The Modern Taoist

Kit Mann
  • 5.0 (12)
  • Spirituality
  • Updated Weekly

The Modern Taoist Podcast is Taoism for people living in the real world. Hosted by Kit Mann of Dao Ananda, each week we explore the situations we all face—relationships, family, work, conflict, stress, ego, expectations, and the past—and look at them through the lens of Taoist wisdom. No sermons. No dogma. No escaping into spirituality. Just practical Taoism for understanding yourself, navigating life, and finding a little less struggle along the way.

  1. 11h ago

    The Tao Te Now - Chapter 4

    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.

    The Tao Te Now - Chapter 4

  2. 2d ago

    Weekend Check In: Time to Meditate

    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

    Weekend Check In: Time to Meditate

  3. 5d ago

    Navigating Bad News

    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.

    Navigating Bad News

  4. Sep 27

    The Tao Te Now - Chapter 3

    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.

    The Tao Te Now - Chapter 3

  5. Sep 25

    Weekend Check-In: Changes Are Coming

    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.

    Weekend Check-In: Changes Are Coming

  6. Sep 22

    You Are Not Required To Be Pure

    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.

    You Are Not Required To Be Pure

  7. Sep 20

    Tao Te Now - Chapter 2

    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.

    Tao Te Now - Chapter 2

  8. Sep 18

    Weekend Check-In - Be Kind To Yourself

    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.

    Weekend Check-In - Be Kind To Yourself
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Ratings & Reviews

5
out of 5
12 Ratings

About

The Modern Taoist Podcast is Taoism for people living in the real world. Hosted by Kit Mann of Dao Ananda, each week we explore the situations we all face—relationships, family, work, conflict, stress, ego, expectations, and the past—and look at them through the lens of Taoist wisdom. No sermons. No dogma. No escaping into spirituality. Just practical Taoism for understanding yourself, navigating life, and finding a little less struggle along the way.

Information

  • Creator
    Kit Mann
  • Years Active
    2025 - 2026
  • Episodes
    94
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Kit Mann
  • Show Website
    The Modern Taoist

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