Surrendering to Yourself
You Are Your Own Soul Mate
By Iris Krasnow 

     In Surrendering to Yourself, Iris Krasnow explores through narratives and interviews the journey one needs to take in order to find themselves. This book is meant to help people find their own “soul child” and find the inner strength that we all have deep inside us.

This book is divided into three parts:

1. “Who are you?”
2. “Who do you want to be?”
3. “Surrender to yourself.”

     The section titled “Who are you?” deals with the “rebirth” that takes place after a life-altering discovery is made, like cancer or HIV or a conflict arises that changes everything and everyone that it involves.

     The section that deals with the question “Who do you want to be?” explores what a person needs, emotionally, to find themselves. There is even a suggestion about starting a journal or diary to help with sorting out the process of living, day-to-day.

     Surrender to Yourself is the section that tells you to “get naked with yourself” and see the person that you are. The reader could either take this metaphorically or literally, but the author herself speaks about how she gets “naked with herself” in a very enlightening way and states that “…we need to quit lying in the quest to know ourselves.”

     This book covers every emotion and stage a human goes through in his or her lifetime– from birth, gain, death, and loss--through the voices and stories of real people who have turned around on the path they’re walking long enough to see where they’ve been and see how that path has shaped them into the kind of person they find under their skin. It shows that those emotions all lead back to surrendering to yourself and celebrating that knowledge that you have of who you are.

     Iris Krasnow says this is the last book in the “surrendering” trilogy. The first two are Surrendering to Motherhood and Surrendering to Marriage.

     I really like this book. It has amazing stories of love, loss, and discovery that are told by Krasnow and others in their quest to find who they really are as people. I took the section about “getting naked with yourself” to be metaphorical, but it, as well as this entire book, is so well-written that its beauty is truly “in the eye of the beholder.” I definitely recommend this book.