This Summer of 2018 in the countryside of northeast Austria in the fertile valley of the Danube river, Christian Wimmer offered a gigantic outdoor Bowspring class to over 200 students!
Every year since 2014, when 40 students first attended this special Summer event, Christian’s “Yoga in the Park” class has become increasingly popular. Now whole families congregate annually in a big grassy lawn in front of the magnificent 700-year old Grafenegg castle to practice a new “21st century yoga” – the Bowspring method.Unlike the yoga scene in Vienna, about 70 km to the east, which is composed of many young people in their 20’s and 30’s, the average age of yoga students in wine country near the town of Krems on the Danube river is well over 40 years old and the oldest being near 80 years old, according to Christian, who has taught yoga in the area for 16 years.

According to Christian, the Austrians are a hard-working, honest and good-hearted people, who are always looking to make things better for their families and community. They are a resilient people looking for new solutions to their economic dilemmas and seeking long-term happiness with their families in these increasingly difficult times.As Christian told me, “Giving up is not in the Austrian character!” In big generalization terms, the country Austrians have conservative values, Roman Catholic mores, and enjoy meat, bread, and beer, especially as an integral part of traditional festivals and football games! Thankfully, for their overall health and happiness they are boldly willing to try the Bowspring – a very different exercise practice than what they are used to. They are opening to try an alternative yoga alignment mainly out of respect and honor to Christian, who has a widespread positive local reputation in Lower Austria.
In the charming little village of Engabrunn (population of just over 500 residents) Christian and his partner, Dinah Pannos, often attract 30 or more students of all ages, ranging from teens to 70+ years old, to their weekly Bowspring classes.
Christian and Dinah, our lead Bowspring teachers in Austria, took two full years to transition from teaching modern postural (mainstream) yoga to teaching the Bowspring method in all their public classes in Engabrunn and Vienna. Their story contains good advice to yoga teachers who have had their world rocked by Bowspring and who then want to start to make the transition from mainstream yoga (MPY) to Bowspring.
Dinah Pannos and Christian Wimmer – Infinity Legs with V-Vector Arms
The Bowspring alignment is so radically different than the normal yoga alignment that when a yoga teacher suddenly changes their classes to the new alignment, it is likely that the students will be confused and even shocked. Teachers, like Christian and Dinah, are good examples of yoga teachers, who out of their bright enthusiasm for Bowspring attempted to suddenly change the asana alignment in their yoga classes which seemed abrupt and unsettling by some students. They ended up losing more than a quarter of their students as pure Bowspring classes were shockingly different than what the students were used to in their previous yoga experience.
As more yoga teachers become increasingly interested in practicing Bowspring alignment, they naturally want to share with their students what is helping develop their daily asana and breath practices. Instead of suddenly changing alignment systems with their vinyasa students, it is advised for teachers to introduce students to the Bowspring slowly. One way to deliberately introduce the Bowspring alignment to yoga students is ‘Bowsprinkling’ – simply including a few Bowspring poses or katas into the sequences of their regular yoga classes – giving credit to the method for the alternative alignments and forms publicly presented.
Christian and Dinah backed off on pure 100% Bowspring classes and began implementing a strategy of ‘Bowsprinking’ to make the new alignment more accessible and acceptable to the students. By introducing only a few Bowspring poses at a time during their public yoga classes, allowing their students more time to assess, assimilate and learn the rudiments of the Bowspring without being overwhelmed by the alien experience of completely new positions and alignments.This mixing of Bowspring method into MPY with the inclusion of a few Bowspring poses into a standard yoga class is what we call, ‘Bowsprinking’. As an example, Christian would do Virabhadrasana 2 or Parsvakonasana as he learned it in Anusara yoga, then he would teach the Bowspring poses, Tribal Lunge and Side Coil in a slow vinyasa flow. He would openly acknowledge the Bowspring method without making a value judgment comparison to the standard model alignment. Christian would slowly introduce filling their ribcage like a radiant ball, bending their knees, moving their hips back to create a deep, long lower back curve, and pulsating and bouncing in the poses through fascial springiness. Instead of trying to convince the students through argument, Christian let his students decide if the alignment was improving their health and their yoga practices or if it was creating more problems for them.
Over the next few months Christian increasingly included more Bowspring into his classes as he observed that his students began to enjoy the dynamic, springy nature of the new alignment. Interestingly, over time the students unsolicited began to request more Bowspring in the classes. With this successful strategy of slowly transitioning from standard model alignment in his yoga classes, Christian began teaching only Bowspring at his studio in Engabrunn a year ago in 2017. His weekly classes are still marketed as yoga with the descriptors of ‘21st century yoga’ or ‘post-classical yoga’, but everyone knows the practice as Bowspring that is a new curvy, springy, primal alignment.
These accurate descriptors of the Bowspring as an alternative, avant-garde yoga practice came from Bastian Schlickeisen, one of the first Bowspring teachers in Germany (Berlin), who introduced the Bowspring to Christian in 2014 after taking a 10-hour workshop with Desi and me in Frankfurt the prior year. Christian started to regularly practice the new alignment to help deal with his daily lower back pain from a serious accident he had six months earlier in which his L5 vertebrae was partially crushed. For the first month, Christian practiced the basic poses of the Bowspring every day for at least an hour since it gave him immediate pain relief. Recently, Christian told me that although he initially thought it was weird to move his hips that far backward behind his ribcage in the poses, he faithfully continued with his Bowspring practice because it was greatly improving his lower back pain and mobility.Now, 3 years later Christian claims that at 42 years old his back is stronger and more mobile than ever before and he is without any pain. Through his experience of recovering from his back injury by changing his overall postural alignment, Christian is now a wholehearted proponent of using the Bowspring method to help students with lower back pain and a variety of other therapeutic issues.
Many of Christian’s Bowspring yoga students are over 50 years old, since they often find the Bowspring much more therapeutic than modern postural yoga and less challenging from a flexibility demand. Surprisingly, a stereotypical young, flexible female yoga practitioner in her 20’s has more challenge with the Bowspring practice than a 50+ year-old student. The younger yoga generation, who has always felt successful stretching in classic yoga poses, feel frustrated when first learning the Bowspring since the practice requires new postural and neurological patterning in which flexibility is not prioritized. While the older students are happy to adopt a weird, funny looking new postural alignment if it relieves their chronic pain! This is a significant reason why Christian attracts so many older yoga students to his Bowspring classes.
In 2014, out of his fire for the therapeutic power of the Bowspring, Christian shared the practice with his partner, Dinah Pannos. At the time, Dinah had just entered a 2-year, 500-hour yoga teacher training in Vienna in which the postural alignment that she was learning to teach was in complete contradiction to the Bowspring alignment. Dinah admitted to me that although she quickly recognized the natural power of the Bowspring alignment, she felt that to honor her commitment to the teacher training, she had to ‘block out’ from her mind the new alignment paradigm that Christian was sharing with her while she was in the training and focus only on the standard yoga alignment. At home, she would practice Bowspring with Christian, but then switch back to the old alignment in the teacher training classes. This type of internal conflict is common for many yoga teachers and for studios who have invested deeply in yoga teacher trainings and for whom this new information of the Bowspring method creates an overwhelming cognitive dissonance.
​​By the end of her yoga teacher training in 2016, Dinah definitely knew that Bowspring was the method that she wanted to practice and teach, and she never looked back. Even with the initial economic losses of not being mainstream, Dinah believed that following her truth about her Bowspring experience would pay off in the end, especially with the fulfilment she would gain from doing something she held to be so meaningful.
Dinah and Christian expressed a heart-felt testimonial about the Bowspring method, “We are so happy for this gift. We really feel that we are changing lives with the Bowspring method.”
Dinah shares about how impactful the Bowspring practice is with the Austrian students, “The feedback from our students is so beautiful – people of all ages are feeling the difference. After every single class, at least one student comes to us and tells us that he or she can do this and that again without any pain. It is the most rewarding feeling imaginable to give other humans a tool with which they can heal themselves. This practice is so powerful that even students, who only do one class a week with us, feel the change and impact in their life so strongly. Because its not about the 90 minutes on the mat…It´s about learning to be mindful, accountable and compassionate in every moment of your precious life…For your own health, and the health of the world.”