When reading in venues like this there are a lot of people who try to learn meditation through books and reading stuff instead of actually going to someone with a new age background and learning meditation from a teacher.

This is a little off-topic, but if you want to learn meditation, I'd strongly suggest not going to someone with a New Age background. New Age isn't an umbrella term for nondenominational mysticism, it describes a specific cluster of spiritual practices -- and, not to put too fine a point on it, but generally not a very coherent one.

More generally, meditation in the West tends to come bundled with a lot of questionable spirituality, and that's bad, but avoiding traditional religious identification doesn't automatically solve the problem. In fact, it can make it worse.