The Modern Taoist
- Episódios
- 112
- Publicação
- várias vezes por semana
- Último episódio
- 13 nov 2026
Sobre o podcast
Taoism has a lot to say about modern life. The Modern Taoist is a podcast about Taoist philosophy, Taoist teachings and the ideas found in the Tao Te Ching, applied to the problems we actually face: stress, relationships, work, ambition, conflict, aging, loss, uncertainty and change. Hosted by Taoist teacher Kit Mann, each episode looks at an ancient idea and asks what it means for us now. How do we understand ourselves? How do we deal with things we can't control? How do we live with less struggle and more awareness?
Episódios 112
Weekend Check-in: When A Good Day Isn't Enough
Ever have a day where nothing went wrong, and you still go to bed feeling like it wasn’t enough? In this Weekend Check-In, Kit Mann looks at the dissatisfaction that can follow a perfectly good day, and at the …
Notas do episódio
Ever have a day where nothing went wrong, and you still go to bed feeling like it wasn’t enough? In this Weekend Check-In, Kit Mann looks at the dissatisfaction that can follow a perfectly good day, and at the expectations that make ordinary life feel small.
Kit walks back through one ordinary day: good coffee, fine work, a laugh at dinner. He shows how the rulers we carry can shrink it before it’s over. One is where we thought we’d be by now. Another is other people’s highlights. A third is how a day is “supposed” to feel. Drawing on Chapter 44 of the Tao Te Ching, “When you realize there is nothing lacking, the whole world belongs to you,” and the Taoist idea of pu, the uncarved block, he explains why the plain days that make up most of a life are enough on their own.
You’ll also get a simple practice for this weekend to help you notice the good in an ordinary day before it slips past.
Taoist philosophy for contentment, gratitude, comparison, and finding meaning in everyday life.
The link Kit mentioned in the episode is :
BID HERE:
https://givebutter.com/c/private-guidance-packages-nkovoy/auctionNot interested in bidding but still want to help? That's perfectly fine, too! If you'd simply like to make a donation to The Modern Taoist Foundation, you can use the donation link in the menu above or go directly to:
MAKE A DONATION:
https://givebutter.com/modern-taoist-support-donations-lnrsgnWhether you're bidding on a private guidance package, making a donation, or simply helping us spread the word, you're contributing to something that I hope will benefit young people for many years to come.
Convenient Isn’t Simple (Why The Tao is Getting More Important)
Simple Is Not the Same as Convenient: Why We’ll Need Taoism in 2027Streaming services, cloud storage, sleep trackers, meal kits and password managers all promised to make life easier. So why do so many of us …
Notas do episódio
Simple Is Not the Same as Convenient: Why We’ll Need Taoism in 2027
Streaming services, cloud storage, sleep trackers, meal kits and password managers all promised to make life easier. So why do so many of us feel more crowded and more tired than ever? In this episode of The Modern Taoist, Kit Mann looks at the difference between simple and convenient, and why that difference will shape the years ahead.
Kit draws on the Tao Te Ching and Zhuangzi to make a pro-human case for balance in an age of AI, apps and endless updates. He covers pu, the uncarved block; Zhuangzi’s gardener and his warning about the “machine heart”; Chapter 38’s call to “dwell in reality”; and Chapter 77’s picture of the Tao as a bow that brings excess back into balance. Along the way he talks about connection to yourself, to nature, to other people and to real life, and why boredom, friction and doing things yourself still count for something. He also offers two questions you can ask about anything new in your life: does this make my life simpler, or only more convenient? And does it bring me closer to real life, or stand in for it?
In the listener question, Gianna in Santa Barbara asks how Taoism views charity and homelessness, and how to help without enabling.
To support free Taoist education and scholarships for young people, visit themoderntaoistfoundation.com.
Taoism for modern life, simple living, digital balance, mindfulness and staying human in a tech-filled world.
Tao Te Now - Chapter 9
How do you know when enough is enough? In this episode of Tao Te Now, Kit Mann goes through Chapter 9 of the Tao Te Ching line by line, using the Stephen Mitchell translation. It is one of Lao Tzu’s most …
Notas do episódio
How do you know when enough is enough? In this episode of Tao Te Now, Kit Mann goes through Chapter 9 of the Tao Te Ching line by line, using the Stephen Mitchell translation. It is one of Lao Tzu’s most practical teachings on balance, moderation and letting go.
Chapter 9 gives four warnings. A bowl filled to the brim spills. A knife sharpened too long goes dull. Chasing money and security keeps your heart clenched. Needing other people’s approval makes you their prisoner. Kit connects each one to modern life: overbooked family calendars, burnout from overworking, a savings goal that keeps moving, and checking your phone for likes. Then he explains the instruction that ties the chapter together: “Do your work, then step back.”
If you have been feeling stretched thin, anxious about money, or caught up in what other people think, this chapter offers a simple Taoist practice for finding peace in everyday life.
Tao Te Now is a series from The Modern Taoist podcast that walks through the complete Tao Te Ching one chapter at a time, in plain, conversational language
Modern Taoist - Trailer
Ancient wisdom. Modern problems. Real life.Join Taoist teacher and veteran broadcaster Kit Mann for The Modern Taoist Podcast, where 2,500 years of Taoist philosophy meets the challenges of living in today's …
Notas do episódio
Ancient wisdom. Modern problems. Real life.
Join Taoist teacher and veteran broadcaster Kit Mann for The Modern Taoist Podcast, where 2,500 years of Taoist philosophy meets the challenges of living in today's world. No mystical promises, no spiritual shortcuts, and no pretending life is always peaceful. Just honest conversations, practical wisdom, and a fresh perspective on what it means to be human.
Three shows every week. One ancient philosophy. A whole new way to look at life.
Weekend Check-In - Holiday Prep
Thanksgiving and Christmas are coming, and for a lot of people that means eight weeks of too many events, too much spending, family tension and not enough sleep. In this Weekend Check-In, Kit Mann looks at …
Notas do episódio
Thanksgiving and Christmas are coming, and for a lot of people that means eight weeks of too many events, too much spending, family tension and not enough sleep. In this Weekend Check-In, Kit Mann looks at holiday stress before it starts and gives you a simple way to get ready now.
Through the story of Carol, who hosts Thanksgiving for twenty-two people every year and spends it in tears in the pantry, Kit shows how holiday chaos builds out of small tasks left to pile up. He draws on Chapter 63 of the Tao Te Ching, “Do the difficult things while they are easy,” and turns it into a thirty-minute plan you can use this weekend: protect two days, cut one tradition nobody would miss, and pick the one sentence you will use when family drama starts.
Practical Taoist philosophy for holiday anxiety, family stress, burnout and slowing down during the busiest time of the year.
What Are You Afraid Of?
What are you afraid of, underneath the spiders and the public speaking? In this episode of The Modern Taoist, Kit Mann looks at four kinds of fear that run people’s lives: fear of the unknown, fear of what …
Notas do episódio
What are you afraid of, underneath the spiders and the public speaking? In this episode of The Modern Taoist, Kit Mann looks at four kinds of fear that run people’s lives: fear of the unknown, fear of what other people will do, fear of loss, and fear of failure. He traces each one back to the same root, which is control.
Kit talks about a study where people found waiting on an uncertain outcome more stressful than knowing a shock was coming. He also brings in a mechanic who has kept his business plan in a kitchen drawer for eleven years, a dad who keeps refreshing his teenager’s location app, and a daughter learning to stop correcting her mother, who has dementia. He draws on Chapters 29, 71 and 74 of the Tao Te Ching and on wu wei, the Taoist idea of action that does not force. With those, he lays out a practical way to handle anxiety, worry and overthinking: name the fear, sort what is yours from what is not, take one action, and use your breath to calm the body.
In the listener question, Jimmy in Fort Collins asks how you can live in the present when you have kids heading to college and retirement to plan for. Kit explains where planning ends and worry begins, and what Lao Tzu says about it.
Taoism, the Tao Te Ching and Taoist philosophy for modern life, with practical tools for fear, anxiety and letting go of control.
Tao Te Now - Chapter 8
In Chapter 8 of the Tao Te Ching, Lao Tzu uses water to show how the Tao works in everyday life. Water nourishes everything without trying. It settles in the lowest places. It never forces. And everything flows …
Notas do episódio
In Chapter 8 of the Tao Te Ching, Lao Tzu uses water to show how the Tao works in everyday life. Water nourishes everything without trying. It settles in the lowest places. It never forces. And everything flows toward it anyway.
Using the Stephen Mitchell translation, this episode walks through the six instructions at the heart of Chapter 8 — how to live, think, handle conflict, lead, work, and show up for your family — and connects each one to situations people actually face: the manager who controls instead of trusts, the argument that turns into a negotiation, the parent who pushes too hard and wonders why their kid stopped talking to them.
If you have ever felt like you are working harder than the results justify, or that the more you push for something the further away it gets, Chapter 8 is the chapter for you.
Part of the Tao Te Now series on The Modern Taoist — a modern, conversational walk through the complete Tao Te Ching, one chapter at a time.
Weekend Check-In: Get Grounded
Grounding is having a moment. Wellness culture calls it earthing. NIH researchers have been studying it. And the Taoist tradition has been practicing it for three thousand years.In this weekend check-in, Kit …
Notas do episódio
Grounding is having a moment. Wellness culture calls it earthing. NIH researchers have been studying it. And the Taoist tradition has been practicing it for three thousand years.
In this weekend check-in, Kit explores what it actually means to feel the earth beneath your feet — what the science is starting to confirm, what qigong has always known, and why rooting downward is the one thing most people skip when they are trying to feel more present.
No equipment. No technique. Just ten minutes and bare feet.
The Modern Taoist is a podcast about ancient Taoist philosophy and its practical application to everyday life. New episodes every Tuesday, with weekend check-ins every Friday.
Why We Make The Same Mistakes Over and Over
You already know what the pattern is. You’ve probably tried to stop it more than once. The problem isn’t awareness — it’s that awareness alone doesn’t reach the level where the pattern actually lives.In this …
Notas do episódio
You already know what the pattern is. You’ve probably tried to stop it more than once. The problem isn’t awareness — it’s that awareness alone doesn’t reach the level where the pattern actually lives.
In this episode, Kit breaks down why repeating patterns survive our best efforts to change them, what the Taoist tradition says about the difference between insight and actual change, and what measurable progress really looks like when the work is finally happening at the right level.
Also: a listener from Bristol asks when Taoism was actually invented and whether Lao Tzu borrowed his ideas from someone else — and gets a more interesting answer than Google gave him.
The Modern Taoist is a podcast about ancient Taoist philosophy and its practical application to everyday life. New episodes every Tuesday.
Tao Te Now - Chapter 7
The Tao Has Nothing at Stake — Chapter 7 of the Tao Te ChingChapter 7 asks a question most people never think to ask: why does the Tao work the way it does?The answer Lao Tzu gives is this: the Tao is …
Notas do episódio
The Tao Has Nothing at Stake — Chapter 7 of the Tao Te Ching
Chapter 7 asks a question most people never think to ask: why does the Tao work the way it does?
The answer Lao Tzu gives is this: the Tao is inexhaustible because it has no desires for itself. It holds everything and sustains everything because it spends nothing on maintaining its own position. No agenda. No reputation to protect. Nothing at stake.
In this episode, Kit Mann works through what that means for an actual person living an actual life. The second stanza of Chapter 7 is one of the most compressed passages in the Tao Te Ching: the Master stays behind and ends up ahead, detaches from everything and becomes one with it, lets go of herself and is perfectly fulfilled. This episode looks at why those lines are true, not just poetic, and what they point to in daily life.
The conversation covers the hidden cost of self-maintenance, the difference between holding something and clutching it, and why the fulfillment most people are looking for tends to be sitting underneath the thing they are working so hard to protect.
Part of the Tao Te Now series, a chapter by chapter reading of Stephen Mitchell’s translation of the Tao Te Ching in plain language for people living ordinary lives.
Weekend Check-In: Nesting In The Fall
You Are Not Lazy. You Are In October. | The Modern Taoist Weekend Check-InWhy do you feel like slowing down when autumn arrives? Why does the couch suddenly look better than your plans, and why does going to …
Notas do episódio
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.
Do Taoists Believe In Ghosts?
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 …
Notas do episódio
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.
Tao Te Now Chapter 6
The Modern Taoist — Tao Te Now, Chapter 6Kit 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 — …
Notas do episódio
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.
Weekend Check-In: Time to Rest
The Modern Taoist — Rest Is Not the Same Thing as StoppingKit Mann on why the weekend you spent doing nothing still left you exhausted on Monday morning. This episode draws a distinction that productivity …
Notas do episódio
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
Ask Me Anything Vol 5
The Modern Taoist — Ask Me Anything | Episode 5Kit Mann answers six listener questions in the latest Ask Me Anything episode of The Modern Taoist — covering clinical anxiety and depression, perimenopause …
Notas do episódio
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
The Tao Te Now — Chapter 5Chapter 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 …
Notas do episódio
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.
Weekend Check-In - Learning To Notice
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 …
Notas do episódio
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 We Argue
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 …
Notas do episódio
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
The Tao Te Now — Chapter 4Chapter 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 …
Notas do episódio
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.
Weekend Check In: Time to Meditate
Sit DownMost 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 …
Notas do episódio
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
Navigating Bad NewsBad 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 …
Notas do episódio
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
The Tao Te Now — Chapter 3Chapter 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 …
Notas do episódio
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.
Weekend Check-In: Changes Are Coming
You Knew This Was ComingChange 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 …
Notas do episódio
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
You Are Not Required to Be PureSomeone 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 …
Notas do episódio
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.
Tao Te Now - Chapter 2
The Tao Te Now — Chapter 2Chapter 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 …
Notas do episódio
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.
Weekend Check-In - Be Kind To Yourself
Find Some Time for Yourself This WeekendWhen 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 …
Notas do episódio
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.
Speak Your Truth
Speaking Your TruthThere 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 …
Notas do episódio
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
Tao Te Now - Chapter One
The Tao Te Now — Chapter 1This 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 …
Notas do episódio
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.
Weekend Check-In - When You're The Only One
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 …
Notas do episódio
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
When Life Feels StagnantMost 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 …
Notas do episódio
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.
Aqui estão os 40 episódios mais recentes de 112. Os mais antigos estão no feed do podcast.
Podcasts parecidos
Mais podcasts de Religião e espiritualidade
Este podcast é seu?
Confirme com uma entrada no seu feed: você recebe um código aqui, adiciona como podcast:txt no canal do seu feed e nós verificamos. Depois disso, seu podcast aparece como “verificado” no SoundNode.