Rituals can enhance daily routines, enrich milestones, and guide us through difficult transitions. Whether you're releasing fear, bringing deeper meaning to a family or community gathering, or celebrating an important event, THE JOY OF RITUAL is like a wise best friend that reconnects us to our hearts and souls.

Even if notions like these offend you (as they do me), you can still find value in this book by reading it selectively. For Biziou, besides being a flake, is also a shrewd folk-psychologist with a deep and very pragmatic understanding of what makes people tick, as well as having the vivid imagination of a born showman. She puts these qualities to work in the design of simple, touching ceremonies that are designed to dissipate negative emotions and create positive ones, to celebrate and to heal.

There are ceremonies for individuals to carry out in private, like the creation of a "healing stick," done by anyone facing a serious medical procedure: assemble a small stick and several colors of yarn. Visualize in turn the friends (and, I would add, public role models) that you most respect. For each one, think of the good quality that you would like to borrow from that person to help you through the coming medical ordeal -- courage, patience, whatever. Choose a color of yarn to represent that person's quality and wind it around the stick. Keep the yarn-wrapped stick with you throughout the hospital stay. Sensibly, Biziou never even hints that the stick itself contains any power; she knows that the comfort you gain from having it close to you is generated in your own mind, through recollection of the people whose qualities you are "borrowing."

And there are group ceremonies, like a ceremony of mutual appreciation to help a group of coworkers bond and support each other.

Some of Biziou's advice is just plain silly, like her discussion of the symbolic meanings of colors and scents: Black symbolizes "release" and "the unknown" -- but not, apparently, death or emptiness -- and red, "passion, energy, creation, stamina" -- but neither "danger" nor "stop." The scent of parsley symbolizes protection and dill, mental clarity, and so on until you just want to say "c'mon Barbara, get real." In my opinion a few of her opinions, especially on health, could be damaging because she is so clever at asserting that illness comes from bad thoughts -- which means that if you don't get well, it's your own fault for not thinking correctly. I think it's a crime to propagate that cruel and stupid concept.

However, many of the ceremonies she describes should indeed be nourishing to the spirit and psychologically healing. For those who can permit themselves unashamedly to participate in a ritual, there should be genuine emotional power and closure to many of these activities.