Apprising Ministries wants you to know that:

F[ather] Thomas Ryan,CSP, [is] a catholic priest and certified Kripalu yoga teacher,coordinates ecumenical and inter-religious relations for the paulist community in the U.S. and Canada. His nine books include Reclaiming the Body in Christian Spirituality; The Sacred Art of Fasting; Four Steps to Spiritual Freedom; Prayer of Heart and Body; Meditation and Yoga as Christian Spiritual Practice; and Disciplines for Christian Living: Interfaith Perspectives.(Online source)

You should also know that in the Roman Catholic Church “CSP” stands for the religious order “Congregation of St. Paul, Paulists.” The back cover another book Ryan has written called Disciplines For Christian Living: Interfaith Perspectives (DFCL) informs us that he “is Coordinator/Ecumenical Officer of Ecumenical and Interfaith Relations for the Paulist Office of Ecumenism.”

He also has a DVD based on another of his books called “Yoga Prayer”:

For centuries, yoga has been used to prepare the body for meditation and communion with the divine. Now, with Yoga Prayer, Thomas Ryan offers an embodied practice to renew and invigorate your connection to God…teaching you the postures employed in the yoga prayers,… (Online source)

And Ryan also:

spearheaded the founding of Unitas in Montreal, an ecumenical center for spirituality and Christian meditation co-sponsored by eight different denominations. He served as its director for five years prior to answering the call of his community in January of 2000 to set up and develop the Paulist Office for Ecumenical and Interfaith Relations. (Online source)

Another contemplative Roman Catholic priest Henri Nouwen (1932-1996) wrote the foreword to DFCL, the book by Ryan mentioned above. We will see we’re not going to receive a Biblical perspective as Nouwen begins by telling us that “Thomas Ryan has written a very broadminded, eminently practical and deeply personal book about the Christian life”

The discerning will immediately notice a couple of things: A) This work is “very broadminded” and B) It will also be right in line with a postliberal highly subjective existential, “this how I personally ‘feel’ about it” type of approach to the Christian faith. Nouwen then writes, “I am convinced that this book will be of great help and support to the many people who have a deep faith in Jesus…”

Here again we see the rapacious results of relativism in our society. Those like Nouwen did who persist in the transcendental meditation of Contemplative/Centering Prayer originally culled from the non-reasoning of Eastern Religions eventually shut down the critical reasoning process God has given us. Therefore they cannot understand that this alleged postmodernism today is actually another fulfillment of Colossians 2:8 in that it takes you captive through hollow and deceptive philosophy, which depends on human tradition and the basic principles of this world rather than on Christ.

In closing for now, the absolute Truth is that just because Nouwen is subjectively “convinced” DFCL is “of great help and support” to “people who have a deep faith in Jesus,” it doesn’t change the objective fact brought out by Ray Yungen in his book A Time of Departing that DFCL “mixes Christianity with Hindu spirituality” (62). This becomes obvious in that, as I showed you above, Ryan is a certified yoga instructor, which would mean that in reality DFCL is actually quite harmful to anyone who has “a deep faith in Jesus.”