The difference between the your intuition and your gut reaction is very important for your personal growth.
In the simplest of terms, intuition is the voice of your spirit, and your gut reaction is the voice of your memories (your subconscious mind). And what’s the difference between your spirit and your subconscious mind? Plenty.
Where your gut reaction comes from
Your subconscious mind is the part of you that stores all your memories - especially the ones you don’t consciously remember. Like, the day you were born, what happened to you on a specific date, your best moment in your second year of life, what you did the first time someone yelled at you and every single past-life memory. Every scrap of information and experience of every kind is loaded in your vast subconscious mind, ready to be used in any moment.
Now, add to this the fact that your subconscious mind doesn’t know the difference between time, so past, present and future doesn’t exist for it. Therefore it doesn’t discriminate between its’ stored experiences; it files it all together. Your subconscious believes that all its’ memories are vital pieces of information about you and what you need to survive. Like a soldier approaching the front line, it’s ready at all times to assist you in whatever you need. Thus, before you could ever engage your conscious mind in thinking about anything that is going on with you, your subconscious mind has an instant reaction to ‘assist’ you with (what it believes to be) trusted, tried-and-true information that’s personal to you alone.
Did you get that?
Your subconscious is the part of you that reacts. It is the reactor. Re-actor. Acting again, on your behalf, in a situation it believes is real. It scans the situation you are in, and remembers what happened when a similar event occurred (which may have been yesterday or several lifetimes ago) and it decides to react in the same way because this feels like the same event.
It’s this piece of information discernment that causes you to have an emotional gut reaction - an internal memory re-enactment - and may then cause you take it further into some kind of verbal or physical gut reaction, such as yelling, or crying, or attacking, or running away. Whatever your instant reaction, you can bet if it was quick, sudden, loud (inside you), and seemingly out of control, it was a gut reaction. Either emotionally felt or physically delivered, or both, it came as an automatic subconscious reaction to something that triggered you.
Intuition wins
Your intuition, on the other hand, is not based in your subconscious, or your earth memories. It is not earth bound at all. Your intuition is based in your non-physical form and therefore in your spirit, your essence. It does not have stored human experiences and information from which to react.
Your intuition has the feel of the quiet, subtle, gentle, sensitive side of you. The key point is that it is awareness, rather than emotion. A gut reaction has an immediate emotional feeling. Intuition lets go of any attachment.
Your intuition doesn’t react, it responds. It allows a natural response to come into its’ field of awareness. It may feel the automatic subconscious gut reaction to the situation, but it chooses not to take it personally, nor to take physical or verbal reaction to the triggering situation. Instead, your intuition brings with it a fresh chosen response to the situation, rather than a used common pattern.