"When you're doing the washing up, that's what you concentrate on, that's where you are, not the cup of tea that you'll have when you've finished. During the course of the day, I'm always pulling my mind back to the present. I also do yoga two or three times a week; it took me a long time to find a type of meditation that suited me. I've tried tai chi and other approaches, but yoga really works for me with its very specific point of mindful focus on the postures. Because of my scientific mind, I like Jon Kabat-Zinn's approach, but I see there being many roads that lead to Rome."

Jon Kabat-Zinn, emeritus professor of medicine at the University of Massachusetts, has developed Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), an increasingly popular short-term therapeutic system that combines various elements from meditation and yoga.

However, as Nataraja says, many roads lead to Rome. Only last year, the film director David Lynch was traveling the world promoting transcendental meditation's use in schools, and a growing number of corporations, including Deutsche Bank, Google and Hughes Aircraft - worlds away from incense, bells and robes - have clocked the studies that suggest that decision-making, attention and memory can all be enhanced by meditation, and now offer classes to their workers.

And long-term devotees are finding that meditation has become more accessible. In the late 60s, when Alan Fletcher was in his 20s, he began practicing transcendental meditation, devised by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and made famous in the West by the Beatles. At the time, it seemed like the only option.

"I was given my own mantra, to repeat at specific times every day. It was effective for me for a while, no doubt about that, but it also became rather too restrictive, too much of a task, and I drifted away," he says. "These days, it all seems far freer, more laid-back, less affiliated to religions or movements."

Rory Singer was a Buddhist monk in the 1980s. Laid-back wasn't on the agenda. "It was a macho environment, tough monks enduring the unendurable. Meditating was seen as a hard, solitary pursuit, but now it's definitely become much kinder," he says.

Despite this, Nataraja's studies show that novice meditators often tend to put pressure on themselves to be successful, and to get there quickly - a rather left-brain, "Are we there yet?" approach - and consequently take longer to benefit.

The electrical activity in the brain recorded by EEG suggests that a relaxed state is hard to come by when you're trying too hard. Singer says this initial frustration is to be expected, and that, as ever, we should not be too hard on ourselves. "Try to remember," he says, "meditation is a pleasurable activity."

(China Daily 04/02/2008 page19)