Breaking Up With Instagram: Frequency, Silence and Sovereignty

Sarah Poet opens Episode 192 of Sacred Remembering with a scene that was supposed to be an interview. She had been scheduled as a guest on someone else's podcast, nearly cancelled after looking into the host's work, agreed to try it anyway, and then sat waiting while he never showed up. In those few minutes she felt a surge of energy so strong she assumed it was meant for the conversation. "It wasn't for his podcast. It was for mine." That reversal became the episode: a solo energy update on frequency attunement, on the strange pressure that followed her decision to leave Instagram, and on the question she thinks everyone should ask about the invisible forces shaping their attention and their sense of what they owe the online world.

What does frequency attunement actually mean in practice?

Poet is candid that the phrase "frequency is everything" can sound like background noise in new-age circles. She admits that she once heard it and thought, "what does that even mean?" Her working answer is practical rather than cosmic. Frequency attunement, for her, is the discipline of noticing what is clearing in her own life and what is not. "I attune to the energetics that are going on in the field that are, you know, clearing from my own life," she says near the start, adding that she does not want to be "caught up in everybody else's business" unless a client is paying her to attune to their field.

The key move is treating friction as information. Poet describes a "grimy rub" you can feel when something is not working for you: a sense of constriction, or of losing yourself a little. She says that is exactly what she felt with Instagram. The feeling was not a moral verdict on the platform. It was a signal that the connection was no longer a match. Her framing, which she repeats across the episode, is that becoming who you are and feeling good in the process is part of the work.

"This is not a frequency match anymore, right? That was the point." (Sarah Poet, Sacred Remembering Ep. 192, ~5:36)

The framing is worth taking seriously even if you do not share her language. It asks you to separate a decision from the feeling that accompanies it, and to watch what your body does when you engage with a particular habit, a particular feed, or a particular expectation about what you should be producing.

Why did leaving Instagram feel like a breakup with noise attached?

Poet describes stepping back from Instagram in stages. She stopped interacting, deleted the app from her phone, and let her assistant post while she was largely absent. She was off for about two weeks. Then she reinstalled the app for one day to publish a goodbye post in which she said plainly that she is not an influencer, and deleted it again.

What happened next is the part she keeps returning to. For a day or two her mind was, in her words, "doing this like it felt like ADHD. It felt like chaos." Quippy posts she could have written started flooding in. She calls it "almost like this fear program of like, oh, you know what happens when you try to get out."

The strangest detail came when she spoke about it with Koko Oya Sienna Ray, her next podcast guest. Poet had said out loud that she was breaking up with the platform, and she says that spoken declaration seemed to set something off. Her friend described the pattern that often follows when one party is finished and the other suddenly tries to win them back. Poet's own report is vivid: a sense of pressure that kept asking, "Are you sure? Are you sure? Are you sure?" She insists she had no doubt. "I'm very clear this is not a frequency match for me anymore at this time." She also notes that her enthusiasm for engaging is simply absent right now, and that her frequency may shift again later.

Whatever you make of the "invisible tendrils" she describes, the sequence is useful to observe. A decision made on business and energetic grounds met resistance the moment it was spoken aloud. Poet asks listeners to question that resistance rather than accept it as proof they were wrong to leave.

Can a friend's comment reveal how online business trains you?

A friend told Poet, "Wow, you really move some energy when you make a post." Poet heard it as a mirror. It reminded her of her early days in online business and social media, when she was, in her words, "just moving energy" and people were feeling it. But she also began to see the cost of the system underneath.

She describes the template plainly: you go out, you post, you post again, you produce content, and the expectation is that this somehow results in people coming to you and a living being made. She says she gave that template everything. Sometimes it returned real reciprocity. Often, she suggests, it did not. She admits she did not really know how to run an online business when she started, roughly seven years ago, and that she ended a seven-year cycle in her business in March.

Poet ties this to what she calls inner and outer behavior. She noticed that when she was online, she was constantly composing the next thing to say, and she recognized that she was breaking patterns that had been formed by engaging with the current systems of online business. The insight is less about any one platform than about how a repeated habit can quietly shape your thoughts, your timing, and your sense of obligation.

She is also explicit about the personal context. She has spoken on the podcast over the last three years about living with complex PTSD, and she describes trying to keep showing up while carrying that stress. "There was a stress that was present," she says, in the sense of keeping things going even when they were not right.

Is mind control something you can actually feel?

The episode's title places "mind control" beside frequency, and Poet returns to it later in the conversation. She describes the tendrils she felt around the Instagram break as something "we should all question," and she links the broader concern to the ways that technology and society can hijack energy without our noticing. She frames the matter as personal inquiry rather than a catalogue of conspiracies. The question she puts to listeners is simple: what is actually pulling on your attention, and does it feel like yours?

That is a useful prompt for anyone who uses social platforms daily. You do not need to accept her cosmology to test it. Notice whether you feel urgency when you have not posted, whether you rehearse what you would say before you have anything to say, and whether a notification changes your mood before you have consciously decided to look.

Why is silence part of the practice now?

Poet describes the current season of her life as quiet on purpose. She says she is "spending a lot of time in quiet and respecting the energetics that are arising." She has been "honoring silence" and "returning to the truth of my own resonance." She is clear that this is not withdrawal for its own sake. It is the condition in which she can hear what is actually her own, rather than what a template or a feed has told her to want.

This is where the episode's larger themes of sovereignty and presence over performance come together. Presence, in her telling, is not a mood. It is a choice about where your energy goes, and silence is what makes that choice audible.

What makes this podcast different?

Near the end, Poet turns to the question of what distinguishes her show. She says that the truth-telling of the episode should already make it obvious, and she places her long-form, personal approach against the performance logic she has been describing. The clear implication is that the podcast is where she can speak without the template, and where the frequency she is describing can be heard without being compressed into a post.

Where to go from here

The episode is short on argument and long on lived detail, so the best next step is to listen to it in full rather than rely on any summary. Pay attention to the moment she describes saying "I'm breaking up with you" out loud, and to the question she asks listeners about what they are being pulled toward. If the material resonates, Poet's earlier episodes listed in the video description include "Summoned By The Earth" (Ep 190), "Feminine Resourcefulness: Healing Burnout, Rewriting Value & Restoring Sovereignty" (Ep 188), and "Rehabilitation of The Energy Body in Everyday Life." Read them as a set. Together they describe a single arc: from burnout and the habit of overgiving, toward sovereignty, quiet, and a relationship to the sacred that she says is calling people now.

Above all, take her invitation literally. Notice one platform, one habit, or one expectation that leaves you feeling constricted, and test what happens when you step back for two weeks. You may hear the same noise she did. You may also discover what is actually yours.