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.

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.

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.