The Modern Taoist

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 reliably for everyone around them and have quietly stopped including themselves in the circle of people they take care of. The ones who have two standards: a generous one for the people they love, and a conditional one for themselves that requires everything else to be done first. The Tao Te Ching has a lot to say about this. Chapter 28 describes the two modes available to a person — the outward, productive, doing mode and the inward, receptive, restorative one. The modern world has nearly eliminated the second. Rest is only acceptable as a means to more output. There is no category for the day that belongs to you not because you earned it but because you are alive. You are not required to run on nothing. This weekend, don't. Follow The Modern Taoist so you don't miss the full Tuesday episodes. And if you know someone who gives everything away and keeps nothing, send this one their way.

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 enough, and quietly enough, that most people have stopped noticing the gap between what is true inside them and what comes out. In this episode, Kit Mann looks at what the Taoist tradition calls te — your inherent nature, the thing that is specifically and irreducibly you, underneath all the adaptation and management and performance of an acceptable self. And at what it costs when that nature is consistently suppressed. Not to the relationships. To the person doing the suppressing. This episode is not about being more assertive or saying hard things to people who need to hear them. It is about the practice of staying close enough to your own nature that you have something true to say — and the return to the self that happens when you start saying it. Also: a listener question from James Key in Tallahassee, Florida, on guided meditation for Taoists — and why the forest the guide takes you to is not your fores

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 has to say about the life you are actually living right now. Chapter 1 opens with the most honest sentence anyone has ever written: the Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao. The book begins by telling you the book cannot contain what it is about. Kit Mann unpacks what that actually means — not in the abstract, but in the marriages where people have stopped seeing each other, in the story you have been telling about yourself that filters out anything that complicates it, in the conversations you walk into already knowing what you want to find. The translation used throughout this series is Stephen Mitchell's. The text is his. Everything else is Kit's.

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 Taoism would help them. In this weekend check-in, Kit makes the case that the practice is not something you demonstrate. It is something you become. And the becoming — done consistently, without announcement — is the only thing that actually changes anything. Follow The Modern Taoist so you don't miss the full Tuesday episodes. And if you know someone who is trying to live this way inside a life full of people who are not, send this one their way.

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 to change and is not changing. The weight has an address. The other is the fallow period — the space between chapters, the winter of the cycle, the time when something is gathering below the surface that cannot yet be named. Both feel like nothing is moving. Both produce the weight. The response that helps one makes the other worse. This episode is about how to tell them apart, what Taoism says about momentum, and what to do once you know which kind you are actually in. Also: a listener question from Gerald in Santa Clara, California, who wants to know what Taoism says about space aliens and ancient visitation — and whether a tradition as old as Chinese culture must have some thoughts on the subject. Kit's answer might surprise him.

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 weekend check-in, Kit makes the case that Taoism is not a philosophy to be appreciated. It is a way of moving through an ordinary day. And the ordinary day is the test. Not the podcast. Not the meditation cushion. The Tuesday morning when something goes wrong and the reaction rises before the response has a chance to form. The conversation that starts to become an argument. The moment you realize you have been somewhere else for the last twenty minutes while the person in front of you was still talking. The question this weekend is not whether you find Taoism interesting. The question is whether it is changing anything. Follow The Modern Taoist so you don't miss the full Tuesday episodes. And if you know someone who finds this interesting but hasn't made it personal yet, send this one their way.

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 is not what produces the change — the change is what produces the change. And the energy going into the prosecution of the former self is energy not going into the life that is still here and still yours. This episode is about what Taoism actually says about the past — not forgiveness as a performance, not spiritual bypassing of genuine harm, but the precise and useful observation that the war with the former self is costing the present self everything while changing the past exactly nothing. Also: a listener question from Tyler in Boise, Idaho, who wants to know which is more enlightened — his cat, who stares at walls for twenty minutes, or his dog, who chases his own tail. Kit has a definitive answer.

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 every week, and in the conversations people have with themselves at two in the morning. The but that follows the sorry. The but that follows the understanding. The but that keeps the door open just enough to feel like engagement while keeping everything on the other side exactly where it was. The Tao does not yield to exceptions. The practice does not come with a but. Follow The Modern Taoist so you don't miss the full Tuesday episodes. And if someone you know ends every apology with a but, send this one their way.

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 Mann makes the case that Taoism actually asks three things of you. Live in the present moment. Notice when you are not there, and return. Understand your nature and be true to it. That is the whole path. Not a simplified summary for beginners. The actual path. Kit also talks about what happens when pain is used as spiritual material too quickly, why the meaning-making that arrives before the feeling has finished is not processing but avoidance, and what a Zen master named Nansen said to a monk who kept pushing for the special technique. Also: a listener question from James in Adair, Oklahoma, who has made serious mistakes in his past and is trying to become a better person — and whose conscience, Kit argues, is working exactly as it should be.

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 it is ending before it became what it was meant to be. But in this weekend check-in, Kit Mann looks at what the Taoist tradition actually says about this moment. The end of summer is not a loss. It is a signal. The cycle is moving, and the question is not how to hold onto what is leaving — it is how to prepare for what is coming. Autumn is the season of gathering back. The tree does not wait for winter to start moving its energy toward the roots. It begins now. And so does the Taoist. Follow The Modern Taoist so you don't miss the full Tuesday episodes. And if this found someone at the right moment, send it their way.

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 looks like inside the real conditions of a modern life — not in theory, but in the body you are living in right now, in the season happening outside your window. Also: Kiera in Syracuse wants to know whether Taoism asks her to give up the beautiful things in life. Kit's answer might surprise her.

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. This weekend, the practice is simple. Go through your day and notice what's already demonstrating everything the Tao Te Ching spent eighty-one chapters trying to describe — in nature, in music, in film, in the ordinary Tuesday world around you. No analysis required. Just attention. Follow The Modern Taoist so you don't miss the full Tuesday episodes. And if this gives someone a new way to look at their week, send it their way.

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 believing it has caused an enormous amount of suffering that goes largely unnamed. This episode makes a distinction the culture almost never makes — between love and the relationship that sometimes houses it. Between the feeling and the attachment that arrives alongside it. Between loving someone and being entitled to anything from them, or them from you. Love, in the Taoist sense, is a state. It is a disposition toward another person's wellbeing that exists in the person who holds it — not in the relationship, not in the reciprocation, not in the response. You can love someone who is gone, who has hurt you, who will never know it. That love is not incomplete. It was never waiting for the relationship to make it real. Also: a listener question from Randall in Salt Lake City who wants to know how you actually tell the difference between meditating and just being quiet — and whether there is one.

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 gap — between the decision and the justification — is not communication. It's a trial in which you are simultaneously the defendant and the prosecutor, assembling a case for a decision that was never anyone else's to approve. This weekend check-in is about that habit. Where it comes from, what it's costing, and what happens when you make one decision this weekend and let it stand without a reason attached. Follow The Modern Taoist so you don't miss the full Tuesday episodes. And if you know someone who exhausts themselves explaining every move they make, send this one their way.

The Thinly Spread Life Look at your week. Count the things that have a claim on you right now. Now ask yourself honestly: is there one thing on that list receiving the full quality of attention it deserves? For most people, the answer is no. And it has been no for a while. This episode is about how that happens — not through bad choices, but through a thousand reasonable ones. The yes that protected a relationship. The yes that hedged against missing out. The yes that proved the calendar was full enough to justify the space being taken up. And the fourth one nobody talks about: the yes that filled the quiet before the hard questions could arrive in it. And then what all those yeses actually cost. Not hours. Not productivity. The quality of presence available for the things that actually matter — the work, the relationships, the moments that are happening right now and will not happen again. Also: a listener question from Marcus in Cape Town asking how reliable the Tao Te Ching actually is after thousands of years of copying, reordering, and translation — and whether what we are reading now bears any resemblance to what Lao Tzu actually wrote.

Stop Being an Employee of Your Own Mind Most people wake up on a Saturday morning and before the coffee is made, before anything has actually happened, the mind has already produced an agenda. Something from last week that needs relitigating. A future conversation that has already gone badly. An assessment of the coming week that is, on balance, not encouraging. They didn't choose any of it. The mind issued the directive and they started working through it, because that's what they always do, because the thought arrived with the implicit instruction to attend to it — and the instruction was obeyed. This is what it means to be an employee of your own mind. The mind produces a thought and most people treat it as a fact requiring a response, rather than as the output of a pattern-recognition machine with a well-documented bias toward the most alarming available interpretation of any given situation. This weekend check-in is about the gap between having a thought and the thought being true — and what becomes available when you start noticing the difference. Follow The Modern Taoist so you don't miss the full Tuesday episodes. And if you know someone who is working full time for a mind that isn't paying them fairly, send this one their way.

Carrying Yourself Whole Chapter 10 of the Tao Te Ching is unusual. Instead of stating, Lao Tzu asks. Can you carry your body and soul together without separation? Can you love people without possessing them? Can you lead without controlling? Can you see what is actually there rather than the version you decided on before you looked? These are not rhetorical questions. They are a mirror held up to the specific ways most people are living at a slight distance from their own lives — present in body, somewhere else in mind; giving genuinely but tracking the return; caring about people while quietly managing them toward outcomes they never agreed to. This episode takes each of those questions out of the abstract and into the ordinary moments of a modern life. The dinner table where the body is present and the mind is elsewhere. The relationship where the love is real and the ledger is also real. The governance that wears the clothes of care and is still governance. Also: a listener question from Someone in Stockholm who travels constantly and wants to know whether Taoism actually helps with patience — or whether that's just something people say.

Chapter 48 — Why Less Is the Practice Most people who come to Taoism hit Chapter 48 and stop cold. Nothing is done and nothing is left undone. It reads like a riddle, or like the book is telling you to give up and opt out. Most people decide it must mean something they're not spiritually advanced enough to grasp yet, and move on. They're not missing spiritual advancement. They're missing a translation issue. Chapter 48 is not about doing less. It's about removing what has attached itself to the doing that was never part of the doing in the first place. The parenting that got buried under the managing of the household. The friendship that accumulated so much maintenance it stopped resembling a friendship. The thing you started for one reason that somewhere along the way became about something else entirely. This weekend check-in is a short, practical look at the most misunderstood chapter in the Tao Te Ching — what it actually says, why it matters, and what it looks like in a real life being lived. Follow The Modern Taoist so you don't miss the full Tuesday episodes. And if you know someone who has been confused by this chapter, send it their way.

You Don't Need to Feel Motivated Motivation is not a magical condition that arrives and makes action possible. It is what action produces. And the person waiting for it to show up before they begin has the causality completely backwards. You brush your teeth without waiting to feel inspired. You make dinner without consulting your enthusiasm levels first. But when it comes to the things that actually matter — the work, the conversation, the change that would shift something real — suddenly the feeling has to arrive first. And it doesn't. And the days pass. And the thing doesn't get done. This episode is about that inversion. About why motivation follows action rather than precedes it, what the Taoist tradition understood about the relationship between doing and feeling, and why waiting for Monday to start something you could start today is not preparation — it's just waiting with a better story attached to it. Also: a listener question from Tana in Austin about whether luck exists — which turns out to be exactly the right question for a tradition that has been thinking about the difference between what happens and what we decide it means for a very long time.

Three Things a Taoist Does Every Day Most conversations about Taoism stay at the level of ideas. The water metaphor. The wisdom of not forcing. The value of stillness. People find these things resonant and then walk back into their lives and do exactly what they were doing before — because nobody explained what any of it actually looks like on a Tuesday morning. This weekend check-in is about the Tuesday morning. Three things a person living close to this tradition actually returns to throughout an ordinary day. Not a morning routine. Not a system to build and optimise. Just three orientations that change the quality of whatever the day is doing — available in the gaps the day already produces, without requiring anything the day isn't already offering. Follow The Modern Taoist so you don't miss the full Tuesday episodes. And if you know someone who has been reading about Taoism and wondering what to actually do with it, send this one their way. Three Things a Taoist Does Every Day Most conversations about Taoism stay at the level of ideas. The water metaphor. The wisdom of not forcing. The value of stillness. People find these things resonant and then walk back into their lives and do exactly what they were doing before — because nobody explained what any of it actually looks like on a Tuesday morning. This weekend check-in is about the Tuesday morning. Three things a person living close to this tradition actually returns to throughout an ordinary day. Not a morning routine. Not a system to build and optimise. Just three orientations that change the quality of whatever the day is doing — available in the gaps the day already produces, without requiring anything the day isn't already offering. Follow The Modern Taoist so you don't miss the full Tuesday episodes. And if you know someone who has been reading about Taoism and wondering what to actually do with it, send this one their way.