Body Prayers: Finding Body Peace helps us begin to question whether society's expectations for women to be thin in order to be beautiful, successful, or loveable makes sense or whether it is actually intolerant and destructive. This compassionate and uplifting book also helps women begin to quietly embrace their own bodies as being uniquely beautiful. When we, as women, discover a more self-accepting and tolerant attitude toward our own bodies, we then find it possible and essential to adopt a more tolerant attitude toward everyone's varied size and shape. It is only when women begin to promote a spirit of tolerance and acceptance for themselves and their children that we will see society's obsession with thinness begin to weaken.
Finding Body Peace is a journey—it happens step by step, insight by insight. Page by page, the reader is led through the inner thoughts and feelings women have as they step in front of mirrors, look at their bodies, struggle to be thin, fail repeatedly at diets, become depressed, and slowly lose their confidence to even pursue the jobs they want or the dreams they have because they are not thin enough. Page by page, the reader begins to then consider another way of thinking. . .another way of viewing their bodies. . .another way of looking at our culture's rigid and narrow view of beauty. Slowly a new vision emerges in which women can embrace the natural beauty of the female body with all of its varied curves. Slowly, the reader begins to imagine the power women would have to change the world if they were not held back by fear and lack of self-confidence stemming from body-hatred.
Body Prayers: Finding Body Peace—A Journey of Self Acceptance is a must read for women who wish to be comfortable in their own bodies and be free of the self-hatred that creeps in from the messages our culture sends us about thinness. Body Prayers: Finding Body Peace—A Journey of Self Acceptance is an essential tool for all women who wish to teach their daughters and sons that females are beautiful in all their diversity. Easy-to-read and sprinkled with 84 statistics that illustrate how deep body-hatred runs in our culture, this book ends with nurturing and motivational affirmations and poetry to inspire our new vision. When women and their friends and families join together in the pursuit of body tolerance, diversity, and acceptance, perhaps we will see an end to eating disorders, body shame, and the swallowed dreams of women everywhere.
