In an age of smartphones, instant messaging and 24/7 availability, it's increasingly hard to find time to step away and reconnect with one's self, especially in fast-paced tech hubs like Silicon Valley.

But before you lock your smartphone in a closet for an hour a day, check out some of the apps and websites available for learning and practicing the ancient art of meditation and the more contemporary mindfulness-based stress reduction.

You don't need a new gadget to meditate -- all the equipment necessary comes pre-installed in the product -- you.

But some meditation and mindfulness trainers are using technology in interesting ways. They range from simple meditation timers to complete courses.

"It's almost using the enemy's weapons against them," said Dada Nabhaniilananda of the Ananda Marga Yoga & Meditation Center in Los Altos Hills. He's developing a meditation app with some computer science grad students, and plans to have it available in several languages.

Classes in mindfulness practices have become popular at some of Silicon Valley's signature tech giants, where Los Altos mindfulness-based psychotherapist and educator Rene Burgard conducts training. "There are more teachers of this in the San Francisco Bay Area than any other place in the world except Toronto, I'm told," Burgard said.

The apps and a growing awareness of the benefits of meditation are helping expand the practice in a big way, according to mindfulness pioneer Jon Kabat-Zinn, who founded the Center for Mindfulness at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center in 1979.

Kabat-Zinn's website is one of the oldest commercial websites, launched in 1998 when the World Wide Web was still in its swaddling clothes. Now, colleagues in Sweden have developed apps containing Kabat-Zinn's series of guided meditations.

"The idea is basically to make this as widely available as possible so people can practice the meditation on a regular basis in their own lives," Kabat-Zinn said.

A molecular biologist, Kabat-Zinn began researching mind and body interactions for healing in 1979, working with patients experiencing chronic pain "who were falling through the cracks in the health care system."

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Meditation, mindfulness gaining popularity in Silicon Valley