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.

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.