The Modern Taoist

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 the gap between the standa...

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 ...

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 mos...

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 a...

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 weeke...

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. ...

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 Ta...

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 &mdas...

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 th...

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 actuall...

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 w...

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 ...

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 a...

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...

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 ju...

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 ...

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 sta...

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 liv...

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 ab...