Maslow regarded peak experiences as vital to mental health and creativity.

He found that even life-changing peaks can be difficult to describe with ordinary language.

He developed a new approach that he called "rhapsodic communication."

Have you had a peak experience lately, replete with great happiness and personal fulfillment? If so, you've probably found that sharing it meaningfully isn't easy. For paradoxically, while disappointments and frustrations are easily described, not so with extraordinarily positive feelings. As Abraham Maslow discovered decades ago in his seminal studies, peaks are often elusive to recount (even to ourselves afterward) and may therefore elicit indifference or outright skepticism.

Why does this matter? Because our closeness with friends, romantic partners, and family members depends heavily on our ability to relate our experiences. And, as Maslow realized in interviewing college students and others, our ordinary language is woefully inadequate for such exploration into "the farther reaches of human nature" (the poetic title of his influential, posthumously-published book). Almost invariably, his interviewees struggled to verbalize the joy, wonder, gratitude, or ecstatic delight that they had felt during these soaring moments.

As Maslow's biographer, I wasn't surprised that he empathized on this matter, for he grappled with it in his own life: the challenge of sharing subtle emotions borne from evocative dreams, reveries, and visionary glimpses of what he termed the unitive "Being Realm." He passionately argued that we lack an experientially-based vocabulary to catalyze the science of human........

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