off, and then gradually the practice just started disappearing. I just was not doing any practice, and so I started going to class. I hired a private instructor to help me. I tried all of these different things to keep the momentum up but it was just sort of fading away from me, and not just the practice itself, which involved Asanas – doing the stretches that are involved in yoga – but also the meditation. I wasn't meditating. And, there's a Pranayama aspect, the breathing exercises. I wasn't doing that.

The one thing that I was still doing was trying to meet my life with an awareness and treat my life as a yoga. My work decisions, my busy-ness, my having to withstand a lot of pressure, that was my yoga. I would remind myself every morning walking into the building and going up in the elevator that this what I was doing. Throughout the day I would drop back into that awareness. So that was my through-line, in one sense, that really kept me awake enough to realize that I had gone the wrong way.

And so there came this evening which I describe in "Dancing with Life" in which I had this body sensation, which I knew was going to bring with it some thought, some kind of realization. It was a little unnerving, and it was when I realized I cannot, I cannot do this as my life, even though I'm reasonably good at it and I enjoy it. I'm stimulated by it. It's fun to create it. I enjoyed the business aspects of it. I liked the whole package.

It was fun enough, but that I couldn't do it, that I was supposed to be doing something else for me, not for everybody; but that I needed to be much more centered around this sense of the inner life, the inner relationship to the mystery, the unfolding. This is what I had to be about, even though it was not at all clear what that meant or how I would do that, or anything.

So then once I had that realization, I immediately tried to find a way to have my cake and eat it too. Being a good American, right? So, we are all like that to some degree or another. Was it St. Thomas who said, 'Give me these things but not quite yet' in terms of his celibacy and all this.

So, I tried to delegate more, and I would go off on two and three day meditative retreats, and nothing really worked. Because I was either doing it or not doing it. If I removed myself I was dissatisfied with the work, because I actually liked the work. I didn't like bein' the boss. I liked doing the work and so delegating didn't work so well. Then, on the other hand, if I did the work myself then I was back into this constant stream. So 'finely, finely, finely,' I reached the point where there came … after I had met my obligations, because I had a lot of people who had invested a lot of money and all, that I felt really responsible for. So, I'd met my obligations and finally this day came when I just had this sudden realization [he claps his hands], 'Phillip, if you don't leave, you're never going to leave. You're going to create yet another cycle on still a bigger scale.' Some people had approached me from other magazine companies about buying Esquire and my takin' over their magazines and all this. It was just going to happen on a larger scale.

Why was I doing that? What was my purpose for me, not for someone else but for me? When my interest, my strong interest was in this inner life, and so, in a six week period of time, I sold the magazine and left.

I was age 40 and had no plans for the future. No plans to know where I would live, not even what country I'd live in. And that became, then, a long period of time waiting for, being active while I was waiting, but waiting for something to emerge.

So, I did not leave in order to become a dharma teacher. I left in order to give myself more fully to practicing. And then, out of practicing, this new life has formed. All on its own. I who had managed, since I started college I had managed my life, I had goals and I worked really hard and I was about fulfilling those goals.

I say in 'Dancing with Life,' 'I began to practice with the goal of no goal.' It's very difficult for a person who has been goal oriented. Listen, what are you about, when you wake up in the morning, what is it you are supposed to do? If you don't say, oh, I want this, I want that, oh, what do you do? How do you spend your time? What do you do?

All I would do is study and sit and explore things. I learned little things. I studied body movement of various kinds – Aikido. I got a black belt in Aikido. I studied these various kinds of techniques of working with the body and trauma, and so forth, and practiced meditation, over and over and over again. And waited, for years waited.

Diana: Really, how many years was it in between?

Phillip: About 7 years. Yeah, about 7 years.

Now, somewhere in that 7 year process, people started inviting me to teach groups of this and that. And then, these individuals started coming to me, these various leaders. In part they came to me because they had heard about me or read about me or something when I left. And they knew me in my Esquire years or knew of me, and so they just found their way to my door.

There was never any system. They would just come to my door and say, 'You know, I'm having this problem in my life and the person that I think would most understand it is you because of what you did.' And so I would listen. And that's how I got started with that.

So, in one sense, starting with the Esquire years, I was already learning how to dance with life. Since then, not only have I learned about dancing with life for myself, but all of these leaders of various kinds, from the for-profit world, the non-profit world, lots of entrepreneurs, lots of professional people, even some psychologists actually, and two, three spiritual teachers from other traditions have come and done Life Balance work.

And then, after about 7 years, I started teaching meditation more formally. Over 10 years ago I became part of the teachers council, which is a collective at Spirit Rock that teaches the Pali meditation or mindfulness meditation. So I've been doing that for over 10 years and it has become my life. And it's a very satisfying life but not what I had imagined.

Diana: Amazing. So your friends and these other people really gave you the idea that you are a teacher. I mean it sounds like you didn't realize you are a teacher.

Phillip: No, I didn't, listen, I'm still a practitioner. I do not identify myself a teacher, I identify myself as one who practices, and when invited I teach, but even when I'm teaching that is a form of my practice. I do not have an identity as a teacher. I just don't.

Diana: How did you come to the focus of suffering?

Phillip: I was very idealistic when I was in college, and I imagined a way of developing one's life where if one was really sincere and willing to work hard and have modesty and all, that one could find a good enough happiness with the external world. Then as I spun more and more into adulthood, it became clear to me that there was no such thing as that. That all of us, no matter how successful in the world in terms of status or contribution or moneymaking or contribution to the well-being, that it is really true that there's always going to be this sense of stress, of dissatisfaction, of unreliability to external things.

Someone that you really care about, they change, or they get mad at you or they die or get sick. All of these things happen. Or you die or get sick or you no longer are interested in them; or a job that you loved, you've done it so long that it starts to be a drudge for you, or the circumstances change and you can't do that work any more, or you lose the job. There's always change and this kind of unreliability and the stress of the unknown and uncertainty.

This is what the Buddha means by dukkha. It's a combination. It's not suffering in just one narrow sense of that word. It's that you're making the perfect meal and one thing burns, that's dukkha. Or you're going to catch your airplane flight but something happens, that's dukkha. That your child didn't get into the school you'd applied for, that's dukkha. That your child has some sort of challenge that you have to live with, that's dukkha. That some force of nature comes along and kills thousands of people, that's dukkha.

It's the uncertainty, the stress, the unreliability, in a way the catch twenty-two of human life, of being consciously embodied, having consciousness in a body. Having this kind of mind that human minds have and this body that's of the nature to get old and sick and die and everything's of the nature to change.

It's an existential problem really. We think of Sartre or someone like that making this reference to the angst of human life, but the Buddha was really the first existentialist and the first phenomenologist, because he broke down experience into such small pieces so that it could be understood. And, he is the original instructor about how to dance with life.

Diana: How did you come to that title? Because of that?

Phillip: Well, because, once you accept the fact that you can't really control your life, so then you're stuck with this question, 'Well, if I can't control life what is my relationship to life?' And I came to see it and to teach it to people, and it's been very helpful to people, you know, life dances with you. Sometimes it's a good dance partner, and boy, don't you have a great time? But, better not try hold onto that great time.

And, sometimes it's just really dragging you around the floor. Not the kind of dance partner you'd like to have. You've got this chronic pain, or you have this huge disappointment or there's this worry that won't go away or you can't sleep or whatever it is. That's just life dancing with you.

And, if you don't take it personally, if you treat it like a dance, and that in this moment the partner is dancing like this, then it rests so much more lightly. It doesn't dampen the heart. It doesn't kill the spirit. It doesn't fuzz up the mind in the same way. You're much more able to relax into it so you don't get rigid and tied and compound the problem. You're being a good dance partner.

Dear reader,

I was going to end part one of the interview a few paragraphs ago, but a voice inside me screamed, "that's like saying stay tuned for how to save your life." So, I leave you here, to ponder how to become a good dance partner with your life leading. And I promise Phillip Moffitt will choreograph more steps for dancing with life next week.

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