ISBN: 979-8-950930-21-8
How to Change the Channel: To Make Thinking Feel Better
2023: Non-Fiction: Psychology / Self-Help
Author: Gary Marks
How can you access the best version of yourself, day to day, moment by moment?
This book is an amalgam of parables and consciousness games to help you get control of yourself! (As much as is humanly possible.)
It borrows ideas from various sources, including spiritual teachers, poets, therapists, Abraham Lincoln, the Declaration of Independence, and a Chinese chef from Berkeley. (Thank you, Mr. Shem.)
Read: How to Change the Channel ~ to Make Thinking Feel Better:
How to Change the Channel - to Make Thinking Feel Better is built as a working toolkit, not a straight narrative. It's a sequence of short parables paired with "consciousness games," small mental exercises meant to interrupt unhelpful thought patterns during the moments they are happening.
The parables draw from an unusually wide range of sources for a self-help book: spiritual teachers, poets, therapists, Abraham Lincoln, the Declaration of Independence, and, by Marks's own account, a Chinese chef from Berkeley he credits directly in the text.
Why a Musician Wrote a Self-Help Book
The same instinct that led Marks to teach and write books about piano improvisation, and to invent a new form of poetry called "Colo-petry," or multi-color poetry, shows up here. How to Change the Channel doesn't promise to fix your thinking. The goal is making thinking "feel better" as much as is humanly possible, whenever possible, not by solving the mind's chatter once and for all, but by altering the story when you don't like the plot. He allows his improvisational thinking and creativity to spill over into mind control, or mind self-control. The control comes from finding new and better self-created vignettes to interrupt thoughts and stories we don't want to follow.
How the Parables and Games Work Together
Marks structures the book so a reader can open to any chapter under real stress and have something to actually work with and think about, rather than something they are asked to merely understand or believe.
One Book Inside a Five-Decade Body of Work
How to Change the Channel is the one book in the catalog that isn't fiction, isn't poetry, and isn't about music. It grew out of decades of free improvisation and his natural instincts as a teacher.
Published in 2023, the same year Marks also introduced "Colo-petry," How to Change the Channel - to Make Thinking Feel Better reflects a period when he was actively inventing new structures across his literary works.
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