The Modern Taoist

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.

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 to it. And the response — unlike the situation — is something you can actually work with. This episode is about the difference between reaction and response. Why the automatic, feeling-driven reaction is almost always the one that makes things worse. What creates the gap between the two. Why understanding this does nothing on its own, and what actually builds the capacity to use it when the situation is serious enough to matter. Also: a listener question from James in Edinburgh, who has been studying Taoism for two years, understands it completely, and finds it completely inaccessible the moment anything actually goes wrong. It's the question most serious students of this tradition eventually arrive at, and it deserves a real answer.

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 spoken — it's in everything that happens after. In the way they quietly close doors that haven't actually been tested yet, and produce, over time, exactly the outcomes they claimed were inevitable. This weekend check-in is about what's really happening when we reach for the absolute. Why it feels like realism and functions like surrender. And what the small, honest shift looks like that leaves the future available without requiring you to pretend everything is fine. Follow The Modern Taoist so you don't miss the full Tuesday episodes. And if you know someone whose absolutes are running their life, send this one their way.

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 episode is about the grading system most of us carry without ever choosing it — where it came from, why knowing it's unreasonable doesn't make it stop, and what actually changes when you start meeting each day on its own terms rather than forcing it through a metric it was never going to pass. Some days are for building. Some are for recovering. Some are simply for enduring. Learning to tell the difference — and to give each one the right standard rather than the same wrong one — turns out to be one of the more useful things a person can develop. Also: a listener question from Daniel in Melbourne about the I Ching — whether it's connected to Taoism, whether it's worth exploring, or whether it's just fortune-telling dressed up in ancient packaging.

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 clinging. If you've ever struggled to let go, feared losing something important, or wondered why attachment creates so much suffering, this conversation is for you.

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 about what it actually means to be the rain in a burning season. Not indifference. Not rising above it. Not performing composure for the benefit of people who find your struggle uncomfortable. But staying, in whatever small increment is available, more thoroughly yourself than the circumstances are making easy — and why that, in the end, is the only thing that actually works. Also: a listener question from Aoife in Dublin, who lost her marriage, her job, and has a seriously ill mother, all at once — and is exhausted by being told to be strong.

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 does the removal of stimulation feel like deprivation rather than relief? Why does the Western nervous system push back so hard against the very thing every contemplative tradition in human history has pointed toward? And why does trying harder at stillness make it worse rather than better? The racing mind is not the problem. The racing mind is the symptom. And understanding what it's a symptom of is considerably more useful than trying to stop it.

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 human life. Not in the obvious places. In the small daily moments where the previously decided quietly wins over the actually present. From the oak that breaks in the storm to the bamboo that bends to the ground and returns, from the external circumstances that calcify through inertia to the interior beliefs that stopped being examined years ago — this episode asks what it would mean to know the difference between what genuinely needs protecting and what is simply familiar. Also in this episode: how to talk about Taoism to people in your life without it getting strange — and a deceptively simple assignment that tells you more about your own rigidity than most extended self-examination will.

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 difference between structure that genuinely serves a life and structure a life has started serving instead, and what wu wei actually asks of us when it comes to control. This isn't an argument for chaos. It's an invitation to notice which of your systems are working for you — and which ones you're now working for.