What losing over 10k followers in an instant taught me about Aparigraha (non-attachment)

Did you hear about the yoga teacher who lost her Instagram account with over ten thousand followers in an instant and couldn’t get it back? It’s not an urban myth — it happened to me. I am that teacher.

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

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

Feeling “erased” digitally hurt my ego, my pocket, and felt so infuriatingly out of my control that my head spun. For my mental health, I had no choice. I had to accept my account was gone and start again.

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, that I had built. While ten thousand followers is not huge 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 have 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 would even post them to the grid. My value had been decided by my social media reach.

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

How can I truly be on a spiritual path to self-realisation when I bought into an illusion so wholeheartedly that I placed my value as a human being and teacher on a social media platform?

On the day I decided to create a brand-new account — not a replication or continuation of the old one, but something more honest and different — was the day I realised I was being taught a lesson in Aparigraha, the yogic idea of non-attachment. It’s so easy to fool ourselves into thinking that we understand these concepts when we visit them in teacher training or regurgitate them for class themes and dharma talks. We kid ourselves that we are practising non-attachment and non-greed by not overeating, not overindulging, and not hoarding. I am a proud minimalist. I am anything but a hoarder. But that’s just surface-level stuff.

We are so intrinsically attached to our ego, our “me, myself and I”, as part of the human condition. I am attached to the idea of being a yoga teacher as my identity, and I was so attached to the idea of that success being linked to social media that I couldn’t see the maya for the trees. I know I am a divine being having a human experience. That’s the universal truth. But sometimes I forget.

I had two choices when creating my new account. Begin again with resentment and continue to try to get full access to my old account. Or accept the situation and begin again consciously. I chose the latter. And as soon as I did, I let go of the attachment to my old account — almost instantaneously — because I chose to reframe it. The only control I had available to me was the right to make that decision for myself.

And now, with just over 1k genuine followers — just enough to go “live” on the platform and offer free community classes and interviews with teachers and leaders in the wellness space — I don’t even want my old account back if it was offered.

Did you notice my use of the term vanity metrics earlier? That’s what the numbers are. Over 9k people are still following my old account; they haven’t even noticed I’ve gone. That’s the difference between audience and relationship. With my new account, I create more of the content that I really enjoy, like graphics and flat lays, even if they bomb. Who needs another selfie? It has nothing of value to add to the conversation.

Losing my account and my followers cost me brand deals with companies with whom, quite frankly, I would never again work with — because of how quickly they dropped me. Unlike my loyal clients and friends, who don’t care if I have 100 followers or 100k. All that matters is their experience in class. That they feel supported in their yoga practice.

No platform can take away my voice, my experience, or my authentic relationships. That is what is truly mine, in as far as anything really is “mine” in this maya. This is a reminder to trust the practice, not the platform. Aparigraha wasn’t the lesson I had asked for when I decided to curate my feed that summer’s day, but it was a practice I was given.