The value of frequent Alexander lessons
and how to stretch time and money to get them

The problem with conventional Alexander Technique lessons is that you can’t get enough of them. If you’re looking for fast progress, you need frequent Alexander lessons for a number of reasons:–

1. You forget what you’re supposed to be doing in between lessons.
2. You forget how to do those things.
3. You just plain forget.
4. You’re not sure whether what you’re thinking and doing is right or not, so you stop bothering.
5. You think it takes more time that it really does to practise so you feel you don’t have enough time and end up not doing it at all.

That’s five reasons just off the top of my head. All of them are show-stoppers: if you don’t practise, you won’t make much progress. Taken together, they mean that most of your potential learning opportunities in between lessons are just plain wasted. What should we do about it?

Why more lessons doesn’t work

Off the top of my head again:–

1. You can’t afford the time to come for a lesson every day.
2. Doing that would be extremely expensive.
3. With lessons happening that frequently, spending half an hour on each lesson is just plain over-kill. But traveling to see a teacher for just ten minutes is totally impractical. Even if your teacher were just around the corner, that would still mean at least half an hour out of your day every day for something that just needs ten minutes. If you have to travel further then…

What’s the solution?

When I was training to become an Alexander teacher, we had not lessons but ten-minute turns. We really piled in the learning by having a ten-minute turn from each of three or four teachers in one morning. Plus we had lots of other opportunities to practise with fellow students. That was all for one journey, so it was much more efficient. But you could be spending the whole morning going to your daily lesson when all you really needed was ten minutes out of your morning.

You could attend group classes and do pretty much the same thing if there were enough teachers teaching the class. Again, though, the expenditure of time and money would be way over the top if you were going to be doing that every day. Ten minutes a day is all you need.

Since attending in person is just not a practical possibility, you don’t get the teaching input you really need. Keeping up the daily practice necessary for fast progress and deep learning becomes highly unlikely to say the least.

Yet the solution is simple.

The answer is distance learning

Hands-on lessons are important. You can learn a lot from a hands-on lesson that you’re unlikely to learn any other way. But not all the time. What you need every day is not a hands-on lesson. What you need is:–

1. Reminding to do the work
2. Reminding what you should be doing
3. Reassurance that you’re going about it in the right way
4. Reassurance that what’s happening as you do the work is what should be happening: reassurance that you’re not going astray.
5. Putting right when you do go astray.

Miss any of those out and practice falls by the way-side — and the progress you should have been making simply doesn’t happen.

Yet all of those needs you have for good progress can, with insightful teaching, be achieved over the telephone and by written interaction over the internet. This is something I’ve just been proving to myself in practice so I can say it with confidence.

It’s time teaching the Alexander Technique entered the 21st century and so I’m now tweaking the Smiling Back Method of teaching to do just this.

Here’s how it works

You get a ten minute telephone lesson twice a week. On the days when you don’t have a telephone lesson, you log in to Repoise.com and make a short post. In that post:–

1. You tell me what practice you have or haven’t done
2. You tell me what problems you have experienced
3. You ask me all the questions that cropped up while you were practising. (Believe me if you were practising every day questions would be cropping up: many, many questions. And they all need answers for you to be able to keep on practising effectively).

I listen to what you’re telling me and, in response, I give you all the reminding, reassuring and prompting that you need in order to keep working — and to know you’re going about your practice in the best possible way.

Plus, all this daily teaching can cost you less than half of what only one lesson a week costs. It can do that because working this way is a very efficient use of my time as well as yours.

Already, Repoise is fulfilling just a part of this need. Those of you who are making daily use of Repoise are also making great progress. I’m proud of you folks.

Finally

If you haven’t yet looked at the Repoise membership, then look at it and consider joining now: SmilingBackMethod.com/Repoise

I’ll be rolling out the telephone lessons over the next few weeks for those who of you who want to move forward like this.

37 Hope Street, Liverpool, Merseyside L1 9EA, England
Telephone: +44 151 708 6172   Mobile: +44 7872 905 154

The Smiling Back Method of the Alexander Technique
Copyright © 2007-2012 Philip Pawley
SmilingBackMethod.com

Philip Pawley

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