"With time, it's said, the effects of meditation start to become the traits of the meditator: You become more relaxed, more focused."

The president of Mozambique meditates. Every day, twice a day, he sits quietly with his eyes closed and focuses on his mantra - a word used to charm the mind away from thoughts and distraction and into a different level of consciousness. The type of meditation Chissano uses is called Transcendental meditation, a classic Hindu practice popularised and mass marketed by the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in the 1960s.

As the mind "transcends," the body relaxes. Blood pressure drops and breathing slows. With time, it's said, the effects of meditation start to become the traits of the meditator: You become more relaxed, more focused.

It seems to be effective. Joaquim Chissano does not look like a man who has spent 10 years at the helm of Africa's second-poorest nation, who has seen his country through revolution, civil war, drought. He looks like he has spent them fly-fishing. He is in his mid-50s but looks 39. He is calm, affable, and appears to have no health problems. If this is what meditating can do for you, I want to know more.

Journey to Africa

The president is dressed in an unremarkable navy blue suit and wears no jewellery aside from a wedding band. He is perhaps five foot five. His facial hair is his showiest feature: goatee, moustache, sharply arched eyebrows. If Lenin had been an African instead of a redhead, he would have looked like Joaquim Chissano.

I asked the president if he had meditated today.

"A small bit in the morning, yes." His English is taut and precise, nothing like the blunt corners and soft shoulders of his native Portuguese. "When I don't meditate, I feel like not having taken my bath."

We are joined by Carlos and his musk cloud. He is taking notes on our interview. I ask Chissano how someone as busy as he is finds the time. He says it's not a problem. "You meditate anytime. For example, if I don't have time when I get up, I do it in the car. After a while, you can do it anywhere."

"Like, say, a delegation meeting?"

"Yes." He's serious. "If people are talking and I don't care what they are saying, I meditate." Carlos purses his lips.

Open-eyed meditation is an advanced technique. Chissano has been meditating for more than two years. His wife meditates, as do his sons, his cabinet, and most of his generals.

Lately Chissano has added yoga to his routine. He does a short cycle of postures, to calm his mind in preparation for meditating. "It takes only six minutes. If you like, I can show you."

Down to Business

Chissano gets up. He takes off his jacket. Standing side by side, we reach our hands high above our heads.

"Do you feel the chest expanding?"

I feel the chest expanding. I feel the interview receding. "Mr. president, I wanted to ask you..."

"Oxygen is coming in. You are catching energy now!"

It occurs to me that if the president is handing out free instruction, perhaps he can show me how to meditate.

He cannot. "This takes time. I am not an instructor. I may mislead you." Chissano tells Carlos to put me in touch with a TM instructor in Maputo. He assures me I will enjoy it. "After some practice with the mantra, you reach one stage, and this is no thoughts, nothing. Then you feel yourself. You feel you inside. And that small portion of time gives you a relaxation of everything. It is like nothing else. Another state. You will see."

I ask Chissano how meditation has changed him. To begin with, he says it makes him more productive. If he meditates in the late afternoon, he's good for another few hours' work. "But the most important effect of meditation, for me, is to control my stress. Meditation changes the way you face difficult problems."

A Longer Fuse

How so? How can something you do for 20 minutes once or twice a day affect the way you think and feel for the rest of the day? One theory is that meditating somehow lowers the body's responsiveness to the stress hormone norepinephrine. The theory belongs to Herbert Benson, president of the Mind/Body Medical Institute at Deaconess Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts. Benson found that among subjects who meditated twice daily for one month, an increased level of norepinephrine didn't cause a rise in heart rate and blood pressure, as it normally would.

Ornish says that meditation simply helps quiet your mind. It's not so much the events in your life that are stressful, but how you react to them: the worrying, the fretting, the mental chatter. Meditation helps you focus on one thing, a mantra, say, or your breathing. You're controlling your mind rather than the other way around. With practice, the calm carries over to the rest of the day.

Whatever the reason, meditation may well be the greatest tonic since TLC. It's been estimated that stress is responsible for 60 to 90 percent of doctor visits. If meditating defuses tension, meditators should find relief from a galaxy of stress-linked ills.

Life-Style Changes

Chissano considers. He says he used to have migraine-type headaches due to stress. "That one, definitely, I can say it went out with meditation... There are many other things which I used to feel, but I cannot say that they went away with meditation alone. Because together with that I have made some other changes to my life." A former jogger, Chissano has recently taken up walking. At his doctor's urging, he's given up red meat. "Except goat."

Take away the goats, and Chissano's health regime bears a strong resemblance to Ornish's Life Style Heart Trial. Twenty-eight people with severe heart disease began a program of walking, low-fat food, and stress management through daily meditation and yoga. One year later, 82 percent had improved. Their arteries were clearer, and they scored significantly lower on measures of anger and hostility.

Ask Ornish which component of the program is most effective - diet, exercise, or stress management - and he shrugs. "You can't rank them. It's one of those situations where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts."

It's seven o'clock, and Carlos is looking at his watch. Chissano asks me, "have you asked all of your questions?" I tell him that I have. "Good. But I fear I have not answered them all. For this, I think, you must take the experience yourself."

Meditation Lessons

My instructor is a diminutive, smiling Spaniard named Joan. Joan has been in Mozambique since 1992, teaching TM to Chissano's colleagues and to the military. Joan leads me upstairs to a door marked MEDITACAO. Inside are two chairs and a small shrine to a swami. I'm not wild about the mystic overtones. Neither is the president, but he simply ignores this aspect of TM.

Before Joan begins the ceremony, he informs me solemnly that I must never tell anyone my mantra. "It is like the child's game... Telephone. You will tell someone and he will tell three others, but they always have it slightly wrong. And soon it is nothing like it began."

Of Mantras and Religions

Actually, that isn't quite what he said. But I will pass this along: The TM mantras are words associated with Hindu deities. Like most forms of meditation, TM has its roots in religion. Virtually all major religions - Buddhism, Judaism, Islam, Christianity - include some form of meditation: a repetitive chant or prayer or movement that takes the supplicant to a deeper realm of consciousness.

"In every religion, the instructions for meditating are the same," says Herbert Benson. "only the words differ." Benson has his patients select their own mantra. In his studies, Benson often has subjects use the word "one."

You can do this on your own, of course, but taking a course in meditation will ensure that you try it enough times to get it. The first two or three times I meditated, it didn't feel like anything special. It felt like sitting with my eyes shut, saying "heating." Around the third time, things began to happen. I felt myself relaxing in a strange, sudden way, like clock springs coming unwound.

As Chissano said, it's another state. You're utterly relaxed, yet you're alert. It's mental weightlessness, a hot tub for the mind. At first, you're only in this state for a second or two. It's as though, with your thoughts gone away, your consciousness has room to expand, to take off its shoes and stretch out its legs and go "Aaaahh." The more you meditate, the easier it is to find the sweet spot, and the more stable it becomes.

Call it what you will - bliss, transcendence, a religious experience - according to Benson, virtually all forms of meditation take you to the same place. Is any one technique more beneficial than another? The TM people say yes, but Benson says no.

Jon Kabat-Zinn, director of the University of Massachusetts Medical Centre Stress Reduction Clinic, seems to share Benson's view. He has practised both mantra meditation and mindfulness meditation, which places greater emphasis on observing the thoughts that come and go during meditation. "They're just different sides of the mountain," he says. "At the top, the view is the same."