We treat feelings only as indicators of something that is going on within us. We treat feelings as signs or gauges of our mental state. However, as much as they are indicators, feelings are, more often than not, the result of choosing the ones we want to have. Many have chosen by default to feel feelings that are negative just because they are familiar with negative feelings. Good feelings can feel strange or unjustified or even undeserving, and they can become signs for us that something is going to go wrong. After all, the pessimist reasons, good feelings can’t last and they just set you up to feel worse when they don’t last. Feelings are, by and large, a choice. The everyday feelings that we have throughout the day are feelings we choose to have. Maybe that choice has just been from allowing what we are feeling to persist, thinking that is “the given.” “Emotional reasoning” is allowing emotions to be our way of reasoning. We think, “if I feel this, it must be true.” Feeling it doesn’t make it true. You can choose your feelings, you can choose them consistently, and you can choose good ones and practice them and they will grow. At the core of you is the reality of love, peace, gratitude, joy and hope. They are the essence of who you are, but we have to get to them, at the core of us, and let them emerge. We can do this from the outside and go in to the heart. That is, choosing to feel joy and feeling a little of it and then a little bit more. We can choose to feel gratitude and feel a little of it, then more of it. If you let this build over time, you touch the inner reaches of your inmost heart and find that it is filled with love, peace, gratitude, joy, and hope. Feelings are indicators and they often indicate, particular if they are negative, that we need to listen to what they might be telling us, but move to an emotional higher ground. Feelings are largely a matter of your choice. Every time I am in the position of being a “greeter” or welcoming people at the door of a function, I feel better and better, and when it’s over I feel great. I have put a smile on my face, reached out, shaken hands, and made another feel welcome. What start to become an act becomes real. Today I will greet and welcome others and the world into my life.