In recap:  I ended up ordering three new yoga disk sets.  Rodney Yee's "Advanced Yoga", Shiva Rea's "Yoga Shakti", and Baron Baptiste's "Yoga Bootcamp."  I've felt for some time that I wanted to broaden my yoga experience, to understand more about the various styles and types and personalities. 
In short, it's time to apply some mental rigor, and not just the
discipline of "get on the mat more often."  Which gets boring.

I've watched some of "Advanced Yoga".  It's advanced.  The people who did that teacher training course that I didn't,
they could do this stuff at the end.  Head balances with legs wandering
around, transitioning to arm balances…I'm sure backbends
transitioning to other things are in there, too.  It's Yee's own
practices, filmed as he made them up for himself.  There's one advanced
pose I've seen in the sequences that I can do, as
kind of a party trick, the arm balance where you put one leg over your
shoulder, cross the other ankle over that leg's ankle, then straighten
the arms you're standing on?  This one.  "Hooked foot pose arm balance"…can't find its proper name just now.

I wanted to get this disk, so that I could confirm what it is I'm working towards.  Of course I like the physical exercise, and the mental strength and calmness, and I know that stuff is why I *should* be doing yoga…but come on, I'm youngish, I'm pretty flexible when I'm consistent, I want to learn tricks!

Baron Baptiste's "Bootcamp" is interesting.  It's meant to be consumed as a three-day retreat, with 3
20-minute sessions, and one 75-minute session, performed at various
times.  And you're supposed to eat better in this retreat.  And go for
walks.  The whole thing sounds very lonely as a solo exercise, but it
could be fun to do with pals.  The flashcards are cool, and my computer
likes the audiofiles, so I might be able to play them on my mp3 player when I travel.

But
it's Shiva Rea who's the real find this time.  First, the formatting of
the two disks is very interesting – they're designed in chunks, so you
pick and choose what you're doing today.  There's also four
pre-designed workouts, so you don't have to think if you don't want
to.  I've worked my way through the most basic one of those, and partly
through one of the harder ones.  The scenery and music is wonderful. 
She stands against sunrise/sunset beach sky in the shallows of the
waves (possibly my only favored beach experience – night has been
corrupted with dune fleas for me, and I fry in the sun). Rea's style really blows my mind.

She
dances the yoga.  I've taken "flow" classes, and sure, there's lots of
reps of series of poses, but the poses are still pretty static, and the
transitions have no feeling to them, other than "smooth".  Rea is
expressive…there's longing, sensuality, thankfulness, determination,
in the work I've seen thus far.  And that extra effort to express kicks my butt,
both physically and mentally – this, this could replace what I had
to leave behind in my dance life, the ability to bring today's emotion
to the floor and exorcise it, show it to myself in the mirror, face it
and accept myself for who I am today.  With of course, the implied possibility that someone might see, which ups the ante for Truth.

I am so pleased, and eager to get back to the mat tonight.