How many lessons should I take?
Updated: Apr 3, 2021
This is easiest to answer if a musician asks it. If they play piano, I’ll say, “about as many lessons as your piano students should take”. Usually they know what I mean.
The answer isn’t a number.
You could take lessons for the rest of your life and you wouldn’t be done. It’s like music, art, or sports. Arriving is a myth, and you can always get better.
But that could imply that you need to take lessons for the rest of your life, which is silly. I teach you a skill, you apply the skill in your life, you reap the rewards of doing that, and you can keep coming back to improve. The more Alexander lessons you take, the more independent from your teacher you become. You just don’t need them as much, because you’re learning to do it for yourself. At the same time, you can always up your game. The ability to notice tension and let it go is a skill, and something that’s bugging you may be beyond what you can do right now. You can increase your skill to be able to help yourself more.
Since people tend to like numbers, I’ll provide a few. They’re flexible.
Three lessons to understand what the heck the Alexander Technique is. If you’re trying to get that from just words, good luck. You’d be the first. That's like trying to know what wine tastes like from reading about it.
Ten lessons to be able to stand on your own two feet with it, if awkwardly.
I consider 30-50 lessons to be a full course. That doesn’t mean you’re done after 50, and it doesn’t mean you need to make it to 30. I don’t feel like I’ve really had a chance to do my thing unless the person takes about eight lessons.
You can also play around with frequency. If you have the time and the money, it’s a great idea to front-load your lessons, that is, start by doing them every day for a week, then 3-5 the next week, then 2-3 the third week, then go to weekly. This is because you're re-conditioning habits, and they're strongest in the beginning. If you’ve done lessons for awhile but don’t want to be done forever, come back once a month or once every other month.
Weekly lessons are the default, and all the wonderful things you may have heard about the Alexander Technique were almost certainly accomplished with weekly, hour-long lessons.
You’ll always benefit from coming back, and the more you do, the less you’ll need to.