1-13-2020: Happy 7th birthday to the Bowspring!
When Desi Springer first showed me her radical paradigm-shifting alignment ideas back in the Spring of 2012, I was blown away. The overall postural alignment that she was performing in every pose of her yoga practice was completely antithetical to the universal principles of the alignment that I had been practicing and teaching the previous 20+ years. I first thought her ideas were crazy. I reasoned, this new alignment couldn’t work and would only lead to injury…but after my very first practice in the wildly curvy and pulsing alignment, I felt amazing. I was baffled. How could this alignment be so effective and powerfully open me like never before? How could it work when it was essentially opposite to what I so confidently affirmed to be true about biomechanical alignment?I spent the next 8 months voraciously studying fascia and functional movement, and practiced the new alignment daily. By the end of that year, it was clear to me that this avant-garde alignment was going to be an important future contributor in the emerging new paradigm for yoga, fitness and functional movement alignment. With great excitement, following my heart, I proposed to Desi that we partner together to organize these alignment ideas into a new paradigm-shifting yoga methodology that would be helpful for all.
On the 13th of January in 2013, we established Sridaiva yoga, which was the original name we used to describe the practice of the Bowspring. “Sridaiva” was a name we coined meaning “divine destiny”. It represented our belief that although there is unavoidable karma and fate in life, we each have the intrinsic freedom to choose to move toward harmony or chaotic destruction. We can choose to either take the high road of accountability and self-mastery or the low road of a blaming and victim mentality. Sridaiva encourages taking the high road to first help oneself and then to ultimately help others choose truth, goodness, and harmony through their own self-empowerment.
A couple of years later, we changed the name to Bowspring. We believed ‘Bowspring’ better described and represented our alignment method and mind-body practice since ‘Sridaiva’ seemed too esoteric for the mainstream. Also, many automatically associated Sridaiva with modern postural yoga, from which we were trying to distinguish ourselves. Although we still use the term Sridaiva in our philosophical presentations, Bowspring is now the name we use exclusively to represent our practice and teachings.
As soon as we publicly announced the founding of our new yoga system, attacks were directed against us. Many of my former students couldn’t believe that the Bowspring was a legitimate alignment practice. Without any inquiry or attempt to give the Bowspring a fair testing, the methodology was dismissed as ludicrous; physically harmful; a passing fad like ‘Beer Yoga’. Some even argued it was a marketing ploy I created to make money after being ostracized from Anusara yoga in 2012.
Despite all the negativity and maliciousness from elements within the yoga world against us and the Bowspring method since 2012, we stand stronger and brighter than ever in 2020. To the vexation of many, the Bowspring method didn’t fade away into oblivion, and I didn’t quit teaching and trying to help as many people as I could. Now, the Bowspring method is taught in 19 countries and our training videos are among the most successful online courses on TINTyoga.com, which serves thousands of students worldwide. The new curvy alignment ideas are supplanting the old paradigm of linear, static posture. Notwithstanding the entrenched holding of the status quo, the Bowspring and the emergent paradigm of curvy, springy primal movement is becoming increasingly accepted in the yoga, fitness and physical therapy communities. The postural revolution is now inevitable.
