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.
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.
4 Oct 2026
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.
2 Oct 2026
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
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