I have often wondered about certain decisions that I have made in my life, about which my gut instinct was negative or my inner voice had given me advice to not proceed and I ignored them and did the opposite. In retrospect, all these decisions met with an unhappy ending and I was left second-guessing myself and my judgement for some time.

There was also the case of a decision which my gut said I should pursue but I didn't and instead I made one of the wrong decisions (mentioned above).

After several years I realized that I did learn some important lessons about myself from all of the unhappy experiences thrown up by my forewarned mistaken decisions. So, there does seem to have been some method to my madness!    

I sometimes wonder if I may, perhaps, have turned my life towards some other experiences and life lessons, than the ones that I have faced and learnt, if I had pursued the decision which my gut endorsed 22 years ago. After all those years, it is just pure speculation for me.

However, this speculation has led me to ponder as to whether it is Fate or Free Will (or a combination of both) which determines the decisions and paths that we follow in our lives.

According to some people and some philosophies, our lives are pre-determined or driven by Fate and so the life lessons which I learnt must have been pre-ordained and I could not have changed anything. In an effort to understand myself, I once asked myself as to why I made one of the unhappy decisions about which I was warned: my inner voice regretfully answered that it had to happen - seeming to point in this particular case to pre-determination.

Yet others say that there is an element of Free Will that we can exercise in our lives. When I remember the distinct gut instinct or clear inner voice which guided that I should not make those decisions, I wonder if I exercised my Free Will in making the mistaken choices.

I have since then based more faith on my own intuition and inner voice. Yet, I am still left with the question:

Did I change my Fate with my Free Will or was I Fated to experience what I did, in spite of intuitive warnings? Or were some experiences Fated and others chosen by my Free Will?

I'd be interested to see what others may have to say on the subject of the role of Fate, Free Will, and Intuition/Gut/Inner Voice in the decisions and paths we take in our lives.

If there is no free will and everything is predestined then we don't decide anything and our lives are pointless. I don't believe in any form of predestination, though I do believe it is possible to accurately see the future or predict it. I do not see this as a contradiction. Seeing the future does not mean it is set in stone (consider the many failed predictions for each that is correct). By our foreknowledge we can change what we see. If we know our path and can see where we are going we can change our path. I'm hesitant to take actions based solely on my intuition, I consider it just one factor in decision making, rather than the sole guide.

Perhaps there is a subtle combination of both?  Predetermination of all things would certainly eliminate any purpose to living it at all, as all things would already be determined.  And lessons are about our learning and applying those lessons into the next step of our journey, so we are learning (changing) all the time.

We are very creative beings.  We plant the seeds of our thoughts and manifest the results in our lives.  We are large and in charge, no matter how we try to 'blame' others or dismiss our own creative abilities.  They work for us when we understand and perhaps a bit against us when we don't understanding.

The larger picture of being in the right place at the right time for the right things to happen seems to be determined by the universe.  Sometimes we just have to follow along and find our own good out of what is presented.

there's more than one way to learn the same lesson. It could be that you come into life with the purpose to learn an important lesson, the universe will make sure it happens. As for how you live your life and what state you get to the lesson is up to you.

just an opinion

i define gut feeling as something u learned from the past and u keep it as record for some specific response "fight or flight'... and that record is saved in our brain as unconscious memory
this record is starting from our birth time till we grown up... and activating in relation with event
so i can tell, basically when we think that we have some negative feeling that related to some events, the best we can do is start to do some self analysis
and then choose the best rational thinking based on the consequence we predicted