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I am a voice geek. I love voices. Certain voices, that is.

As I write this, I'm listening to Carly Simon's "adult lullaby" CD, Into White. I fall in love with certain music and voices and listen to them nonstop. This is one of those CDs. Right now, Carly's singing "Oh! Susanna" in a voice that makes me feel like a tiny kid, hypnotized by the soothing tones of the world's most loving mamma. The track after next is "You Can Close Your Eyes" which she sings with her real kids and one of the most amazing piano accompaniments I've ever heard by Teese Gohl. That piano feels like a dream cascading through my body.

Last week, I was listening to the audio recording of Pema Chödrön's book The Places That Scare You. It's read by a woman named Joanna Rotté, who has one of those voices that feels as if it gets absorbed by my skin. I know this even though listening made me loopy; the recording put me in such a deep trance that I can hardly remember a lot of it.

I know from my yogic experiences that this trance is a good thing. Called tandra in Sanskrit, it's a state between waking and sleeping, and although it feels a bit like being on drugs, and if somebody called my name when I'm in the middle of it, I'd probably sound extremely dumb when I answered, I like being there.

Rotté read a bunch of passages that ended in a mantra: "Just stay. Just stay." That's the main thing I remember from inside my skin. Just stay . . . Just stay with whatever's happening. Feel it. You can tolerate it.