Intuitive feelings that I acted on were all body-related in my experience. In most cases, these intuitive feelings always had to do with assessing who another person is. My intuition about that seems to be pretty accurate.
I think there's a lot more happening in your body than you might realize. I've noticed that myself by practicing mindfulness. However, I don't think it rules out your idea that some intuitions are purely mental.
By the way the word emotion is a tough one, as I believe there is always a bodily component part to an emotion. I subscribe to the James-Lange theory [1] and the appraisal theory. In part, because I experience emotions in those ways before I even knew about the names and knew that these theories existed.
In short how I view emotions is process-based:
- An event occurs (thought, feeling, someone talks to you)
- This automatically gets processed by you whether you want it or not (though when it's automatic, obviously you're not using your full cognitive resources on it)
- This automatic processing concludes into two things:
1. You get thoughts about it
2. You get feelings about it (feelings in your body)
Note: thoughts and feelings are immediately re-triggering this process. So it gets meta pretty quick as you can have feelings about feelings about thoughts about feelings about <mix_and_match_as_long_as_you'd_like>
During my meditation retreat I realized that feelings come slightly earlier than thoughts. At least that's how I experienced it and I happened to be laser focused on observing my feelings and thoughts.
Coincidentally, that's also why I believe I have no free will as my feelings give rise to my thoughts, even when I simply observe my feelings. I don't choose that these feelings give rise to thoughts (and there were times where I really didn't want them to give rise to thoughts), therefore there's no free will. But that's another story :D
[1] There's probably a more advanced theory of this one as it is pretty old. For practical purposes, this theory was good enough for my understanding on what emotions are.
I always figured people were speaking mostly metaphorically about "gut feelings." Certainly, some kinds of intuitions (e.g. ones involving disgust or fear) are held onto as "physiological state" (i.e. written through motor-cortex commands; read back through pattern-detection in embodied cognition.) But I would expect most intuitions to present as e.g. sudden emotional states, or other weird purely-mental qualia.