Hi Andy,
Are you following a specific school/method in your practice? Because in my opinion, continuously compiling our own system with practices and views from different traditions could add to confusion and diffuse our efforts.
Friends tell me things, sometimes I listen.

Literally, my 'school/method' is mainly what I read on this site, DhO and Hamilton Project, and very occasionally (when I can hold my attitude together long enough) the AFT. That of course is a wide swathe of alot of traditions, but there is an underlying unity in it all that.
I allow the basic 'inconsistantancy' of my personality to be what it is -twisting away-, going back and forth, roaming around, but always mindful of it. When something produces results approximating the descriptions by the likes of Nick, Matthew, Katy, (and many others), it goes into the tool box of what works.
So that means when I sit it is mostly as informed by VF, sit, breath, let go of grasping at things, notice, basically build mindfulness. I do not aim for any altered state or jhana (any more) if anything I have settled into what simply increases calm off the cushion. I do 'actualise' what I feel though, whatever is going on, I deliberately bring it back to the room. maybe zen like? I have no training in that, just my impression of it.
when I'm off the cushion I'm using some sort of pointer (there are a few) to snap me out of 'myself', and back into the present/actual world.
If it could be called a tradition then it is roughly pragmatic dhamma, i.e if it gets results (ending of stress) today, then great..whatever success I have with a method I don't try and hold onto beyond whatever I remember to do the next day. I find the wandering is not the problem, the chasing and grasping is. (second noble truth is the origination of stress being a fundamental desire, wandering is a fruit of that, not it's cause.) I am identified with this 'understanding faculty', that is my particular fermentation of stress- so it is then important to let go of 'understanding' and appear the fool (even to myself), there are no points for being right...
there are 'yogis' who have noted consistently without reward (i could provide links) and I'll bet it's not technique that is letting them down, but identification. They are a 'noting meditator in such and such tradition' and so in that instant undo whatever good they have done. It is a clinging to views. why else would it take decades to achieve something that otherwise take others a very short time? Some never get that they are 'building identity view' when they should be letting it go.
I'm feeling clever right now, and i realise also in that instant I am not. If I was truly 'clever' i would be free right now. hence I look at the feelings right now and think;
"perhaps it is wise to delete this post and appear the fool."
My own identity view is that 'I understand'. so without a teacher, someone who actually is present to guide, i knowingly let uncertainty rule.
'should there be something more to this grief? I should atleast ask, as I clearly do not know what to do' What Quardamon says is what i'm inclined to suspect, that the twisting is 'putting it off', that the sorrow is more of a 'pure experience' that I simply do not know how to navigate. So hence I never fell it, as I twist reality to avoid it.
I should say that my grand mother died last Wednesday and I don't feel sad. Yet I know I am nowhere near advanced enough for that to be a good 'dhamma' thing, hence the idea of 'spiritual bypassing'.