You should begin any meditation by relaxing, or grounding. Beginning at your toes, working your way up towards the head, stopping a moment on each body part releasing stress and tension. You do this by visiualizing the tension draining or seeping away from you into the earth. This gets rid of not only tension and stress, but excess energy you might be unnecessarily toting around with you.
You can be creative here, and invent your own grounding method. Taking a shower is also another method of grounding. The Celts believed in taking a bath before ritual to be clean and to also ground.
You can also center yourself, a friend of mine gave me this excersize to center myself:
Picture your energy around you as white light, in your mind's eye hold in front of you a box and draw the white light around you into this box like a sheet. Then open the box in your mind's eye just a little and let just a teency bit of the sheet out, about 1/4 of it, let it flow in the wind just a bit, then suck it back into the box. Then let out about half of the sheet, doing the same to let it flow in the air like laundry out on a clothesline. Suck it back, then let all of the sheet out letting it flow about in the wind. Suck the sheet back into the box, now let the sheet out and let it come back around you again, forming your aura of white light again.
In that excersize you should picture your aura as white because adding a color to it could add a mood to you, keeping it white is keeping it clean and pure for ritual, however I suppose if you are in a bad mood you could start out with this excersize to cheer yourself up, same ritual, but start with your aura as one of your least favorite colors, when you draw it into the box each time you let it out to 'air out' envision it turning into your favorite color, or a calm happy color. I would let the color-change process change the 'sheet color' gradually each time you let it out of the box, and you can suck it back in and let it back out as many times as you want. I just use the 3x method in keeping with my Celtic tradition. (See Sacred Number section for details)
Meditation techniques are basically whatever works best for you. What works best for me most times is to just light a candle and get comfortable and stare into it. Basically it is anything that would put you into altered states of consciousness. The state we are normally is in is called Beta. This is our wakeful hours of the day, normal state. The next is Alpha. Alpha is light to medium meditation. You also reach this state sometimes while driving, eating, doing repetetive choirs, yoga, reading, watching television, etc. It is the time when you are somewhat oblivious to the rest of the world.
The next is Theta, deep sleep, deep meditation, complex astral projection, light unconsciousness, pathworking. This is usually the state you are in just after you wake up from sleeping, also, just between being asleep and awake, but yet somewhat aware of yourself and surroundings. This state is when astral projection is easiest. (Astral Projection is the out of body experience, I'm not a very good authority on this, as I have only really done it once but I never got too far because I saw myself and popped back in. There are other websites out there on this subject tht cover it very well. Go to my Links section and click the communities page; or go to one of the search engines listed on the mian link page. Good luck with your research and experimentations!)
Meditation Techniques:
I try to meditate on a regular basis, but I have a baby and a husband and for right now "me-time" is very rare.. I can't even work on this web page without having to stop and take care of things, so having 'you-time' for yourself is very important in meditation, as is any ritual working.Awareness Raising Excersizes:
To raise your psychic awareness, you need to practice your visualization techniques. While meditating you could picture an apple. Turn it over and around as you would a real three dimensional apple. Does it have a stem? Is it still attached to the tree? What color is it? Don't be surprised if everytime you do this there is a different apple on the screen of your mind, because you are actually visualizing a real apple in existance. The apple changes because a new one is taking the old one's place. Another interesting visualization is colored numbers. Picture a big 10 on the screen of your mind, give it a color. A big yellow 10. Now a big orange nine! Count backwards visualizing each number with a different color. Turn the number over in your mind like the three dimensional apple if you like.
See also: The Gems section at the end of the listing of the gem correspondences are a couple excersizes dealing with feeling the vibrational energy in stones.