SuttaCentral
Thankfully, the Buddha never intended for lay people to follow the same guidelines as monastics. It doesn’t make lay people any less spiritually worthy.
We just happen to have different duties in life, and therefore different expectations that can be fulfilled.
In the Dharma well expounded by me,
all who have sufficient faith in me,
all who have sufficient love for me,
all have heaven as their destination.
The Buddha, The Alagaddupama Sutta
@Sujith, my thought is to really try and feel some kindness and compassion for yourself. One thing that truly emanates from the Pali texts, for me, is the wisdom and the kindness of the Buddha. I don’t think he ever intended that this Path be felt to be a burden, or a sword over one’s head, in terms of cultivating the Path. The good news is that this sense of the Middle Way gives us the ability to feel a sense of compassion for what we can and cannot do, and to not let any human limitations be a form of dukkha for us. We simply do our best, and work with the best intentions we can muster, despite our human limitations.
Living a renunciate life in a world that is driven by consumerism and busyness is difficult. But, like the musician that plays the lute, try to set your strings so that they are appropriately balanced. Strings on a instrument that are strung too tightly cannot produce good music.
I really believe that the Buddha saw this Path as being joyful. Try to cultivate joy and a sense of balance in your practice. That sword that we feel sometimes is something our minds create and not something the Buddha gave us. If you feel that sword at times, imagine it transforming to the calm hand of the Buddha above you, cautioning you to be mindful of kindness and compassion for yourself. That is his message, but in this world, we sometimes lose sight of the kindness of his message.
It’s a wretched situation when one clearly sees monkhood as the way that can carry a person to Release, but can’t ever don the robes.
As an aside, there are wats in Thailand, for example, where the abbot can make accommodations for diabetes, if you ever did want to ordain.
Right now, the most popular fad diet is the low-carb, high-fat diet, which Robert Atkins originally popularized. Incidentally, he died in poor health, which may have been related to his way of eating:
All fad diets seem to have a level of unbridled enthusiasm that borders on a religious obsession:
Excess fat can’t be blamed on insulin, carbohydrates or the Loch Ness Monster. Gaining body fat comes from taking in more calories than you burn. Anyone who can prove otherwise will surely win a Nobel Prize in physics for disproving the first law of thermodynamics…
It does not matter what percentage of protein, carbohydrates or fat you consume in the grander scheme of weight loss and gain. It is all the simple formula of calories in minus calories out. Golay and Bobbioni, in their 1997 article “The Role of Dietary Fat in Obesity,” agree: “… fat is almost exclusively used or stored in response to day-to-day fluctuations in energy balance.”6
In 2004 Buchholz and Schoeller looked at the published data to answer the question “Is a calorie a calorie?” The results were published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. They conducted a thorough metabolic analysis of the effects of diets that varied in fat, protein and carbohydrates and came to assert, “We conclude that a calorie is a calorie. From a purely thermodynamic point of view, this is clear because the human body or, indeed, any living organism cannot create or destroy energy but can only convert energy from one form to another.”…
In both religion and low carb, there is a lot of money at stake. Atkins Nutritionals, the rapid growth of gluten-free products, paleo products … changing dietary dogma means a massive loss of income, and people like to keep the money rolling in. They depend on it. And so, they are resistant to the idea that their dietary choices might be wrong…
Dietary fundamentalism is not limited to low-carb, but the LC crowd seems to be the most vocal and dogmatic. Part of this I believe stems from the fact that LC is not all it’s cracked up to be. It gets mediocre results, there is difficulty in sustaining it, and it’s not a wise choice for the physically active. And so, they need to create powerful, vocal support groups to convince themselves that they’re doing the right thing.
http://www.bodyforwife.com/low-carb-and-paleo-dieting-as-religious-zealotry/
When we take the Buddha’s advice about always following the middle way, we will be able to figure out the nutrients our body needs and the right amounts, rather than insisting on either low-carb or low-fat diets.
A small clarification - I meant ailments as the sword, not the Path.
I used to be terribly arrogant and vain, staring balefully at life and existence with a kind of mad-eyed wrath, but these days, I have managed to nudge the dart of conceit just a little, tiny, bit - so thanks very much for your kind words. 
I really hope these words of the Buddha helped you to feel better:
This is the Buddha’s true love for all people, regardless of their station in life.
Yes, very much. Thanks
Sorry about the off-topic rants, some days are a bit hard to get through…
That’s perfectly understandable. 100 years ago, type 1 diabetes was a death sentence. It’s not your fault:
The doctrine of kamma is probably the most misunderstood of all the Buddha’s teachings. The four most common misunderstandings are these.
- Everything which happens to us is the result of our past kamma. In actual fact Buddhism recognized at least four other broad causes of why things happen including natural laws (dhamma niyàma), biological laws (bãja niyàma), physical laws (utu niyàma) and psychological laws (citta niyàma)…
Kamma - Dhamma Wiki
The Buddha himself had back problems, including back pain and dying of food poisoning, despite having burned off all negative karma.
Also because Imperial Japan outlawed vinaya observance! Darn nanny states.
That was much later in history, during the Meiji restoration:
Shinran left the monastic life for much happier reasons. He received a vision of Avalokitesvara, prophesying his future marriage, at least according to legend.
Poor Shinran, he didn’t know that it was actually Mara taking the form of Avalokitesvara to make him stray away from the higher Path. The real Avalokitesvara would never appear to any monk and propose to him to take a lower path than that of a renunciant. He basically threw away a much more superior kind of pleasure (ie. one that arises out of renunciation and meditation) and retrogress back to that all too common, coarse and fleeting kind of pleasure, sensual pleasure!
Fat corrupted monks aren’t the cause to the death of the Dhamma. Ignorant people who keep supporting and venerating them are.
You’ve got to be kidding me. It’s normal in Tibetan Buddhism to have a sense of humor:
You’ve got to be kidding me even more. There’s a huge difference between having a sense of humor versus doing Mara’s work by re-enacting that same exact scene where Mara and his 3 daughters trying to distract the Buddha by dancing in front of Him!
Yeah, but what about Theravada monks smoking crystal meth?
It’s not an isolated case:
What did the Buddha teach about horse pills?
Sogyal Rinpoche is not a monk. He is a serial sexual predator.
If the majority is doing something wrong, that doesn’t make it right.
When you find a video of a Jodo Shinshu priest snorting PCP, please let me know.
That’s completely irrelevant to what we’ve been discussing.
Something about not throwing stones.