Advertise on podcast: The Modern Taoist

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 traditionally been understood as a season of consolidation, when energy begins moving inward after the expansion of spring and summer. There is a difference between nesting and hiding, between genuine restoration and simply checking out. The Taoist approach isn't about becoming less productive. It is about recognizing when forcing yourself against the conditions around you has a cost. If you're feeling more tired, introverted, reflective, or drawn toward home this October, that may not be laziness. It may be information. In this episode: Why autumn can change our sleep and energy The Taoist view of seasonal rhythms Why consolidation is as important as expansion The difference between nesting and hiding How to recognize when your body is asking you to slow down Why rest can be productive How to move with the season instead of fighting it A short Taoist check-in for anyone who feels like doing a little less this time of year. Follow The Modern Taoist on Spotify for the Tuesday episodes, and share this episode with someone who needs permission to follow the pull inward this season.

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 what you’d expect. In Taoism, there is no supernatural. If something exists, it’s part of nature. Which means ghosts, spirits, and the unseen world aren’t outside the framework. They’re part of it. Kit walks through the classical Chinese vocabulary for the spirit world — Shén (shen), the animating spiritual force; Guǐ (gway), the ghost or lingering dead; Zǔ (dzoo), the ancestors; and the two souls every living person carries: the Hún (hwun), the yang sky-soul, and the Pò (poh), the yin earth-soul. What happens when they separate at death — and what happens when they don’t — is exactly where the Taoist understanding of ghosts begins. From there: why ghosts exist according to the tradition (unfinished business, violent death, and the neglect of the dead by the living), Zhuangzi’s famous story of singing at his wife’s funeral, the skull on the road who wouldn’t trade death for life, and the deeper question underneath all of it — why do we see them, and why do we need them to exist? This episode also answers a listener question about unexplained waves of sadness that arise in meditation, and closes with a Taoist assignment built for the season. Thoughtful, a little unsettling, and grounded in a 2,500-year-old tradition that took the unseen world seriously long before it was Halloween.

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 breaks down what that actually means, why the emptiness Lao Tzu is describing is not a lack but a function, and why the Tao is not something you go out and find. It was already there before you started looking. If you have ever felt like your spiritual practice was something you had to earn your way into, this chapter says otherwise.

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 taught that rest is what happens when the work is done — a reward, something earned, something scheduled into the gaps. Taoism does not see it that way. Rest is not the absence of work. It is part of the same cycle as the work, and the person who removes it from that cycle has not optimized anything. They have cut off the source the productivity comes from. This check-in is short, direct, and built for the person who scrolls for two hours and feels worse afterward, who sits still and stays somewhere else in their head, who cannot remember the last time they came back from time off actually restored. If that is you, this is the episode. If you know someone like that, send it to them

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, no tidy argument. Just real questions from real people and honest answers that bring Taoist thinking to the places it actually lives — in the body, in the workplace, in the grief, in the obsession, in the gap between what you understand and what you feel.

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 what it does not mean. It is not moral relativism. It is not indifference. It is the recognition that waiting for the universe to validate your goodness and punish the wrongdoing of others is its own kind of suffering, and that letting go of that expectation changes something real. The chapter also introduces a new image for the Tao — the bellows, empty and infinitely capable, producing more the more it is used. And it ends on nine words that contain the whole of the practice: hold on to the center. Not arrive at it. Hold on to it. The difference between those two things is the difference between a destination and a practice.

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 that catches the ego arriving before it has said anything. That registers the shift in a conversation before it becomes a problem. That brings the attention back to the breath in the sitting. It is one thing. It gets built in the small moments or it does not get built. This weekend's practice: one walk, twenty minutes, phone in the pocket. Look for what nature is doing in the places where it was not invited. The weed in the concrete. The tree growing from the rock face. The moss on the city wall. Not to interpret it. Just to see it. And notice what else becomes visible once the filtering is off. Follow The Modern Taoist so you don't miss the full Tuesday episodes. And if you know someone who moves through their days without quite being in them, send this one their way.

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 person in front of you. Drawing from the Tao Te Ching, Kit offers a practical approach to disagreement: hold your position without needing the other person to lose, recognize when ego has entered the room, and find your way back to what the argument was really about.

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 describing the nature of reality, Lao Tzu says plainly: I don't know who gave birth to it. It is older than God. In this episode, Kit Mann works through each image — what the well means for the people who feel depleted, what the void means for the conversations people have already decided will go badly before they happen, what hidden but always present actually looks like in an argument at eleven at night rather than in a meditation session. And what Lao Tzu means when he places the Tao before God — not as an attack on religion, but as a reframing of where every tradition, every framework, every story about the origin of things actually sits. Chapter 5 next week.

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 — but because there is something the body learns in the sitting that the mind cannot learn from reading about it. The return to the present moment practiced five hundred times in a chair becomes the return available in an argument, in a hard week, in the moments when the philosophy is most needed. For people who want to start but do not know how, The Modern Taoist YouTube channel has guided meditations in 12, 16, and 22 minute sessions — with more coming. The 12 minute session is the place to begin. For people who already sit — this one is a reminder of why it still count

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 identity shift that nobody talks about, the mode that takes over before the feeling does. And at what the Taoist tradition says about being in that space without making it harder than it already is. Kit also covers what not to say to someone who has just received bad news — and why most of what people offer in those moments is aimed at the comfort of the giver rather than the person receiving the news. And what to say instead, which turns out to be considerably simpler. Also: a listener question from Lanto in San Jose, Costa Rica, who was raised Catholic and still carries parts of it — and wants to know whether Taoism asks him to leave all of that behind.

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 decision and the adult that creates, the person who reaches the destination they were told to want and finds out it was never theirs. And the one instruction that runs underneath all of it: stop doing the thing that is producing the problem. The rest follows.

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 information that was not being processed. The change was not sudden. The awareness of it was sudden. And those are not the same thing. The Tao Te Ching's Chapter 16 describes the practice of returning — of being present to what is actually there rather than to the mental model of what should be there. The preparation for change is not strategic. It is attentional. The person who is in the room with what is actually in the room does not eliminate change from their life. They eliminate the gap between the change and the awareness of it. Follow The Modern Taoist so you don't miss the full Tuesday episodes. And if you know someone who keeps getting blindsided by things they already knew were there, send this one their way.

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 bands. Noah Levine teaches Buddhist dharma and built a recovery community rooted in punk culture. Both have spent careers fielding the same raised eyebrow. The picture follows people across traditions. And the picture is wrong. In this episode, Kit Mann traces where the purity myth actually came from — Buddhist monasticism stripped of its context, the Victorian transmission of Eastern philosophy filtered through discomfort with the body, and the human need for visible credentials in a practice that produces nothing visible. And he makes the case that the Taoist tradition has been pushing back against this confusion for twenty-five centuries, because the tradition understands exactly what happens when communities mistake the aesthetic for the practice. The metal listener, the person whose language is rough, the one who watches films the aesthetic considers inappropriate — none of them are in tension with Taoism for any of it. The question the tradition asks is not what category of thing is being engaged with. It is whether the person is actually in it. Also: Clint in Iowa wants to know if lifting weights is compatible with Taoist practice. The answer is short.

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 standard and everything that does not meet it. And how that gap becomes the primary experience of the thing rather than the thing itself. This chapter covers wu wei — probably the most misread idea in the entire tradition — and what it actually means for the action to arise from the situation rather than from the self managing toward an outcome. It covers having without possessing, acting without expecting, and succeeding without taking credit. And it addresses something listeners ask about regularly: why does Stephen Mitchell use she when referring to the sage, when the original Chinese text uses no gender at all.