Beautiful You: A Daily Guide to Radical Self-Acceptance
– Rosie Molinary

As a child, you felt comfortable in your skin.  Your body was an instrument, an extension of your wholly unique mind and soul.  You used it to take you where you were going, to express what you felt, to get things done.  The world, for you, was hopeful and certainly not limited by the way you looked.  But then, somewhere on the way to adulthood, something shifted.  Your sense of your

own brilliance faded. Your understanding of your own beauty dimmed.  Your faith in your radiance wavered.  Maybe it was the media that overwhelmed you.  With instant access to information, with thousands of images shot at you every day, maybe your digested and internalized too much of the scrutiny.  Maybe it was an unintended slight that stung you or a comment that someone delivered flippantly that you have held onto forever.  Maybe it was not being chosen for this or being ignored by them, maybe it was a loss so significant that it still seems like your soul is empty from it.  Maybe it was the way your body matured into adulthood that felt like a betrayal, or the way that it didn’t.  Whatever it may have been that stole away your understanding of your inner and outer brilliance, Beautiful You is the book that will help you get that feeling back.

In October 2010, Seal Press published Beautiful You: A Daily Guide to Radical Self-Acceptance. In Beautiful You, readers discover 365 ways to shore up their confidence, encourage self-awareness, and get reacquainted with their beautiful, brilliant selves.  Drawing on self-awareness, mind-body, and practical techniques, Beautiful You is an action plan to give women what they need to champion and fully live their own lives, coaching them into the most extraordinary- and necessary- habit of treating their whole selves well.  Part personal essay, part action and empowerment guide, Beautiful You: A Daily Guide to Radical Self Acceptance is a practical and inspirational tool for realizing a healthy self-image through championing one’s own emotional and physical well-being. [From: Rosiemolinary.com]

In Beautiful You, author Rosie Molinary passionately encourages women—whatever their size, shape, or color—to work toward feeling wonderful about themselves despite today’s media-saturated culture.

Drawing on self-awareness, creativity, and mind-body connections, Molinary incorporates practical techniques into a 365-day action plan that empowers women to regain a healthy self-image, shore up self-confidence, reframe and break undermining habits of self-criticism, and champion their own emotional and physical well-being. Through accessible, doable daily actions, women and girls learn to manifest a healthy outlook on life—teaching them to live large, and starting them on the path to learning to love themselves and others. Molinary steers clear of the florid affirmations and daily meditations often utilized by books geared toward personal growth, instead delivering a hip, modern guide of inspirational thought and action that keeps pace with the times. A practical, candid, and accessible handbook, Beautiful You strikes a chord with every woman who has ever faltered in her self-confidence or lost her personal brilliance—and it makes sure she never lets it happen again. [From: Amazon.com]

This book is an action plan for a year of introspection. It will have you unveiling the external, often unattainable fictions about what you’re supposed to look like. Rosie demystifies the source/origin of our contentment and satisfaction

by having you actively engaged in realizing it is fully within your power; and within your strengths, passions and capabilities that your light will shine most beautifully. However, if you are a woman who is intelligently conscious of these truths it is still a different matter entirely to be ready, present and willing to do the deep hard work of the exercises.

Rosie successfully challenges our ability to look within ourselves with authentictity and integrity. Through a wide range of films to watch, authors /quotes to read, and anecdotal experiences, Rosie shepherds us through a labyrinth that leads to our core.

In addition, she challenges our sense of responsibility and accountability to our greater community- to our gender. By guiding us to serve as active mentors and members of the greater collective female consciousness, Rosie has us face what it is to be globally minded, working on behalf of others and developing a voice. Lastly, the educational merit of this book for educators and parents alike was mind-boggling to me. All of us at one point or another will be faced with modeling a behavior or guiding a younger generation and how we do that can be life-altering. [From: Amarettogirl.squarespace.com]

In this book of daily readings directed at young women, educator Molinary (Hijas Americanas: Beauty, Body Image, and Growing Up Latina) offers tools and resources for personal empowerment. Molinary’s work stems from her belief that each woman should develop her own positive self-image independent of popular culture. Some readings are a single paragraph, others continue beyond a page. Throughout, she uses examples from her own life and includes exercises for writing in a “Beautiful You Journal.” In her introduction, Molinary stresses that though there is no single right way to read through this book, doing the exercises is important for learning. She also gives guidelines for sharing experiences in dyad (friend, mentor, mother, or daughter) and group settings. VERDICT Although the readings are designed with young women in mind, this book can help foster self-confidence and positive body image for all women, and it should appeal to all ages. [Reviewed by Library Journal on Barnesandnoble.com]