Hi @FrankN ,
Great to see you posting here! Welcome to the Land of the Posters 
I just wanted to chip in here and say that it looks like you are overcomplicating what it means to ask yourself “How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?”
You have probably already seen the latest version of @Kub933 's flow-chart, but I will re-post it here:
As you can see, there are two possibilities after asking oneself “How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?” (i.e. HAIETMOBA):
- feeling good (felicitous + innocuous)
- bad feelings (sorrow + malice) / good feelings (antidotal pacifiers)
That is, the answer to the question “How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?” is essentially one of the following, for a “newbie” [1]:
A. I am feeling good – i.e. I am in a generally good mood
B. I am feeling bad – i.e. I am feeling angry, upset, peeved, annoyed, anxious, fearful, sad, sorrowful, etc…
C. I am feeling a ‘good’ feeling – i.e. I am feeling love, compassion, bliss, ecstasy, driven, etc.
D. (Not on the flowchart:) I am feeling ok/meh – i.e. neither feeling good nor bad, neither here nor there. Boredom might fit into here.
This does not require sophistication to answer, nor an advanced degree, nor even any degree of any sort, nor any philosophical knowledge or practice or experience, etc. It essentially comes down to, “How am I feeling?”
And the answer is gotten at by just using your normal regular human ability to feel your own emotions, i.e. just a regular, normal, plain, intuitive, ‘what am I feeling right now?’ Even a child can do this, it is really nothing very advanced whatsoever.
Then, as the flowchart says, what you do next depends on the answer:
1 - if you are feeling good – then, great! fantastic! Enjoy and appreciate it – and you are now employing the actualism method . Ask yourself the question again regularly until it becomes a non-verbal approach to life etc…
2 - if you are feeling bad/‘good’ feelings/neutral – then, no worries, it is a normal human thing – follow the flowchart to get back to feeling good.
And that is about it!
What you are going for by doing this is as continuous and consistent a sense of general well-being as possible. There is nothing specialized or particular to actualism about being in a good mood – except for it being the focus to life as opposed to anything else. But, at first anyway, it is just basically being in a good mood all the time.
All that happens ‘later’ is you see that a good mood can increase essentially exponentially 
. But you can cross that bridge when you get to it.
Also I realize I may pose an image on here as being someone who is ‘advanced’… and though I have a lot of knowledge about actualism, I’m by no means virtually free even, I still experience feeling bad on a regular basis – though I’ve had periods of multiple days where it was all feeling great or better – but I am still on the path .
Cheers and hope this helps,
Claudiu
[1] The only difference for a non-newbie will be that EEs and PCEs occur more frequently, or one may be feeling better than ‘good’, and so the answer to the question may be that – but I left it out of the post here for simplicity sake.