In the name of Progress -- whatever that is.

It's been bothering me lately that my progress on guitar is a stop-and-go kind of thing. When it comes to learning about theory and songwriting, I've grown familiar with the tools and devices my teacher has introduced to me -- I know their names and how they work -- but my growth is still stinted by a weak theoretical ear and an inability to apply what I've learned to practice. I can't listen to a progression and say, "oh, that's E , F#m7add11 , G#m7#5 , G#7, C#m, A,"(a tune I wrote last month); neither can I sit down to write a song and decide to toss in a modal interchange, followed by the root's relative minor. Somehow, I write songs that are theoretically elaborate and properly structured, but it's never on purpose, and I can't rely on accidental ingenuity when I hit writer's block.
This is where I realized that my approach to learning isn't very driven. I'll sit down and practice for several hours on end -- sometimes all through the night -- but I've never really taken much care to listen to what I'm playing, in the theoretical sense. I'm simply playing, producing sounds with no clue as to how they relate to each other. On occasion, I'll discover something that sparks explosive creativity, and I'll churn out song after song for a week or two...but I'm developing a definite sense that there's something hidden under all of this. When I write down the music that results from these surges, the material is always drastically different from what I've written before; I'll break down the songs and discover that they all have a certain theoretical element in common that was absent from my old work.
So here's my revelation and my goal: if I make a conscious effort in my practice to apply what I've been learning -- I call this experimenting with direction -- I can generate the same "eureka!" moments at a much more rapid clip, and if I run into a dead end I can always move on to applying the next lesson.
My music is about to undergo a huge transformation...and the method is so obvious that I feel almost stupid for not realizing it sooner.