You say spirituality matters to you, but you're not sure if it's actually a core value or just something you believe you should care about. The gap between what you claim to value and what you actually organize your time and energy around is real, and it's worth examining.
Who This Is For
This is for someone who has used the word "spiritual" to describe themselves, or mentioned spirituality in conversation about what matters, but then felt uncertain whether it was honest. You might meditate occasionally or attend services or read about philosophy, but you're not living as though it's central. You're questioning whether that gap means you're failing at something you should be doing, or whether spirituality simply isn't as important to you as you assumed.
This is also for people who are aware that Shalom Schwartz's research on universal human values shows spirituality clustering with certain other values—benevolence, universalism, and tradition—in a predictable pattern. If you are familiar with the circumplex structure and understand that values work together in coherent systems, you're looking for help seeing how your values actually fit together, not in theory but in your lived choices.
This is not for someone who has no doubt about what matters to them. If you're clear that spirituality is central to how you make decisions—you organize time around it, you choose work and relationships partly because of it, you experience genuine conflict when you can't practice it—you don't need this page. You already know. This is also not for someone still in the exploratory phase who simply wants to learn what spirituality means or which traditions to investigate. This page assumes you've already encountered spirituality; you're just not sure what role it plays in your actual value system.
What You Will Discover
Once you test your actual values, not your aspirational ones, you'll see where spirituality lands relative to everything else you care about. The assessment surfaces your top values in order, and then shows you the gap between what you rank as important and where you actually spend your time and attention. If spirituality is in your top five, you'll see it clearly. If it appears lower, you'll understand why you might feel conflicted about it—not because you're failing, but because other things are legitimately more important to you. You'll stop arguing with yourself about what should matter and start making decisions based on what actually does.
You'll also see how spirituality connects to your other values through Schwartz's framework. In his research across 80 countries, he identified ten universal value types arranged in a circle where adjacent values reinforce each other and opposite values create tension. Spirituality, when it appears in someone's core set, typically clusters with values like universalism (concern for others' welfare beyond your own group), benevolence (helping people close to you), or tradition (respect for cultural practices and beliefs). Understanding these connections helps you see whether the pull toward spirituality is genuine or whether it's borrowed pressure from other values you do hold.
Common Reasons People Wait
One common hesitation is that assessing your values feels selfish or spiritually crude. Taking an inventory of what you actually care about, ranked in order, can feel like you're treating meaning as a product to be optimized rather than something to be experienced or received. This is understandable. But knowing what you actually value is not the same as chasing it ruthlessly. It's the opposite—it's the honesty that allows you to stop performing versions of yourself that don't belong to you. Spirituality, in most traditions, begins with clear seeing, not with assumption.
Another reason people hesitate is fear that the assessment will reveal spirituality is not as important to them as they've told others. If you've built part of your identity on being a spiritual person, or if the people closest to you understand you that way, finding out it's not in your top five can feel like a betrayal of a commitment you've made. This is a real cost, and it's worth acknowledging. What often shifts after the assessment is not that you lose spirituality, but that you stop defending it when you don't actually practice it, and you stop resenting yourself for not doing practices that never quite fit. You get honest about what you're actually choosing.
The third hesitation is that your spiritual values might have changed, and you're not ready to admit that. People hold onto "spiritual person" as an identity even when their actual priorities have shifted toward family, career, creative work, or simple peace. This is particularly common for people who had a meaningful spiritual period earlier in life and now feel they're supposed to maintain the same intensity. An assessment can't tell you what to value, but it can tell you what you're actually living, which is the only ground to build on. Pretending you value something you've moved away from wastes energy you need for what matters now.
The My Values assessment ranks your actual values and shows you where you're living them and where you're not, with no judgment about what the ranking should be.
Can spirituality be a core value if I don't practice a specific religion?
Yes. Spirituality in Schwartz's framework and most values research refers to a search for meaning, transcendence, or connection beyond yourself—not adherence to a particular tradition. You might find that through nature, service, art, or philosophy. What matters is whether it actually shapes your decisions and how you spend time, not which form it takes.
What if my spirituality is really just tradition or universalism?
That's a common finding. In Schwartz's circumplex, spirituality clusters with tradition (maintaining practices and beliefs from your culture) and universalism (care for all people, not just your group). If the assessment shows these values are core for you while spirituality is peripheral, it means you're probably drawn to the communal or service aspects of spiritual practice rather than the transcendence itself. That's useful information.
If I discover spirituality isn't a core value, does that mean I'm not spiritual?
No. Values are not personality traits or identities. Someone can have spiritual experiences or beliefs without spirituality being a value that organizes their choices. The distinction matters. Values are what you actually prioritize when resources are limited. You might be interested in spirituality without it being central to how you live.
How often do people discover spirituality is more important to them than they thought?
Less often than you might expect. More commonly, people discover that spirituality ranks lower than they've been claiming, or that what they called spirituality was actually something else—belonging, tradition, or the pursuit of meaning through a specific community. The honesty itself, rather than the ranking, is usually what's most valuable.