As somebody who has embarked on the journey of spirituality and self-exploration, you may be facing the inevitable confusion about the different terminologies that are floating around. An understanding of yourself starts with understanding two crucial aspects that define who you are—your instincts and your intuition.

One morning, Reba didn’t wake up as peacefully as she always did. It was a usual morning though: the sunlight filtered in through cracks in the curtains, her husband slept with a mild snore beside her, and the setting of the room was just how it was the previous night when she went to sleep. But something in the air didn’t feel right. A strange, queasy feeling arose somewhere in the pit of her stomach when she opened her eyes that morning.

She went on with her quotidian tasks for the next couple of hours—getting her boy ready for school, seeing her husband off to work, and doing her household chores. However, that afternoon, as she was lulled into a short siesta, her phone buzzed to life and a voice on the other side informed her that her son had been severely injured during his playtime. She stood there frozen, as if the world around her had crashed and she stood as a helpless spectator to it.

Truly, something was not right for Reba that day. Her son suffered a head injury that could have been fatal without immediate medical intervention, which, thankfully, was provided at the right time. Upon knowing this, Reba called her husband to vent her panic, her breathing short and heavy. Without wasting a second, she dashed out of the door, not even bothering to lock it behind her. It did not matter. Nothing was more important to her than her son’s life.

Years later, as she looks back to that day, she can acknowledge that feeling that arose in her gut. A realization washes over her that the feeling was a message, a nudge so subtle that one would do nothing but shoo it away. Although her son has now grown up, healthy and strong, Reba still is unable to shake the feeling that somewhere deep down, she knew something was not right about that day.

The feeling and the memory of it still linger somewhere around her. The morning heralded what the afternoon had in store for her. Some of you would call it motherly instincts. However, it was also accompanied by her intuition, popularly called “gut feeling.” That morning was perhaps meant to wake her up to the existence of it.

Reba’s story makes it necessary to shed the light on the difference between instincts and intuition. As soon as she got the news of her child’s accident, she froze. Once the call was over, she called her husband out of panic, groping for some emotional relief. She rushed to her son, leaving the door unlocked. Those were all her instincts.

Reba’s behaviour was her hard-wired survival mechanism kicking in—without her choice. Her son meant everything to her and any harm suffered by him was like the rug was being pulled from under her. It threatened her survival, her meaning of life as a mother. She did not need conscious thinking to freeze when the news came. She was automatically kicked into her human instinct to rush for her son’s help.

The feeling she woke up with was her intuition. While Reba’s behaviour was instinctual, her subconscious mind was preparing her internally for the mishap. The inner restlessness she felt the moment she woke up that morning was her intuition, which is nothing but her inner guide. Unfortunately, she didn’t realize the profundity of this natural ability.

Intuition goes beyond the viscera of humans

In reality, the instincts of a person kicks in at a very visceral level. It occurs in your nervous system and is defined greatly by one’s genetic makeup and early environment. Instincts are involuntary in nature, meaning their activation is automatic and takes place without the conscious intervention of the human. The primary objective of instincts is to ensure a human being’s survival and adaptation to the immediate environment.

As humans, we are all instinctual in nature. It’s our natural ability to keep us all alive. This defines our in-built behaviours like breathing, blinking, shivering, and not to forget our fight-flight-freeze response. These bodily actions are natural and automatic; they have existed evolutionarily. You don’t have to think about performing these actions. Your body is intelligent enough to do it without your interference.

However, intuition goes beyond the human viscera to occur on the level of your soul. The brain-generated instincts can be felt at the face of any threat. But intuition goes beyond the mind’s rationality to prompt you about any threatening encounters. That was exactly what Reba felt that morning. But unbeknownst to the existence of this subtle communication, her rational mind dismissed it, only to bring her face to face with an overwhelming situation.

Some occurrences in life are inevitable, but your intuition is always present there in you as a compass. When something is not right and a little voice nudges you about it, listen to it. It’s your intuition. Such insights come out of nowhere. It’s not magic, yet there’s unexplainable magic in them. You just know something and you don’t know how you know it. It’s as if a voice from beyond prompts you to do something. It all depends on how much you are able to listen to it.

Tapping into one’s intuition is a spiritual feat that requires a highly centered and grounded consciousness.

Whether you realize it or not, it’s a balance of your intuition and instincts that keeps you safe and carves a way forward for you. Besides being instinctive, humans are also intuitive—a fact that is often forgotten amidst the daily chaos of life.

For a spiritual person, listening to this inner guide and shaping one’s responses to life is a continuous process. It’s a continuum of trial-and-error experiments that don’t necessarily have an empirical validation. It’s an inwardly working mechanism that has profound external effects. The power of intuition is a magic that the rational mind cannot fathom and words cannot express. But surely, it’s an experience that’s clearly palpable—if you know how to feel it.