Julie Rappaport

I recommend Julie as a therapist and also for her yoga teaching and therapeutic yoga. She is very knowledgeable, experienced, embodied and smart. She integrates a wide range of knowledge and practices, both East and West. She is also very compassionate and present.

I am a very «left brained» analytical lawyer person, approaching 50, who felt a barrier or disconnect between my brain and my body. I wanted to reconnect but felt overwhelmed to the point of tears by the fast instruction given at most yoga classes — it was totally inaccessible to me. I had met Julie at a Wesleyan alumni event, and had held on to her card for nearly one year. I thought, a person who’s both a yogi and a therapist! And who is available for private sessions! What a great combination. And I was right!
Over about two years, Julie was able to work with me one on one to teach me the basic yoga moves in a supportive and positive setting. She is extremely knowledgeable about yoga and anatomy. She is amazingly skilled at adapting instruction to reach the person with the most rudimentary skills (me!) all the way up to a person who is a skilled athlete. She is adept at changing the words or using demonstratives to reach the person who has difficulty with geometry or spacial relations (again, me!). She also adapted the instruction to my body’s injuries (hip and knee issues, shoulder injury).
I so enjoyed Julie’s teaching that I joined a group trip she organized to India, a yoga retreat, in the summer of 2013. Our group included several novices like me, all the way up to two experienced yogis who themselves teach classes. Julie could teach all of us, and in the same group. It was a great trip, and I never would have done it without Julie.
I am now able to attend a «regular» introductory yoga class and follow the instruction, with adaptations for my injuries. I also still attend small classes held by Julie.
I cannot recommend Julie highly enough. She is the real deal. She has loads of fancy education and has spend years studying yoga, including months and months in India. She is also a licensed therapist — although we did not do therapy, you can tell that Julie knows how to interact and communicate in an appropriate therapeutic way around all issues related to the body (body image, trauma, injuries, stress, energy, body processing, somatic everything, etc., etc.). She knows all of the religious and cultural background and history to yoga, and has met yogis around the world. She studied yoga before it was cool. She is down to earth. She is nonjudgmental. She understands about aging and injuries. She is affordable. If you have any interest in studying yoga, you cannot go wrong with Julie. She is the gold standard. I feel lucky to have had the chance to meet her and to work with her.

Julie has been my yoga teacher for the last three years. I returned to my practice after a shoulder injury that «got me off the mat» for a whole year. From the outset I experienced Julie’s teaching style as very accepting, compassionate and safe. I love Julie’s sense of humor and her encouragement to play and not to take myself too seriously. Since then, my relationship with Julie has deepened. My husband and I traveled with Julie to India which was fabulous. Julie orchestrated the trip, with no major hiccups (not an easy feat in India!). I came to India with a recurrence of my shoulder injury and Julie took great care in making sure that I was practicing safely. Julie attracted a wonderful group which was incredibly compatible and easy to travel with (an almost impossible task!). Since the India journey, I have been seeing Julie for private yoga sessions, and my practice has really deepened. I feel very safe working with Julie and she has helped me expand my practice and opening places that have felt constricted and frozen.

She was really unprofessional with me and irresponsible. She spent a lot of time moving me back and forth between a seating on the floor and a yoga mat, although I didn’t really get into any poses or learn any new yogic techniques to reduce my chronic pain but increase my activity. When I would bring up that I was there for psychology treatment and wanted to work through a couple of issues, she would ask me a lot of questions that seemed to be out of her curiosity of details without insights or, what she had described somatic therapy was, becoming present and the relationship between the body/​mind.
She won’t bill insurance and said she would provide me with receipts that I could submit to insurance. She only did after nudging, and then emailed me one without a diagnosis code, which insurance companies won’t process. When I asked her about it, she said that she knew this was the case, but she wanted to touch base with me about the diagnosis code. Then, she left out the «chronic pain» diagnosis that we discussed that I had checked my insurance company would cover for her services. I asked her about this, and she was really rude in her response. It took 3 weeks to get the first receipt even though we had discussed before the first session that she would get it to me immediately so I could see how much my insurance company would cover.
Quote from an email she sent me:
«I did send you an invoice last week and have revised it for proper submission. Please find it enclosed here. Any other issues that you have regarding reimbursement must be taken up directly with your provider.»