Mindfulness Blog for Life and Work
I’m Ashraf Monzer, the coach and writer behind A Mindful Spot. In this mindfulness blog, I explore the personal and professional experiences that shape how we think, feel, relate, and make decisions.
Drawing on mindfulness, coaching, and lived experience, I write about relationships, work, repeating patterns, difficult choices, and personal change. These reflections are an invitation to pause, consider a different perspective, and understand your own experience more clearly.
Articles
What Is Anxious-Preoccupied Attachment?
Anxious-Preoccupied Attachment: My Experience With It What Is Anxious-Preoccupied Attachment? Anxious-preoccupied attachment is a term commonly used to describe a pattern of relating that can involve worry about rejection or abandonment, a strong need for reassurance, and close attention to…
Self-Love: The Way to True Love Begins With What Hurts
Self-Love: The Way to True Love Begins With What Hurts From Treating Yourself to Meeting Yourself For more than a decade, I understood self-love mostly as giving myself something enjoyable. Take that vacation. Go on that trip. Buy yourself an ice cream after a difficult day. Spend the weekend…
Recover Your Sovereignty: Stop Letting the Past Decide Your Life
Recover Your Sovereignty: Stop Letting the Past Decide Your Life The phrase recover your sovereignty, which I encountered in Thich Nhat Hanh’s book Buddha Mind, Buddha Body, stayed with me. It made me ask: How much authority do I have over the way I live, and how much of my life is still being…
Stop Blaming Your Parents and Take Responsibility for Your Life
Stop Blaming Your Parents and Take Responsibility for Your Life For many years, I blamed my parents for almost everything I disliked about my life. I blamed them for our poverty, for what we could not afford, for the fact that I had to work full-time to pay for university, and for the ways I…
How to Find Inner Peace in a World That Is Not Peaceful
How to Find Inner Peace in a World That Is Not Peaceful We tell the dead to rest in peace. But why should peace belong only to the dead? Many of us spend our lives chasing success, holding tightly to relationships, fighting conflicts, worrying about money, and reacting to a world that rarely seems…
When Pain Becomes Part of Your Identity: Who Are You Without the Struggle?
When Pain Becomes Part of Your Identity: Who Are You Without the Struggle? Over the years, I’ve noticed a quiet, unsettling question echoing beneath many of our experiences: “Who am I without the struggle?” Emotional pain can become more than something we feel. When it returns often enough, it can…
Why We Mend Our Emotional Wounds Before We Heal Them
Why We Mend Our Emotional Wounds Before We Heal Them For years, I carried a particular idea of healing. Through what I heard, learned, and hoped, I imagined healing as a destination. One day, I would be free from the emotional weight of the experiences that shaped me. The wounds would close, the…
Is Awareness the Same as Freedom?
Becoming aware isn’t the same as becoming free. After years of reflecting on mindfulness, I have come to question something we may easily assume: that awareness automatically leads to freedom. My answer is no. Awareness can reveal a pattern, but seeing it does not automatically change how we…
Reflections
Just Before Your Next One, Read This | Reflection
Next Time! Next time you have the urge to smoke some weed, joints, tobacco… stop for ten seconds. Breathe, for ten seconds. Might you be numbing your pain by smoking it away? My Story with Smoking When I first started smoking joints, I told myself I was just doing it because it helped me…
War Begins Again When Those Left Behind Try to Live | Reflection
A Brief History I was born in 1988, during the brutal final stretch of the Lebanese Civil War — a war that raged from 1975 to 1990. Those last years were chaos: factions fighting for power, influence, and survival, while ordinary people tried to cling to life. Away from the politics and headlines,…
How Avoiding My Triggers Hindered My Growth
How Avoiding My Triggers Hindered My Growth For many years, I thought avoiding certain people and situations was a sign of growth. I felt less agitated, less angry, and less reactive. From the outside, that looked like progress. Looking back, I see it differently. Avoidance gave me distance from…
Feeling Overwhelmed by Personal Growth? Here’s What Helped Me | Reflection
Feeling Overwhelmed by Personal Growth? The feeling of being overwhelmed by personal growth is common. I’ve experienced it myself—the internal questions like: “When will I stop feeling like this?” “When will I finally get better?” “I’m 36 and I still can’t get a grip on my thoughts when they take…
Check-In in the Here and Now | Reflection
Mindfulness reflection in times of emotional overwhelm Hello, dear friend. It’s been a while. So let me ask: How are you? Not the “I’m fine” version.But how are you—really? Have you felt your sadness creeping in lately? Have you numbed it with distractions, filled the silence with noise, scrolled…
The Everlasting Seeking Syndrome: When the Search Becomes the Struggle | Reflection
The everlasting personal development seeking syndrome? This is a personal reflection—part observation, part opinion, part lived experience. Take it gently. Not too seriously. It’s about: Personal development and the trap of constant seeking When I began my personal development journey six…
Poetry
The Moment He Floated Free | Poetry
The Moment He Floated Free Sometimes liberation arrives quietly.Sometimes it comes in a single breath, in a moment when the body finally feels safe enough to let go.This poem explores the tender edge between joy and doubt, safety and fear, and the beautiful moment a person feels themselves float…
Learning to Love the Self That Suffers | Poetry
Learning to Love the Self That Suffers In his day dreams, he’s seen it all. Since young, since before he’s seen it, he has seen it all. Running away from his present and escaping his past— that of which he had not known back then, that it had even hurt him— he fell into day dreaming. Day dreaming…
Finding Love (Full Version) | Poetry
Part 1 — The Road As he walked the road, he found all that life could offer.He found the fruits of all the trees, the animals of all of nature, the drinks of all that grapes, barley, and the botanicals had to offer. He found down that road sunshine and blue skies, warmth and livelihood, joy and…
Fly Free: A Moment of Stillness and Liberation | Poetry
You are free.Free from judgment, anger, and hate.Free from greed, desire, and anxiety.Free from irritation, sadness, and your deepest wounds.Free from lust, agony, and long-held trauma. Fly as light as a feather carried by a soft summer breeze.Fly as steady as a bird drifting on warm winds.Leave…