Wow, what a coincidence! I get all of my practices out of his book Yoga and Kriya, which is an amazingly useful book. I also have the book you mentioned which I just started reading a few days ago. It seems like it too will be a very useful book. That's interesting that he says to start with the ajna and then go from the root up because that's exactly what I've been doing so far.
Haha I do regularly. I find I can much more easily control qi, but it still gets stuck in my head. I had a crazy experience once where I felt like my head was getting sucked out of the top of my head and it felt like a huge amount of energy poured into me. That time I could actually kind of control it and make it go down into my body. It was weird though, it seemed like the energy had a mind of its own and was moving around my body by itself like it was looking around. Weird.