To make a start, for me personally, I found that a new understanding of āyatana had a tremendous impact on my meditation practice. I presented the case in detail here.
Just in short, I came to understand that depending on ‘where we are’, i.e. in which mental space we locate our experienced self, we will experience accordingly. So for example as long as I define myself as a sense-being, my mind will bounce back to experience normal senses, no matter how hard I try in meditation to transcend it.
So now I more often become aware in meditation that the mind is in a very specific place and that part of my practice is to dislocate the whole realm of experience in order to progress.
In my own private language I call the ‘normal’ way of processing ‘object-processing’ and the more important new way ‘subject-adjustment’.
Anyhow, I feel I really wasted years of meditation practice by focusing on meditation objects whereas now I work much more with the meditation-subject.