With regards to your meditation, you can train your mind in generation stage until you see all gurus as a buddha and all buddhas as guru, until you have very strong, stable devotion. Not just for a few hours or a few days, but spontaneously arising from the heart. You must work on guru devotion every day. This should be one fundamental practice.

On top of that, [meditate on the lamrim] until you feel all the works for this life are not important and you have no wish to gain a good reputation, comforts, materials, happiness of this life, etc. You need to understand that death can happen any moment, any day, therefore the works for this life have no meaning and are nonsense and childish. Until you get these realizations you should work on the graduated path of the lower capable being.

Meditate on the general lower path of the lamrim, until you get this understanding spontaneously arising in the heart. Then you will see that samsara is how prisoners feel when they are imprisoned. Day and night they naturally want to be free from prison and have the intense wish to get out. Or it’s like your naked body is sitting on a thorn bush or in a nest of poisonous snakes or a fire. Like that, you should feel that samsara is unbearable and you don’t have the slightest attraction to samaric pleasures, even in a dream. When only the wish to be free from this is spontaneously arising in the heart day and night, this realization is renunciation.

You should also meditate on the true cause of suffering, the true cause of the shortcomings of samsara, delusion and karma, also the three, four, and six types of general sufferings of samsara, the twelve links, and the sufferings of the individual samsaric realms.

[Meditate on bodhicitta] until you feel like the mother feels towards her beloved child, as the most precious one in her heart, and whatever problem the child has, even if the child is drowning or is in a fire, the mother herself would jump in and rescue her child by herself alone. So like that, a stable strong feeling simultaneously arises from the bottom of heart for all sentient beings without exception. Not only wishing sentient beings to be free from suffering but wishing to cause it by yourself alone, wishing to free all sentient beings from suffering and achieve full enlightenment for all sentient beings by yourself alone. For that purpose, you need to achieve enlightenment. This thought needs to arise spontaneously, without effort, day and night, all the time. This is refuge. You must meditate on bodhicitta until you get this realization.

The unmistaken realization of emptiness is when you can see subtle dependent arising and emptiness as one object; that things exist depending on base and thought as labels. The generation stage is when you have the realization that any time you want to see yourself as the deity and mandala it automatically happens without the slightest effort, as explained by Kirti Tsenshab Rinpoche. Everything, every detail is very clear. Also being able to concentrate for hours without a single thought entering—without attachment-scattering thought.

This is how to go about meditating in order to attain these realizations. Without realization of renunciation, you can't have realization of bodhicitta. So you need to work on renunciation by doing analytical meditation on renunciation, bodhicitta and emptiness, also guru devotion and generation stage. This is what you can do from now.

Do as many of these meditations as you can each day.