The Modern Taoist

The Modern Taoist — Ask Me Anything | Episode 5 Kit Mann answers six listener questions in the latest Ask Me Anything episode of The Modern Taoist — covering clinical anxiety and depression, perimenopause, whether Taoism is only for older people, what the tradition actually says about death, collecting as compulsion, and what to do when a company betrays nine years of loyalty. No themes, no arc, n...

The Tao Te Now — Chapter 5 Chapter 5 opens with the most uncomfortable claim Lao Tzu has made so far. The Tao does not take sides. It gives birth to both good and evil and does not choose between them. The sage does not organize the world into people who deserve care and people who do not. She welcomes both saints and sinners. In this episode, Kit Mann works through what that actually means — and...

In this weekend check-in, Kit Mann makes the case that the noticing practice does not start in the meditation sitting or in the hard conversation. It starts in the moments that have nothing at stake. The temperature of the air when the door opens. The weight of the coffee cup. The face of the person across the table, actually looked at. The faculty that notices those things is the same faculty tha...

Why do couples argue about the smallest things when the argument is rarely about the thing itself? In this episode of The Modern Taoist , Kit Mann explores the Taoist view of relationships, conflict, ego, and communication. He looks at why arguments create winners and losers, how unspoken expectations fuel resentment, and what changes when being right becomes less important than caring for the per...

The Tao Te Now — Chapter 4 Chapter 4 is eight lines. The shortest chapter yet. And in those eight lines, Lao Tzu makes three of the most striking observations in the entire text. The Tao is like a well — used but never used up. The void it describes is not emptiness but the space where all possibilities still exist before any of them have been closed off. And then, after eighty-one chapters of des...

Sit Down Most people who find Taoism do so through the ideas. The philosophy resonates. The way of looking at things shifts. And then they go back to their lives without ever sitting down to do the one thing the tradition has always been built around. In this weekend check-in, Kit Mann makes the case that the sitting is not optional. Not because the ideas are worthless without it — they are not —...

Navigating Bad News Bad news does not wait for a good time. It arrives in grocery stores and parking lots and at the dinner table in the middle of an otherwise ordinary Tuesday. And the world rearranges itself, and the person has to find a way to keep moving inside the rearranged world. In this episode, Kit Mann looks at what actually happens when bad news arrives — the phased processing, the iden...

The Tao Te Now — Chapter 3 Chapter 3 is fifteen lines. Lao Tzu covers overvaluing, distrust, installed ambition, the confusion that arrives when certainty collapses, and wu wei. In that order. Without wasting a word. In this episode, Kit Mann works through the chapter line by line — the neighborhood where the house has become a status symbol and what that produces, the parent who manages every dec...

You Knew This Was Coming Change arrived this week for someone listening to this. It always does. And the response, almost universally, is some form of: I never saw that coming. In this weekend check-in, Kit Mann makes the case that most of the time, on some level, the person did see it coming. The job had been unstable for months. The relationship had been signaling. The body had been sending info...

You Are Not Required to Be Pure Someone looked across a table recently and said: I thought you were supposed to be some kind of guru or something. That sentence is the whole of this episode. There is a picture of what a spiritually serious person looks like. Measured. Elevated. Careful with language. Free from the coarser textures of ordinary life. Brad Warner is a Zen priest who plays in punk ban...

The Tao Te Now — Chapter 2 Chapter 2 follows immediately from where Chapter 1 left off, and it wastes no time. The moment you decide what is beautiful, something else becomes ugly. The moment you decide what is good, something else becomes bad. Lao Tzu is not making a point about subjectivity. He is making a point about what judgment does — how the act of naming a standard simultaneously creates t...

Find Some Time for Yourself This Weekend When did you last do something purely for yourself? Not to recover so you can work better. Not to be a better partner or parent or friend. Just because you wanted to. For a lot of people that question produces either a blank or a memory that is further back than it should be. In this weekend check-in, Kit Mann talks to the givers — the people who show up re...

Speaking Your Truth There is the thing you actually think. And there is the thing you say instead. Not because you are dishonest. But because somewhere along the way, most people learned that what they actually think is not always welcome. That it creates friction. That it costs something in the currency of approval or belonging or keeping the peace. And so the filtering began — and ran long enoug...

The Tao Te Now — Chapter 1 This is a new series. Every week, alongside the main Tuesday episode and the weekend check-in, we are going to sit with one chapter of the Tao Te Ching. In order. All the way through. Not as a lecture. Not as a study of ancient Chinese philosophy. As a conversation with a short piece of writing that has been sitting in the world for twenty-five centuries, asking what it...

What do you do when the people closest to you are not doing any of this? When your partner escalates every disagreement. When your family runs on guilt and obligation. When the people you love most are the ones making it hardest to live the way you are trying to live. The answer is not tolerance. It is not patience from a position of quiet superiority. And it is not explaining to your partner why...

When Life Feels Stagnant Most conversations about stagnation start with the same question: how do I get the momentum back? In this episode, Kit Mann argues that this is the wrong question — because it assumes stagnation is one thing, when it is actually two things that feel identical from the inside and require opposite responses. One is the life that has genuinely stopped moving. Something needs...

This Is Not Just a Philosophy Podcast A lot of people listen to shows like this one the same way they read books they find interesting. They take something in, find it resonant, think about it for a while, and then go back to their lives more or less unchanged. The ideas join the collection of other interesting ideas and none of them do very much. Kit Mann is not interested in that. In this weeken...

Most people who have done real work on themselves end up in the same strange place. They have genuinely changed. They are not who they were. And they cannot stop being at war with the person they used to be. In this episode, Kit Mann makes the case that sustained regret is not accountability. It feels like accountability. It has the texture of taking things seriously. But the depth of the regret i...

I love what Taoism says about living in the present, but I can't stop worrying. I know I need to let this go, but I've been hurt too many times. I'm sorry I did that, but here's why. The word but does not add to what came before it. It cancels it. In this weekend check-in, Kit Mann looks at the single word that shows up in apologies, in arguments, in the messages listeners send eve...

Lets Not Try So Hard Most people who begin a serious spiritual practice end up in the same place eventually. Not enlightened. Exhausted. Every difficult moment becomes a test of the practice. Every negative emotion becomes evidence of insufficient development. The tradition that was supposed to make the life lighter has become another job. Another standard to fall short of. In this episode, Kit Ma...

The Summer Is Almost Over — And That Is Not a Bad Thing Something happens in late August that most people feel immediately. The light shifts. The shadows are longer. The air in the morning carries something that was not there two months ago. The season is talking to you. For a lot of people this produces a low-grade grief because after all, the summer was supposed to be more than it was, and now i...

The schedule belongs to the employer. The food comes from somewhere you'll never see. The light is set by a switch. And the connection to natural cycles that Taoism considers the ground of everything has been so thoroughly dismantled that most people aren't sure they ever had it. In this episode, Kit Mann looks at what was taken, what is still available, and what a Taoist practice actually...

The Tao Is Already There — You Just Have to Look It's in the weed pushing through the sidewalk crack. It's in the dog who is completely inside the joy of this particular walk with no memory of yesterday's and no plan for tomorrow's. It's in song lyrics you've known for twenty years that suddenly sound like something Lao Tzu would have written if he'd had a record deal....

We have spent our lives being taught that love needs a relationship to be real. That loving someone who doesn't love you back is a wound to be healed. That loving someone you've lost, or left, or grown apart from is unfinished emotional business — an attachment that hasn't been properly processed. That the love ends, or should end, when the relationship does. None of that is true. And...

Stop Explaining Yourself Most people have developed the habit of providing a reason for every decision they make. Not just the big ones. The small ones too. Why they left early. Why they said no. Why they need the day to themselves. Why they chose the thing they chose instead of the thing that was expected. The explanation arrives before anyone has asked for it. And what's happening in that ga...