What Losing Over 10,000 Followers in an Instant Taught Me About Aparigraha (Non-Attachment) | Om Yoga Magazine

On an unusually sunny August day in Dublin, I decided I was following far too many accounts that I no longer resonated with. In fact, I couldn’t remember why I followed half of them in the first place. I decided to do a bulk unfollow. Unfortunately for me, the platform incorrectly identified me as a robot and restricted my account. Just like that. Abruptly. Final.

The community I had built, the brands I worked with, the income I had generated – was gone in an instant. Yes, I fought it. I spent hours, days, weeks following along before I had to admit defeat. The stress it caused me wasn’t worth it. The frustration, the shock of losing everything so suddenly, the lost time: all one big headache. It didn’t get resolved no matter how hard I tried.

The feeling of being “erased” digitally hurt my ego and my pocket, feeling so furiously out of my control that my head was spinning. For my mental health, I had no choice. I had to accept that my account was gone and start over.

I already understood that social media accounts are not owned by the user, and I did have a database of my yoga clients’ emails and phone numbers. But my identity had become entangled in the numbers, the vanity metrics I had built up. While ten thousand followers isn’t big in the scheme of things, in a small niche community in a relatively small country it is. Ten thousand followers means frequent PR packages, launch invites and prestige. I’ve never had to pay for a yoga mat, a supplement, or even a body oil in the past five years. My events sold out on Instagram stories before I even posted them to the grid. My worth was determined by my reach on social media.

Most of us agree that social media is a highlight and therefore an illusion. In yoga terms it could be considered Maya. Maya is an illusion – the construction of the material world – a temporary phenomenon. It’s not real. The experience my clients have with me in the sixty minutes they are in my studio is in no way affected by how many people see my Instagram story of me decorating the space. How could it be?

How can I truly be on a spiritual path to self-realization if I so wholeheartedly believed in an illusion that I posted my worth as a human being and a teacher on a social media platform?

The day I decided to create a brand new account – not a copy or continuation of the old one, but something more honest and different – ​​I realized I was being given a lesson in Apparigrahathe yogic idea of ​​non-attachment. It is so easy to fool ourselves into thinking that we understand these concepts when we revisit them in teacher training or regurgitate them for teaching topics and Dharma talks. We fool ourselves that we are practicing non-attachment and non-greed by not overeating, not overindulging, and not hoarding. I am a proud minimalist. I’m anything but a hoarder. But those are just surface level issues.