The Modern Taoist

Speaking in Absolutes Is a Form of Giving Up I will never. This always happens. I'm just not the kind of person who. These sentences feel like honesty. Like finally facing the hard truth instead of pretending. They arrive with the authority of real experience behind them, and that authority makes them almost impossible to argue with from the inside. But they are almost never accurate. And the...

Life Is Not Asking You to Win Today Most people end hard days feeling like they failed them. Not because anything went wrong, exactly — but because the standard they applied to the day had nothing to do with what the day actually was. A day that deserved to be called endurance got filed under disappointing. A day that needed genuine rest got spent in guilty half-productivity that produced neither...

This weekend, I share a very personal experience that led me to wrestle with a much bigger question: What is the difference between protecting something and trying to possess it? It's a subtle distinction, but one that touches every part of our lives, from relationships and careers to our identities and expectations. In this Weekend Check-In, we explore why the Tao doesn't ask us to stop c...

When the World Is on Fire, Be the Rain Some seasons of life don't arrive one thing at a time. The relationship breaks, the job disappears, the family tips into crisis — and suddenly everything is burning at once. The instinct is to fight harder, clamp down, match the energy of the chaos with more energy. Taoism suggests something different. Something that takes more courage than it looks like...

A listener wrote in this week with something a lot of people are feeling but haven't said out loud: they've been trying to do the things the practice asks — the stillness, the presence, the slowing down — and it's boring. The mind races. Nothing lands. The quiet that's supposed to feel like relief feels like a room with no windows and no particular reason to stay in it. This check-...

The Strength in Yielding Most people would say they're flexible. And then life actually asks them to be. This episode examines the gap between believing you're adaptable and genuinely being so — and why that gap matters more than most people realise. Drawing on one of Taoism's most quietly radical observations, that the living are soft and yielding while the dead are rigid and stiff, i...

The Organized Life Is Not the Tao There's an entire industry built on the promise that better systems will finally make life feel manageable. More structure, more optimization, the right routine — and yet the feeling of control it's supposed to produce stays just out of reach. This weekend check-in looks at the compulsion to organize everything through a Taoist lens: why the rigid tree sna...

The Closest Distance The person sitting across from you at dinner. The one who has seen you at your worst and stayed. The one whose breathing you know, whose moods you can read from across a room before a word is said. This episode is about what it actually means to be present with that person — and how often, in our closest relationships, we're doing something that looks like presence but is...

The Little Things Are the Big Things Most people are waiting for their life to get interesting. The trip that hasn't happened yet. The version of things that arrives once the difficult patch is over. The moment when everything settles enough to actually enjoy what is here. Meanwhile, Tuesday keeps happening. And the coffee that was genuinely good this morning. And the brief, unplanned moment o...

When life gets genuinely hard, the advice to "be present" can feel less like wisdom and more like an instruction to sit quietly in pain. This episode is for the people who are currently inside something difficult — not after it, during it — and finding the usual answers insufficient. Using a quietly profound passage from Haruki Murakami's Kafka on the Shore as its starting point, thi...

Many people discover Taoism during a difficult season of life. A relationship ends. Work becomes overwhelming. Anxiety starts taking up more space than it used to. Naturally, we begin looking for something that can fix the problem. But Taoism was never meant to be a problem solver. In this Weekend Check-In, we explore one of the most misunderstood aspects of Taoist practice: the difference between...

What if not everything requires a response? And what if not every meaningful moment needs to be recorded? In this episode, we explore Chapter 49 of the Tao Te Ching and the Taoist idea of the “unfixed mind” — a mind that meets life openly instead of arriving with reactions already prepared. From social media arguments and news cycles to our constant urge to document experiences before they’ve full...

Why do so many people start suffering for Monday before Monday even arrives? In this Taoist Check-In, we explore the familiar feeling of Sunday dread and the habit of mentally living in the future before it happens. From work stress and unfinished tasks to the simple fear of another busy week, the mind often turns tomorrow into a problem long before tomorrow gets here. Drawing from Taoist principl...

What if the exhaustion you feel isn’t coming from doing too much… but from forcing too much? In this episode, we explore Chapter 55 of the Tao Te Ching and one of Lao Tzu’s most surprising images: the newborn child. Not as innocence. Not as weakness. As a picture of natural strength. We look at what happens as we grow older and slowly trade ease for performance, natural response for self-managemen...

We spend a surprising amount of life treating desires like needs. Not because wanting things is wrong, but because somewhere along the way we begin believing peace can only arrive once the next thing does. In this Taoist Check-In, we explore the difference between desire and need, why modern life constantly blurs the line between them, and how attachment quietly turns ordinary wants into sources o...

What makes waiting so painful? Not just bad news. Not failure. The space before knowing. In this episode, we explore the uniquely difficult experience of living in uncertainty — waiting for answers, outcomes, decisions, change, or the next version of your life to begin. From pending medical results to major life transitions, Taoism offers a perspective that goes far beyond “just be present” or “le...

Chapter Two of the Tao Te Ching contains a simple line that becomes harder and harder to ignore once you really understand it: “Do without depending.” In this Taoist Check-In, we look at how modern life trains us to attach our peace to outcomes, validation, praise, attention, and control. Laozi points in another direction entirely. This episode explores the difference between caring and depending,...

For years, we’ve been told the same thing: You have to forgive in order to heal. But what if that isn’t always true? In this episode, Kit takes a direct and deeply honest look at forgiveness, emotional healing, and the pressure people feel to “move on” before they’re actually ready. Instead of treating forgiveness like a moral requirement or spiritual achievement, this conversation explores a more...

Most people are not exhausted from doing too much. They’re exhausted from resisting what they already know needs to be done. In this weekend’s Taoist Check-In, we explore how avoidance, distraction, and endless internal negotiation create unnecessary suffering in modern life. From unfinished tasks to constant phone scrolling, we’ve become experts at delaying direct participation in our own lives....

We talk about phones like they’re stealing our time. That’s not really the problem. In this episode, we take a Taoist look at what’s actually being lost. Not productivity. Not focus. Something quieter, and a lot more important. Your ability to fully be in your own life while it’s happening. Drawing from the teachings of Zhuangzi, this episode breaks down how constant checking and scrolling reshape...

Something goes wrong. You try to fix it. It doesn’t move. And before you know it, you’re carrying it around all day. This episode is about what actually frustrates you in those moments. It’s not the situation. It’s the loss of control. We look at what’s really yours to handle and what never was. Not as an idea, but as something you can apply immediately when things start to spiral. This is a groun...

You don’t get tired from doing too much. You get tired from maintaining who you think you’re supposed to be. There’s a version of you that’s been built over time. The capable one. The calm one. The reliable one. It didn’t come out of nowhere. It came from real experience, real effort, real feedback from the world around you. But at some point, that version stopped being something you express and s...

This weekend, simplify your thinking. Not your schedule. Not your environment. Your thinking. Most of the weight people carry isn’t coming from what actually happens. It’s coming from what gets added on top of it. A moment happens, and almost instantly it’s interpreted, personalized, and expanded into something bigger than it needs to be. In this Taoist Check-In, we go straight at that. Using a si...

Most people think awareness is something you build. Something you get better at by paying closer attention, thinking more clearly, or watching yourself more carefully. But that’s where things start to go wrong. In this episode, we draw a clean line between awareness and overthinking. Not as an idea, but as something you can recognize in real time. Because they can look almost identical from the ou...

You’re not stuck because you have too many options. You’re stuck because you don’t trust the first clear signal. In this Taoist Check-In, we take a direct look at hesitation, what happens when multiple good paths are in front of you and thinking takes over. What feels like careful decision-making is often just resistance in disguise. Using grounded insight from the Tao Te Ching, this episode cuts...