Everyone who does anything with magick needs to know how to center and ground.. It's like stretching before a sports event. Centering will help you keep yourself balanced and focused on what you are doing. Grounding keeps you from getting "spacy"or distracted.
You should always ground before you do anything with any magick or ritual work. As well, if you do it before you sleep you'll not only sleep better, you might remember more from your dreams as well. Grounding and centering aren't just for magickal uses, either. Grounding will help you to meditate better. Centering can help you with public speaking, taking exams, performing, and managing anger.
When you're first learning this, get yourself somewhere where you're very comfortable, and if you're not quite settled anywhere, make yourself as comfortable as possible wherever you can. After a while you can do it anywhere, because it becomes second nature.
Centering:
Close your eyes, and place your feet firmly on the ground or floor. Gather all the energy in your body to a nice round glowing ball in what you feel is the center of your body. This is centering. Find a center point in yourself and feel it there, steady and calm. If you are only centering and not moving on to grounding, maintain this as long as you need to until you feel you have centered yourself enough.
Grounding:
Center yourself first. Breathe deeply. As you breathe in, feel the clean, fresh air filling your whole body, filling your Self. As you breathe slowly out, feel the worries and problems of your everyday life, your mundane existence dropping away, through your feet into the Earth. Now imagine that ball slowly putting down roots, small at first, getting thicker, through your feet and your hands. Feel those roots get thicker as they go down through layers of soil and rock, pushing deep into the Earth Mother's body.
Imagine the water table under all those layers of earth, and when your roots reach the water, draw the cool, fresh energy of the Earth flow up to your centered energy ball and blend with it - the Earth Power is a deep well, and you are drawing it up into yourself, through your chakras, up your spine and through the top of your head. Feel the Earth Power fill you, rise through you like refreshing water, and feel it flow through your Center, constantly providing both new energy and a route for negative and unhealthy energy to flow away, carried by the Earth Power back to the depths of the living well to be cleansed and made useful again.
