My yoga practice is very special to me. It has taught me to be honest and to focus on finding my self-truth. But self-truth doesn’t trend. In order to generate more likes and get more followers it’s not self-truth we turn to, but to others instead. We look at what’s currently popular and that’s the path I took too. As a result I started to lose myself and my practice. I started to forget all the lessons yoga teaches me about myself. And I got so tired of being a follower that the only way I saw out was to take a step back from social media altogether. I don’t blame social media or others’ influence. I blame myself for allowing it to get to me. Yet I’m proud that I recognized the severity of it and how deep I had fallen in and for taking what I saw as the necessary steps to take to heal myself. Here, now, with this blog, my first in many many months, is a timid attempt to find balance and to rejoin the online community after my absence. I’m learning to balance my practice and my interaction with social media.
One day I just didn’t log on to my Instagram account. The next day I didn’t either. And the next. Of course I felt guilty, for not responding to the DM’s, for not liking posts of accounts that I follow, for not posting, and for not participating in general. Surprisingly though I wasn’t going through withdraws or FOMO or anything like that. The honest truth is that it was just great. The moment I told myself that it’s okay to not participate in the online community and that I don’t have to feel guilty over it I realized that it was exactly what I needed – a break from the constant pressure to produce content, to participate in challenges, to scroll and scroll and scroll!! Mainly I needed a break from constantly coming up with content that is both popular and authentic at the same time. The result of my decision to take a break from social media was that I found a lot more time for my practice.
The truth is that we all have only two choices with some wiggle room for a combination of both. These two choices are: we either follow what’s trending and try to keep up with what’s popular, or stand out unapologetic, raw, exposed and different. In reality this can be applied to all aspects of our life – school, work, socially, but where I’m taking this is how those two choices influenced my yoga practice, or more specifically how I allowed the influence of social media and what’s trending to take over everything my yoga practice stands for.
The first choice, following what’s trending, is really the reason social media exists and feeds off itself. More or less it’s a popularity contest and it comes down to using the same hashtags, posting similar content and thus staying relevant by following the standards set by what’s currently popular. Colour within the lines – feel free to use different colours and make it your own but the canvas is basically the same, this is what social media trends really preach.
So in a way we don’t really post self-truths, instead we see something that we sort of relate to that’s already trending and we use the same hashtag.
Here is the catch. To stay relevant a good rule of thumb is that we must produce at least two posts a day. Therefore every day we must find at least two currently trending posts and create content that is sort of relevant to these trends but focuses on our self-truth in relation to that trend. Well it takes some creativity to say the least and I’m hugely inspired by those influencers who can effectively do that and remain authentic, at least in my perception. This is also one of the main reasons why being a social media influencer is a full time job in itself. Content creation must be almost as instant as the pace at which trends change! So in my effort to keep up I stopped looking in and I started following. I stopped standing out, because there was no time to be authentically different and to stay relevant at the same time. I reacted instead.
I produced content that is relevant in this instant. In fact a lot of my posts where just pictures without any other content other than visual. I followed challenges and trending hashtags and I took pictures of various postures and posted them but there wasn’t anything that I felt I could share about them more than just that – the instant photo. I only posted the part of my practice that was relevant to what was trending at the time. That was my contribution to participating in social media – follow the trend and if I didn’t have anything to relate to, just keep it simple. At least I didn’t make up anything that wasn’t really there.
Yoga is about finding balance. It is a lifetime practice of doing so. In a world where we must constantly produce relevant content that means that I only have an instant to find/figure out myself or I’m old news. Have you tried doing that?? Because I did and I went nuts and called it quits. I was becoming a copy/paste machine, without taking the time to observe, to self-analyze, to digest and to make an effort to change. My time allocated to my yoga practice was overtaken by taking pictures and posting them, not on understanding and experiencing the poses.
I’m speaking in very broad terms here. The reality is that we all try to be a little different even when we try to be the same. That’s what I mean about the wiggle room between the first choice and the second choice – standing out. Standing out can be scary. In the social media community it can produce some very powerful and authentic content, but if it’s not in trend with what’s popular it can be lost. It can also be used against us. The internet really has no filter and sometimes comments can be more damaging than supportive.
I have a very hard time sharing my private life publicly. It takes real effort to produce content that is authentic to me. To then post that self-truth, that takes even more than effort, it takes guts. And if it doesn’t pay off is there really a point of trying? At least that was the question I came to ask myself every time when I posted something different, as opposed to something popular. I was already struggling with sharing my self-truth publicly, and making myself vulnerable to criticism and feedback for things I’m still figuring out for myself. The reality was that the feedback I was getting only confused me more and influenced what I thought and did.
We all struggle to find ourselves and yoga offers the tools for it. Yoga helped me to learn to pay attention to myself and to do things for myself, and not because others were doing them. Social media, I came to realize, was often times more noise and distraction.
My struggle with social media now has come down to how do I stay authentic to myself and my practice and still share it with the online world in a way that the feedback I get from sharing doesn’t affect why I do it. Do I stop reading the comments? Do I stop interacting with others? The answer really isn’t about total self-isolation. I believe that we can sometimes get too self-absorbed and an outside observer can offer more insight. In that case feedback from the online community would be critical as a tool on the path to self-discovery. The line between useful feedback and popularity can be so easily blurred. So I focus my attention on my practice, but I make the effort to also take the time and share my most authentic self to the world.
I don’t need a specific number of likes in order to feel good about myself. My account requires it in order to stay relevant and trending. I welcome any well thought out feedback – positive or negative, but that is a rare occurrence in an ocean of instant likes and quick scroll throughs. I cannot allow the requirements of my social media account to overtake my practice. And if that means posting a picture of the same pose seven days in a row so be it. I don’t need to explain it to the public if I’m still struggling to explain it to myself why exactly I needed to do that exact pose or any other for that matter seven days in a row.
All in all my objective remains the same – my practice is my priority. My social media account might be lacking in regular content but my quest for self-truth remains. Perhaps there are more truths I will choose to share too, but for now I return to my practice.
ॐॐॐ