I don't think many people know or use this feature enough. In the path enter something like
/{0}/{1}/%
This will get all the documents from second level of the current node. For instance you have two nodes like so:
/About/Contact/Office 1
/News/Current/News Item One
It will always get the documents below Contact and Current.
One other thing you can do us use the macro
{% CurrentDocument.Parent.NodeAliasPath %}
As the code shows, it will get the parent's alias path of the current document.
I'm not positive this will resolve the current issue you are having but they have helped me tremendously. Good luck