Hi Syd,
Just a brief high-level points that I think are worth mentioning.
I think it’s useful to re-iterate here since this has been a longstanding blind spot for you, that the ‘good’ feelings != “feeling good”. And, “feeling good” != pleasant hedonic tone.
You may retort that you do understand this – but here you say that the whole time, when you are having your affective awareness running… the ‘good’ feelings have not been triggering the ringing alarm bells, because they have pleasant hedonic tone!
The point of the affective-awareness tool facilitating the method is to notice when feeling good diminishes, not when feeling pleasant diminishes.
In other words, a ‘good’ feeling (pleasant as its hedonic tone may be) ought to trigger off the alarm bells at just the same intensity as a ‘bad’ feeling.
This will greatly assist you in minimizing both the ‘bad’ and the ‘good’ feelings going forward.
Viz. (bold italic emphases added):
Note well: feeling good is the “minimum standard” version of “feeling as happy and as harmless as is humanly possible”; this feeling good is enabled by minimizing both the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’ feelings, not just the ‘bad’ ones. In other words, the ‘good’ feelings diminish the feeling good as well.
Besides that, more to your direct topic, the thing that stands out to say is that I’m not sure if you are saying that sorrow is the opposite/flip-side of nurture, as in, that is what sorrow is ‘defined’ as. I’d rather put it that sorrow is the flip-side of malice. Normally when some misfortune happens, like being stuck in traffic 2 hours a day on a terrible commute, people can choose to either be angry about it, honk yell scream, or sad about it, cry bemoan wail. The former would be the malice approach (generally directed outwards) while the latter the sorrow approach (generally directed inwards). There are many causes of sorrow, not just nurture or desire being frustrated.
Cheers hope this helps,
Claudiu