The Modern Taoist

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...

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 conv...

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 ...

It Is Never the Situation

Something goes wrong. And the immediate experience, almost every time, is that the situation is the problem — that the way forward runs through the circumstances changing, and until they do, you're stuck.

Taoism has always disagreed with that reading. Not because circumstances don't matter, but because the situation is not where your life is actually happening. Your life is happening in your response t...

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 damage they do isn't in the moment they're...

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 rest nor anything else.

This ep...

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 caring. It simply invites us to care without ...

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 from the outside.

This episode is a...

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-in takes that frustration seriously. Why...

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, it traces where rigidity actually lives in a...

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 snaps while the bamboo bends, the differen...