Your yidam [tantric deity] is Five-Deity Heruka. The other one is secret Chenrezig, Gyalwa Gyatso. You can take the initiation of this in the future, but maybe practice Heruka. You will need to take the Heruka initiation and you can take the Gyalwa Gyatso initiation also, but practice Heruka unless you have a very strong feeling for Gyalwa Gyatso.

Your daily life practice is the Chenrezig sadhana written by His Holiness the Dalai Lama, The Inseparability of the Spiritual Master and Avalokiteshvara. I think that is according to Highest Yoga Tantra. Once you have received Highest Yoga Tantra initiation you can practice Lama Chöpa Jorchö. You can do the extensive guru yoga after receiving Highest Yoga Tantra initiation.

Preliminary practices

• 100,000: Refuge
• 400,000: Tsa-tsas, the saviours of the three types [Tib: rik sum gönpo] Manjushri, Chenrezig, Vajrapani. All three come together as one tsa-tsa. Do some tsa-tsas as statues with clay and also some can be done on the water, like that. Those are two possibilities.
• 300,000: Vajrasattva
• 100,000: Prostrations to the Thirty-Five Confession Buddhas

Lamrim Study and Practice

The main lam-rim for you is Manjushri’s Own Words [The Sacred Words of Manjushri; Jam päl zhal lung] by the Fifth Dalai Lama. Of course you can read Lama Tsongkhapa’s lam-rim, Pabongka Rinpoche’s lam-rim and other lam-rim texts, but the main one to study is Manjushri’s Own Words.

Read the text through four times from beginning to end. The things you don’t understand mark with orange color as an offering like painting a buddha statue or thangka, or like offering color or robes to holy objects. In other words, mark the text in a respectful way. Don’t mark the texts with black ink. Marking texts in a disrespectful way creates negative karma and is a cause to be born in the lower realms. One Western professor who is very good in Buddhism said that in the past many times he marked many manuscripts with black color right over the letters and created the cause to be born in the lower realms many times.

Also you can write down all the questions you have, everything you don’t know, in a book and discuss these afterward with the geshes or Western students who have done very good study in the Basic Program and Masters Program. If there is someone who has studied well then they can help.

Do effortful meditation on the lam-rim, then effortless experience.