The Modern Taoist

Simple Is Not the Same as Convenient: Why We’ll Need Taoism in 2027 Streaming services, cloud storage, sleep trackers, meal kits and password managers all promised to make life easier. So why do so many of us feel more crowded and more tired than ever? In this episode of The Modern Taoist, Kit Mann looks at the difference between simple and convenient, and why that difference will shape the years...

How do you know when enough is enough? In this episode of Tao Te Now, Kit Mann goes through Chapter 9 of the Tao Te Ching line by line, using the Stephen Mitchell translation. It is one of Lao Tzu’s most practical teachings on balance, moderation and letting go. Chapter 9 gives four warnings. A bowl filled to the brim spills. A knife sharpened too long goes dull. Chasing money and security keeps y...

Ancient wisdom. Modern problems. Real life. Join Taoist teacher and veteran broadcaster Kit Mann for The Modern Taoist Podcast , where 2,500 years of Taoist philosophy meets the challenges of living in today's world. No mystical promises, no spiritual shortcuts, and no pretending life is always peaceful. Just honest conversations, practical wisdom, and a fresh perspective on what it means to b...

Thanksgiving and Christmas are coming, and for a lot of people that means eight weeks of too many events, too much spending, family tension and not enough sleep. In this Weekend Check-In, Kit Mann looks at holiday stress before it starts and gives you a simple way to get ready now. Through the story of Carol, who hosts Thanksgiving for twenty-two people every year and spends it in tears in the pan...

What are you afraid of, underneath the spiders and the public speaking? In this episode of The Modern Taoist, Kit Mann looks at four kinds of fear that run people’s lives: fear of the unknown, fear of what other people will do, fear of loss, and fear of failure. He traces each one back to the same root, which is control. Kit talks about a study where people found waiting on an uncertain outcome mo...

In Chapter 8 of the Tao Te Ching, Lao Tzu uses water to show how the Tao works in everyday life. Water nourishes everything without trying. It settles in the lowest places. It never forces. And everything flows toward it anyway. Using the Stephen Mitchell translation, this episode walks through the six instructions at the heart of Chapter 8 — how to live, think, handle conflict, lead, work, and sh...

Grounding is having a moment. Wellness culture calls it earthing. NIH researchers have been studying it. And the Taoist tradition has been practicing it for three thousand years. In this weekend check-in, Kit explores what it actually means to feel the earth beneath your feet — what the science is starting to confirm, what qigong has always known, and why rooting downward is the one thing most peo...

You already know what the pattern is. You’ve probably tried to stop it more than once. The problem isn’t awareness — it’s that awareness alone doesn’t reach the level where the pattern actually lives. In this episode, Kit breaks down why repeating patterns survive our best efforts to change them, what the Taoist tradition says about the difference between insight and actual change, and what measur...

The Tao Has Nothing at Stake — Chapter 7 of the Tao Te Ching Chapter 7 asks a question most people never think to ask: why does the Tao work the way it does? The answer Lao Tzu gives is this: the Tao is inexhaustible because it has no desires for itself. It holds everything and sustains everything because it spends nothing on maintaining its own position. No agenda. No reputation to protect. Nothi...

You Are Not Lazy. You Are In October. | The Modern Taoist Weekend Check-In Why do you feel like slowing down when autumn arrives? Why does the couch suddenly look better than your plans, and why does going to bed early feel strangely guilty? In this Weekend Check-In, Kit Mann explores the Taoist idea of seasonal living, rest, and working with the natural rhythms of the body . Autumn has traditiona...

Every October, people feel it — the sense that the dead are closer than usual. Halloween is just the pop-culture echo of something much older: the recognition that the unseen world is real, and that this time of year carries a different weight. In this episode of The Modern Taoist, Kit Mann goes deep on what the Taoist tradition actually says about ghosts, spirits, and the afterlife — and it’s not...

The Modern Taoist — Tao Te Now, Chapter 6 Kit Mann on the five lines in the Tao Te Ching that make the biggest claim in the book and then immediately make it personal. Chapter 6 calls the Tao the Great Mother — empty yet inexhaustible, the source of infinite worlds — and then turns directly to the listener and says it is always present within you, and you can use it any way you want. This episode...

The Modern Taoist — Rest Is Not the Same Thing as Stopping Kit Mann on why the weekend you spent doing nothing still left you exhausted on Monday morning. This episode draws a distinction that productivity culture never bothered to make: the difference between stopping and actually resting. One of them restores something. The other is just anxiety in a horizontal position. Most people have been ta...

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...