Yoga as a Mean to Cultivate Ethical Values

Abstract

The Humanistic Psychology movement has been from the beginning attentive and receptive to integrate eastern approaches that have contributed to enrich the psychotherapeutic and personal growth processes. Moreover, it has explicitly been opened to considering and cultivating ethical values and spirituality (Declaration at the European Congress in Geneva, 1981). Here, we demonstrate how a yoga practice can be a powerful tool to deeply connect with our ethical values, and therefore give us the opportunity to live more connected to our deep self and the world. In this paper, we present a yoga sequence (Boucard, 2015) designed to connect with the ethical values from the psychological perspective as introduced by Ramón Rosal (2003; 2012 and Rosal y Gimeno-Bayón (2011) using postures, breathing and meditations. The possibility to combine the eastern practice of yoga with the cultivation of western ethical values shows that both approaches have the same objective: to become aware of the fact that we are part of the world as well as the sense of responsibility that derives from it.