Joelle

Joelle Van Sickle, R.Y.T., is a certified Kripalu Yoga instructor and a registered member of Yoga Alliance.  She also holds both BFA and MFA degrees in Dance. Informed by her love of movement, her teaching style focuses on body alignment, breath awareness, and the flow of energy throughout the body. In addition to her Kripalu studies, Joelle completed an in-depth mentorship program in the Iyengar style with Vickie Aldridge in Boise, Idaho. Through this program, she gained specific knowledge of postural alignment as well as the use of props to facilitate asanas for students of all levels of practice. Joelle has been teaching Yoga since receiving her certification in 2000 and has been a professional dance educator since 1991. She believes strongly that yoga practice extends off the mat and permeates our daily lives in ways that raise consciousness, improve physical and emotional health, and promote peaceful interaction with all beings.  Joelle is an experienced pre-natal teacher who practiced yoga during her own pregnancy.  She has focused her studies particularly on the curative power of yoga pertaining to diseases of the female reproductive system and women's health issues in general.

christy linson's September 8, 2006 interview with Joelle

christy: In taking your classes I have felt that there is a real depth in your knowledge of anatomy and the way the body works, and I wondered if you would talk a bit about your background and your home practice.

Joelle: I came to yoga first through dance and dancers are trained in alignment and proper ways to stretch right from the get-go. I have that in my background so when I came to yoga much later, I already had a language. I have a bachelor’s degree in dance so anatomy and physiology are a part of that study.  I also did some massage therapy training so I have hands-on anatomy experience and I think I applied all of this to yoga.  There are some particular things like language that are particular to yoga, but I came to understand the body through dance, anatomy and physiology, and massage.

Sometimes we come at body knowledge through injuries and through our own issues.  I think I came to know a lot about the body by getting injured in dance and having certain chronic things that I had to learn how to fix.  I corrected them by learning how to properly align my body.  This is what I work on in my home practice; I have slowed it down a lot to pay attention to what is out of whack and the changes as I am getting older. It is very centering and grounding and that is where I start off.  I think I push myself when I take a class more than at home.  I gear my home practice toward being therapeutic toward working out the kinks and finding alignment.

c: How did you come to practice yoga?

J: It’s back to dance and getting injured...when I realized that there had to be something more I could do to take care of myself and create balance in my body.  As a professional performer you get imbalanced.  There was a physical need, but now that I look back, there was also an emotional and psychological need for something nurturing.  I took a dance workshop by a wonderful teacher named Lynn Simonson who was a dance teacher and also a yoga teacher.  She created a retreat where we lived at Jacob’s Pillow(Massachusetts) for three weeks.   The workshop was designed to integrate yoga and other therapies into a curriculum for dancers.  She taught us that we are more than our bodies.  As a dancer your body is your instrument and you become focused on the product, the end result, whereas she was trying to focus us on the process.  The idea that we are a human being inside a dancing body was revolutionary to me.  I was blown away by that. I thought, “I have to take care of me.”

There is this adversarial relationship you end up having with your body, “I am not good enough”, “I am not thin enough”, “I am not this enough.”   She was there to try to take care of us as people and we realized that a lot of us were wounded in a lot of ways.  So I did the yoga then as part of the workshop and thought, “I have to keep doing this.”   When I was performing professionally, it became my warm-up every morning and I stopped getting hurt, I got stronger, my movement was more integrated, and my core was stronger. Physically I needed it and psychologically I needed it to handle the pressure.  At some point, it became the thing I wanted to do more.  I saw the need to help people, and dancers were just one population.  I wanted to bring yoga to as many people as I could.  I quit my full-time job as a dance professor as the University of Southern Mississippi. Teaching dance became too limited to me, I taught yoga to the dancers, but I wanted to cast the net wider.  I just transitioned.

c: Who did you take your yoga teacher training with?

J: After the retreat, I started studying Iyengar yoga in Manhattan, then I went to Kripalu (Lenox, Massachusetts) for a month long, 200 hour teacher certification training.  When we were living in Boise Idaho, I studied with an excellent teacher named Vicki Aldridge who is an intermediate Iyengar teacher.  She taught a mentorship program focused on alignment awareness and teacher training.  I studied with her for a year taking classes and long weekend trainings and then I felt ready.

c: You are the only teacher at this studio who teaches Kripalu yoga and you teach classes from beginner to level 2/3.  Would you talk about the Kripalu style and what you think constitutes each class level?

J: Kripalu means compassion.  We are taught right away to help cultivate that in the students.  It begins within oneself first and then it can translate out toward others.  This means taking care of yourself, getting to know yourself first, using props when you need them.  Kripalu talks about the idea of feeling sensations in the body called “Choiceless Awareness.”   You become an observer and watch what is happening in your body which is the beginning.  A very advanced practitioner may not have that awareness.  You can go really far without really learning how to pay attention to what is going on.  That applies to all levels but it’s a great way to work with beginners.  With this style of yoga you develop self respect and a deep desire to challenge yourself that comes from a really healthy place.  People bring this motivation into the classroom.  Within Kripalu yoga you go deeper and hold the postures longer really embodying that which you do.  Eventually the practice is said to spontaneously spring forth from the meditative state cultivated from the awareness that you develop.  That’s what happens with Kripalu.  I would not say I teach a strictly Kripalu class.

For me though, my Iyengar experience takes me into the value of the other postures such as deep backbends and inversions.  The inversions are the bread and butter.  When you move up in the levels you need to be competent enough that even if you are doing a headstand or arm balance against the wall coming into a level 2 class, you know the framework and the alignment.  I think it’s important to know a bit of Sanskrit; to recognize the name of a posture.  It’s different for everyone.  If someone is really in their body, are aware of their body, and have the ability to take care of themselves, I may push someone into a level 2 class faster than someone else who started at the same time.  It depends on the person.  Basic knowledge for level 1/2 is to have at least seen and done basic standing postures, and have a working knowledge of inversions but you don’t  have to be perfect or super flexible.  That comes.

I love teaching all levels.  Sometimes people think that because Kripalu means compassion that it is gentle, but we break a sweat.  It is a style that can help even the most advanced practitioner.  It is my mission to make yoga accessible to all people.  I try to present it in a way that is fun and light but deep.  Even if you think that you are not the type of person who does yoga, or that yoga is something foreign or strange, don’t be afraid to try it; it is about learning more about yourself. 

c: You also teach a Women’s Health/Prenatal class, and seem to be interested in adapting yoga for all stages of life.  Would you tell me a bit about your background in these areas? 

J: My initial draw to the prenatal part was having complications with pregnancy, and getting pregnant. Practicing yoga through a high risk pregnancy was difficult and sometimes I couldn’t do anything at all.  I learned a lot from and about it and felt like I had a lot to offer people.  It was a really challenging time.  Also, there is such a joy in that time in your life.  When you are pregnant yoga feels so delicious. Any movement, I don’t know why, just feels so much better.  That is how I got drawn to that population.

I think you can start yoga at anytime.  My mother started practicing when she was 60 and she is doing great and is really improving!   There is so much progress there.  I love teaching beginners because the progress is really palpable.  What has drawn me to women’s health was having experienced difficulties with certain health issues.  Without yoga, I would not have kept my sanity.  These bodies are finite in their form.  We are infinite beings and we will transcend our bodies someday, so we have to contend with a lot.  Yoga teaches us the acceptance to do that; it teaches us acceptance of ourselves.  I want to really try to impart that to other people, to teach them how to become compassionate again toward themselves, love themselves no matter what is going right or wrong physically.  I guess my experience with women’s health issues has made me care about that population specifically, but I care about everybody that comes to my class.