Growing up in West Virginia, Suzanne Hodges remembers living on what she calls "relatively meager means" and dreaming of the comfortable security she finally attained in her 30s, complete with big home, Land Rover, and BMW.

Why then, she often asked herself, do I feel so uneasy on easy street?

"I was waiting for that feeling that you would get at the end of a marathon, to say 'I did it!' but it never came," says Ms. Hodges, a financial planner with Merrill Lynch in Huntington. "What came instead was a lot of anxiety" about losing what she had and needing more to be truly safe.

What Hodges describes is hardly unusual. Her colleagues in financial planning recount many a story of successful people whose ambitions got them where they are, but whose habits of always needing or wanting more made them so restless they couldn't enjoy their affluence. In an ironic twist, the very factors that allow for material success can and sometimes do undermine the ultimate goals: personal fulfillment, good health, strong relationships, and other things that make life worth living.

Faced with that pattern, some planners are becoming part-counselor, part-philosopher, as they ask clients: What is the purpose of money? Do you acknowledge the limits of what it can achieve? How much money is enough, anyway?

Such questions may have once seemed taboo or intrusive, but no more. Consider:

• For each of the past three years, workshops on this type of "interior finance" have drawn more than 600 financial planners at the Financial Planning Association's annual meeting.

• About 450 planners have taken a two-day workshop in "life planning," where the California-based Kinder Institute of Life Planning teaches them to probe what clients crave most deeply and then brainstorm creative ways to finance it.

• This month, the Integral Finance Center in Colorado held its kickoff event. The center uses the ideas of Ken Wilber, a spirituality and psychology writer and author of "A Theory of Everything," to tackle financial planning.

In taking these approaches, a growing breed of countercultural planners and their clients are challenging prevalent attitudes that say one can never have enough money. To the contrary, they suggest that discovering what constitutes enough marks a necessary step in the process of reaching dreams.

"We try to build a bulwark of money against any number of tragedies and hope we can keep bad things from happening to us," says Pamela York Klainer, a former financial planner and author of "How Much is Enough? Harness the Power of Your Money Story - and Change Your Life." But even riches can't insure against tragedy. "You have to learn to ask money to do what it does and develop skills in other areas to do the rest of what's important in life."

In Life Planning, the brainchild of Massachusetts financial planner George Kinder, the process for knowing what's truly enough begins with an introspective inventory. Planners trained in the method ask clients what they would do if they had just five years to live - and what they would regret if they knew they would die tomorrow. Elicited by these and other probing questions, individual passions find their way to the surface and establish a life agenda. Next step: Estimate costs and find revenue.

"You can only come to that figure of how much is enough when you know what will truly fulfill your client," says Susan Galvan, CEO and cofounder of the Kinder Institute.

Often clients don't know what will fulfill them, and the process of finding out can be humbling. For instance, one of Hodges's clients hated his job but hadn't saved up enough to quit. He explained his habit of buying expensive shoes and suits when he got depressed about his work. Clearly, she told him, he'd have to quit that habit in order to reach his bigger goal of a fulfilling life. She asked another executive, who didn't feel secure with $3 million, "When was the last time you did something fun?" He had come for investment tips, but instead found himself assigned to take a week-long bicycle trip. The shift may sound enjoyable, but for him it wasn't easy. The point was leisure, but he felt compelled to keep pedaling to the front of the pack.

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