27 Jan Positive Psychology (Yoga in Heston & Hounslow)
In the 1960’s some psychologists started to feel that the field of psychology was paying too much attention to all the things that go wrong. They wanted to study people who were happy, joyful and excelled at all they did, and see if there were lessons we could all learn from them. This gave rise to humanistic psychology which was made popular by psychologists such as Abraham Maslow and Eric Berne.
Humanistic psychology, much like the current self-help movement, lacked scientific rigour. Positive psychology arose out humanistic psychology as a discipline that focused on human excellence and wellbeing but did so while adhering to the scientific method.
At Sefali’s Yoga we like to keep abreast of all the new developments arising out of positive psychology. The work of Mihály Csíkszentmihályi on the subject of “flow” has been very influential to our approach to how and what we teach.
The studies on the benefits of practising gratitude and altruism have given us a fresh perspective and new insights on ideas and concepts we first encountered in ancient texts.
We continue to study positive psychology as well as related fields such as moral psychology so that we can pass every useful or practical bit of information or advice on to our students.
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