Concerning your fear of death, the following will help immediately. As a basis, do self-initiation four, three, or two times, or at least once a month. For immediate protection, self-initiation is best. Doing a short one every day is the best. This purifies broken vows, reviving them and making them pure again. This not only saves you from the lower realms, which have unbearable suffering, but also from suffering there for long periods of time, for eons. The main thing is that it is beneficial to do self-initiation. It helps you achieve realizations, as it is an extremely powerful method of purification. Other practices help, but self-initiation is an emergency protection. It helps with the fear of death.

Having strong compassion toward others is another important thing. Then, there is also following the guru’s advice in thought and action, which is guru devotion.

Prepare the mind every day. Practice the five powers*, so that you can apply them at the time of death. If you can practice these, you don’t need to practice po-wa and so forth, since the practice of the five powers becomes po-wa. Even if you practice po-wa, what makes it successful is the basis of having practiced the five powers as you near the time of death and also integrating them into daily life. Dying with bodhicitta is the best way to die, as you have heard many times. This is immediate protection. Learn these things and put them into practice.

Remember the five powers every day and be ready to die any time, because death can come at any time. Don’t wait until you have cancer or such a condition because untimely death can happen at any moment. If you think, “I will practice the five powers in the future,” death might come before that. If you practice the five powers every day, then when an earthquake, car accident, or heavy sickness comes, you will be ready.

*The five powers are the power of the white seed, familiarity, determination, repudiation, and prayer. For more detail, see Pabongka Rinpoche’s Liberation in the Palm of Your Hand.

[See more related advices from Rinpoche—particularly on the five powers—in Preparing Oneself for Death, in the Death and Transitions topic of the Online Advice Book.]