The Modern Taoist

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.
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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.