zim zim:
The more i reveal whilst in meditation the more seems to be asked of me of morality in my external life. It really is motivating me to break down more and more of my own stuff and consider my relationship to others with more clarity,however certain things i thought i had dealt with in the past are back with a vengeance and are almost brand new in their potency.Is that the norm?
Yep, definitely normal. That kind of stuff happens a lot in the dark night. It can happen at other times, but it's pretty typical of post A&P time, which is pretty likely for you given all this thought about and experience with the powers. It's perfectly fine that this occurs, as long as you stay firm in resolving not to get caught up in all of the "stuff." Just like the powers, psychological "stuff" is not bad or wrong, but it's not useful to dwell on these during the dark night. The four Right Efforts are really important for managing this type of occurrence. I'm sure you already know them, but I like repeating them -- skillful effort at abandoning unhelpful mindstates that exist, skillful effort at preventing unhelpful mindstates from arising, skillful effort at causing helpful mindstates to arise, and skillful effort at maintaining helpful mindstates.
The four Right Efforts apply to each of the Three Trainings, but they apply differently to each one of them. For example, in everyday life or morality, this may look like cognitive restructuring to help you be more productive and compassionate and happy. In bare concentration practice, it might be abandoning any attention to things other than your meditation object. For insight, it's avoiding any involvement with content, and directing the mind to observing the three characteristics in some way (noting, choiceless awareness, jhana-based insight, etc.).
If you find yourself ruminating about thoughts that are bothering you, then you can improve your handling of them in several skillful ways. During formal insight meditation, of course, it's always helpful to bump up to the bare sensate level and stay out of content altogether. Your concentration skills appear to be great, so it shouldn't be hard for you to stay out of content during insight meditation. Just keep up the energy of your three characteristics investigation so that you get the most benefit from your concentration ability.
Off the cushion, you can just give bare attention to the thoughts, noticing that they aren't skillful but not judging them or getting involved. You can choose to redirect your mind to new thoughts. You have to actually pick specific new thoughts to stay with -- it won't work if you decide to NOT think about something. So pick something skillful that you DO choose to think about, and stay with that. You could also just do some pure concentration practice, which can be like hitting the reset button on your mind.
In terms of your new involvement with sila -- great! In some ways, sila really is where it's at. All that is required to keep this skillful is to avoid -- you guessed it -- rumination on content! If you're unsure what to do about a problem/situation, then you might try and stick with simple solutions involving increasing the amount of skillfully compassionate actions and thoughts for yourself and others in your actions. This is one way to avoid insight bleedthrough.
Hope i made my point there about the powers and i apologise for drifting at the end there. Been a rollercoaster few weeks for me. Plenty of highs and a few lows thrown in there also.
Heh, welcome to insight! Crazy ride. Gonna be soooo worth it!