Great topic and well written. Good to hear of your personal experiences. It's always helpful to practice in a group. My yoga training was more involving 2 hours meditation a day, sitting in one place from 5-7am if you were good enough not to fall asleep. There was a lot of Sanskrit studies too. And the physical practice daily was dancing, and of course music and chanting, so it was a different approach but also adopted with total surrender, in community, for a decade before part two came along.