People have been practicing meditation for centuries.
To a certain degree, they've been practicing it since the dawn of civilization: consider: prayer is little but meditation, a concentrated series of thought sent to some Higher Power (or God, or Great Spirit, or, in some parlances, the Self) and, as such, each religion has some form of meditation within it,, whether or not they call it so in their particular faiths.
Then there are the kind of meditations that don't adhere to any specific faith or dogma, that do, in fact, focus themselves on the simple effects of peace and calm for the individual.
In this sense, the steps toward learning meditation are as varied as the cultures that spawned them.
These days, many of us need a little more peace in our minds.
Some of us broke with our churches long ago and I, for one, am one of those.
I have no reason to go back.
There's a great song on 1974's Innervisions that mentions one of the most popular forms of modern meditation.
Called transcendental meditation, or TM, often the practice involves repetition of mantra twice a day for twenty minutes per day, is essentially a purgation of thought that's meant to calm the body and mind by removing daily distractions from the meditator.
This meditation for is essentially a western update of older, eastern and Zen Buddhist forms wherein the meditator would be given phrases to repeat in order to achieve a general calm.
I've never heard it said directly, but I've always suspected that the Catholic prayer prescriptions were a form of complicated TM, or,, more accurately, that TM is the non-religious response to constant repetitions of the "Lord's Prayer" or the Hail Mary.
When one goes to confession, they're often told that they will have to repeat prescribed, memorized prayers-- which are nothing more than long mantras-- in order to purge their soulds of the sins to which they've just confessed.
The process of saying "Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee," etc.
twenty times is eerily similar to ringing a bell and repeating "Na'm yo ho ren dye ko" over a prescribed period of time.
TM is a simplified form of both.