Tao Lin is the author of ten books, including Leave Society (2021) and Trip: Psychedelics, Alienation, and Change (2018). You can find more of his recent writing on The Paris Review, Granta, and his Substack, Tao Lin.
#93: Tao Lin
Hawaii
What does health, or being healthy, mean to you?
Daily poop. Experiencing nature. Feeling peaceful. Reading books that reduce fear, like The Truth About Contagion and Life After Life. Caring for and loving something — hard with humans, can use pets.
How would you describe your current lifestyle?
Working on my writing while caring for my cats and detoxing my liver and learning.
How do you start and end your days?
Start: exercise and meditation. End: talking to myself, my spirit guides, and my soul about my day and my upcoming dreams.
Can you recall a moment when you became more aware of your health, or your relationship to it changed?
I had chronic nosebleeds as a child. A doctor scalded the inside of my nostril to try to stop them. It didn’t work. From then on, I engaged with mainstream medicine many more times due to lung collapses, chronic pain, and other acute and chronic issues. Each time, my trust in it decreased. By my mid-thirties or so, I’d lost all interest in conventional medicine. I haven’t been to a dentist or a doctor since 2015 or so. I believe the body’s best healer is itself. I’ve been working on a book titled Self Heal since 2022. I put it on hold in 2024 because I had insomnia, chronic pain, and eczema. I’ve had these since my twenties but they were getting worse in 2024 and I was confused.
What’s your relationship to self-healing?
I like it. I love it. It’s one of my favorite things, to heal myself.
Do you work with any practitioners, texts, or modalities on a regular basis?
I figured out my insomnia, pain, and eczema were due largely to vitamin A toxicity and copper toxicity; I’d been eating a lot of liver products for years, as well as dairy: raw milk, cheese, ghee. Since 2024, I’ve been following the Nutrition Detective Dr. Garrett Smith’s advice on diet, nutrition, and detoxification and have 90 percent healed the pain and eczema and don’t have insomnia. His info — which I’ve found revelatory — is free on his livestreams on YouTube.
Do you have a spiritual practice?
I’ve been meditating for 60 to 90 minutes a day, 30 of it to theta waves via binaural beats. I’ve been learning about the properties of the soul and the spirit world, in part by reading books on near-death experiences, reincarnation, and out-of-body experiences. I keep a dream journal and am working on becoming more conscious and perceptive in my dreams. I have a long-term goal of astral projection — leaving my physical body. I’m 50 percent done with writing a nonfiction book titled Spirituality: Remembering I’m a Soul.
When do you feel the most nourished?
I’m not sure. I think it varies. I feel nourished after eating, but that seems obvious.
How do you reset?
I don’t know. I don’t think I like to reset.
Do you have a favorite meal?
Beef, chicken, sourdough bread, brown rice, beans, noodles, coconut water, bananas, lychee. I don’t have a favorite meal. I eat the same thing throughout the day — variations of those foods I listed — so maybe that’s my favorite meal.
What advice would you give to your younger self?
I’m not sure if I would give him any advice. Giving him advice might lead him to become someone different than who he is now (me), which may or may not be desirable.
What advice would you give to the person reading this?
Read nonfiction books that contain non-dominant perspectives on various topics, such as The Chalice and the Blade (history), Children Who Remember Previous Lives (reincarnation), 1996 (gang stalking), Poisoning for Profits (vitamin A), Journeys Out of the Body (ontology), The Big Bang Never Happened (cosmology), Hidden Truth, Forbidden Knowledge (extraterrestrials), Infinite Universe Theory (physics).
What would you like to see or create more of in the world?
Nonfiction books with non-dominant perspectives on various topics.
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