[Megan]

Re: "Idealized version of yourself"

I think maybe what we're talking about is our body's sense of our authentic self which is 'speaking' about the desks or whatever.

If we trust them, our bodies are capable of giving us a 'readout' of the "chorus of our deeper reality" (as Donald Epstein, DC calls it) that our conscious minds have a hard time wrapping around, since there are often so many disparate elements within us--not to mention all the 'idealized versions of ourselves' foisted on us by others which are knocking about inside us too.

This somatic 'readout' includes and transcends our conscious reasoning, it seems to me.

In any case, I ran out of filing supplies yesterday and ran in to Office Depot, so I thought, "Hey--desks!" and went back and looked at them while asking, "Is this me?" in my mind, just for an experiment on the fly.

Wow, talk about a way of chunking information fast! Absolutely no deliberation necessary!

All the desks were obviously and unequivocally 'men' (to me). There weren't any 'woman' desks, much less 'me' desks. I knew this in under a minute, as promised!

If I'd had $1000 to spend and was shopping for a desk without looking for a 'me' desk, I might have bought one of those desks, because I would have just been looking for features alone.

And then I probably would have felt vaguely uncomfortable with it for years to come for reasons I might never figure out. Interesting!

Kudos for a great heuristic, Steve!