Becoming aware of and controlling your breathing is one of the best ways to begin relaxing and alter your consciousness. You don't necessarily need to do elaborate counting of breaths: the important thing is to breathe properly and slowly to calm yourself and give your body all the oxygen it needs. [A physiological note: proper breathing is from the gut, not the chest. Reach behind you and place your palms against the small of your back. Now, take a deep breath. If you are breathing properly, your chest will not rise, and your back will expand, pushing your hands outward, away from your spine.]
Cleansing Breaths
To begin, take a couple of deep cleansing breaths: Slowly breathe in properly and deeply, imagining your body filling with air from the center of your body all the way out to your head and toes. Breathe in until you can hold no more: hold it briefly, but not to the point of discomfort. Now let it out slowly. As you release your breath, feel all your tensions and concerns leaving with the air you exhale. Feel the negatives leaving from your head, your toes, and all of your body. Empty your body, mind, and spirit of all negatives as you exhale. When you have released all the air from your body and feel empty, breathe in again, but this time imagine your body, mind, and spirit filling with peace, joy, and power as you inhale. Fill up all the spaces emptied of negatives with positives. Feel your whole body breathing; feel as if you can breathe from every pore in your body. Do this a couple times until you feel cleansed.
Calming Breaths
After a couple of cleansing breaths, the next step is breathing slowly and rhythmically. If it helps you to count something like "In-2-3-4-Out-2-3-4" do so, but don't set so caught up in counting that you tense up. Breathe slowly but not uncomfortably. Don't hold your breath between breaths, but breathe steadily and regularly. Feel the deep, slow, steady breaths calm you and relax you. Feel the air circulating through your body. Feel every pore in your body breathing with you. Relax and be at peace.
2. Ground and Center
Grounding and centering is very important because it gives you a foundation on which to build. There are many methods you may come across to ground and center; however, this is another of those areas where it is easy to get so caught up in the technique you lose sight of the end result. Centering is finding your inner balance point, the point deep within you where you are still. You may see it as your core, hear it as the harmony within, or feel it as the point where you feel "together" and at peace. Grounding is becoming aware of the connection of your center to all else, the world around you. It is finding your place in the Web, the dance, the patterns, rooting in the Tree of Life. All of the methods of grounding and centering are just for you to find this point and connection; remember that as you try them.
Tree of Life
This method is based on the exercises in Starhawk's Spiral Dance. Imagine you are a tree with roots deep within the Earth. Feel your roots digging deep, deeper, deeper into the Mother, into the molten core of the Earth Herself, dipping into the power and boundless energy there, drawing the energy up the roots through your feet like a tree draws water, drawing the power up your spine like sap up the tree, rising with every breath, up your spine, up your neck, up, up, until it reaches the very top of your head and explodes outward like branches on a willow tree, branches that reach up and out and mingle with outer branches, out and down like willow branches, sweeping back down until they reach the Earth, sending the power back down to the Earth, down to its source, making a circle, completing a circuit, returning to the Mother and yet flowing through you. Feel that you have access to this power at all times but it does not build up in you; it is a free flowing stream up you and through you. Feel your power within, and its connection to all else.
Where You Are
I thank an old friend, Aislynn, for this one. Start at your center of gravity, the solar plexus. Sense that part of you; sense where it is. Expand your sensing outward to include all of your body. Now expand your sensing outward to include the room you are in. Sense how the room feels; sense where you are in relation to the room. Now expand your sensing outward to include the neighborhood you are in. Sense how the neighborhood feels; sense where you are in relation to the neighborhood. Now expand your sensing outward to include the city you are in. Sense how the city feels; sense where you are in relation to the city. Now expand your sensing outward to include the state you are in. Sense how the state feels; sense where you are in relation to the state. Now expand your sensing outward to include the country you are in. Sense how the country feels; sense where you are in relation to the country. Now expand your sensing outward to include the world you are in. Sense how the world feels; sense where you are in relation to the world. See if you can expand your sensing farther, and know that all is interconnected with that point of balance within.
3. Inner Sensing
Most people call this visualization; I avoid that term because it holds the connotations of primarily using sight, when all the inner senses would be used. As with all things, don't get so tied up in the techniques and practice exercises that you forget the purpose. In inner sensing, the purpose is to "make believe" something so strongly that you are able to cause it to manifest in reality. If you want a new job, you need to go into your inner senses and experience what it would look, feel, sound, even smell and taste like to be in that new job. Make believe as realistically as possible, in as much detail as possible. Use all your senses and use inner sensing to imagine it as if it were happening right now.
To practice, start with heightening your outer sensing awareness. Close you eyes and listen, just listen, to all the sounds around you. Listen both to the individual sounds and the composite pattern they make. Listen to the "white noise" that you usually shut out. Listen as all the sounds around you make a rhythmic symphony, how they combine and compete and merge, changing as your awareness changes. Now open your eyes and look at familiar things differently. Become aware of the patterns shadows make; become aware of the shadings of light and color you usually do not notice on familiar objects. Close your eyes again and become aware of feeling - how the air feels on your skin, how your clothes feel, the movement and pattern of your breathing. To practice inner sensing, pick a familiar object (say an apple). If you wish, take one physically and examine it using all your senses. Now, without the object, start with the sense that comes most naturally to you. If you make mental pictures regularly, picture the apple in your mind's eye, looking at it as clearly as you can. If you generally talk to yourself within your mind, hear the sound an apple makes when you bite into it. Hear the crisp flesh crunch. If feeling comes naturally to you, feel the apple as you hold it. Feel the weight in your hand. What would it feel like to throw it? What would it feel like to bite into it? If you can, use smell and taste as well, smelling the fresh scent and tasting the sweet tang. Practice with single senses if this is easier for you; then practice integrating them so that you can mentally experience the object or situation as fully as possible.