There are lots of different types of meditation but one that has cropped up in recent years and is becoming increasingly common isnew age meditation. It works by taking the best bits of the older forms of meditation, such as Zen, breathing, etc. and combining them with new discoveries that help the brain to reach a deep meditative state without years and years of boring practice.

Which, in a nutshell, is why so many people are turning to this form of meditation nowadays.

After all, there are so many things to do in life and, as the saying goes, so little time. Especially as time seems to speed up as we get older - gone are the long boring days at the weekend that seemed to go on forever as a child. Now we turn around and suddenly months have passed in what seems like a blink of the eye.

New age meditation helps with this problem. Most examples of this type of meditating involve nothing more complicated than listening to an MP3 file. Everything else is taken care of "behind the scenes". A series of tones - called binaural beats - are played in the background of the track and these help your brain to go into the same kind of deep meditative state that it would otherwise take you years of practice to achieve.

In these days of "I want it now", this is superb.

And - unlike lots of modern instant solutions - this really is as good as going through the years of practice that people like Zen monks have done. Brain scans have shown the results to be near enough identical whether the meditation was achieved traditionally or with these new age methods.