The OP is long gone from the board.
Answer to his questions, though:
Astral projection is a hypnotic phenomenon related to trance depth. In the past, i have described the 5 levels of trance here, with the basic phenomena that happen at each trance level. Projection happens at level 5. This is not an opinion, but fact - it has been psychologically tested and proven at Stanford and other universities dedicated to hypnosis susceptibility scale testing using double-blind experiments. I explained this many times before on this board, such as here, here, here, here, here, and here, but for whatever reason, magicians today don’t want to face up to what hypnotists and psychologists have known for decades.
If you don’t know how to go to trance depth, Michael Raduga’s The Phase is a shortcut that subsitutes sleep state for hypnotic trance depth. Raduga has you work on your projection when you wake up from sleep, just before or immediately upon awakening. This is as close as you can get to trance depth without any hypnotic training or a partner to guide you.
If you sleep at night and wake up in the morning in a relatively dark place (ie not with lights shining in your face), you can do the Phase exercises and they should have you lucid dreaming or astral projecting within a week.
The OP also probably had a really shitty meditation program. A meditation form i learned from Dr. Paul Scheele is Johannes Schultz’ Autogenic Training (which i outlined here), followed by Autogenic Meditation, which is explained in the book i linked to.
Hypnosis and Autogenic Training are both scientifically tested and have been proven to work exactly as described. If you have trouble with other methods, give them a try and see if they make a positive difference in your practice.