A conversation with the former chief editor of Esquire magazine, who abandoned all that outer success to become a ful-time yogi. He is now a renovned meditation teacher and author.

This is some of what we speak about:

• Phillip tells us how in his early life he was both a work aholic as an entrepreneur, but at the same time he never put aside his interest in his inner life, which back then was expressed in his yoga practice.
• his big concern was always what gives meaning to life
• Phillip tells us how he took over Esquire magazine and converted the failing magazine into a success. And how then... in the middle of a meeting, he had a revelation flow through him: he had to follow a different path.
• These revelations that have come to Philip regularly, he calls intuition.
• He says, we must trust our body, feel ourselves embodied, that will lead to intuition
• How challenges are more fun than just managing success
• How it is so easy to become complacent in your life, when you are successful and life is easy
• We talk about how each of us needs to find our path of wellbeing, which means finding authenticity, meaning, continuity and coherence in our life - and how this is a continuous path... you never arrive... because of the radical impermanence
• Phillip talks about the basic conditions of this human realm, and how it is not a mistake, that there is suffering in this realm, but also, that we can work with this suffering...
• we speak about the causes of suffering...
• living a values-based life, based on wise view and vise intention - in each step living your values.
• having a life of integrity and dignity is a satisfaction in itself
• The nature of this realm is difficult
• when you don't accept the basic reality as it is, you are more likely to create more suffering and unskilful actions
• staying positive doesn't mean that you don't deeply accept suffering
• There are two types of suffering, neurotic suffering and necessary suffering.
• When we are in that reactive state we have bad judgment, and can't see clearly, we can't even see the happiness that is possible in life
• The nature of this realm is desire, so we do need to work skillfully with them - it is the grasping and attachment to the outcomes of those desires which can easily become unwholesome
• If you have a desirous mind, it is always going to be in that kind of state, no matter how much it achieves and gets.
• The jungian notion of the second half of life, where we move away from building up the ego, and start seeing more clearly the reality of how things really are
• There is nothing wrong with ambition, but what are the motives behind that ambition?
• Life is always dancing around us, and we can participate in that dance in a skillful and joyful way. We can learn to be a good dance partner... We always have some choice to realign, to adjust our course.
• It is not skillful to collapse or become bitter under all the suffering in the world, then we just add to the suffering.
• So much of living is an art, where information must become knowledge.
• We add to the suffering of the world when we resist reality
• Phillip explains the four noble truths and how they truly are ennobling
• Mindfulness without intention doesn't have direction, and intention without mindfulness forgets itself...

Phillip Moffitt's websites: www.dharmawisdom.org & https://lifebalance.org/institute/

Link to my course, Rewilding the Soul - Restoring Lifeforce & connecting to aliveness through nature & mindfulness:  app.mastermind.com/masterminds/29462

My website : www.duritaholm.com