Home - Claudia Dommaschk

About the Book

"Belonging is remembered, together."

We are living in a time of profound fragmentation—within ourselves, between one another, and across the very systems meant to hold us together. In the midst of this unraveling, many of us feel the ache for belonging without knowing how to return to it.

Beneath this experience lies a deeper crisis, not simply of politics or technology, but of relationship itself. We have become highly skilled at optimizing, managing, and performing. Yet in narrowing our attention toward efficiency and control, we have sacrificed the very presence that allows trust to grow.

The Communal Heart offers a different starting point. Rather than prescribing quick fixes or reinforcing familiar self-improvement narratives, this book invites readers into a relational understanding of reality, one rooted in presence, attunement, and the quiet intelligence that emerges when we learn to meet life as it is rather than as we wish it to be.

Drawing on clinical experience, neuroscience, and embodied practice, Claudia Dommaschk shows how the divisions we see in today’s culture mirror a subtle split within ourselves. As we begin the work of integration, something steadier becomes possible: relationships can withstand tension, communities become grounded in dignity, and a deeper sense of connection takes hold, even in a world pulling us apart.

This is not a call to agree more. It is an invitation to relate differently and, in doing so, to remember that belonging has always been there, waiting to welcome us home.

*Corrections to the First Printing

The Communal Heart is available everywhere books are sold on September 15, 2026

Gather Your Own Wisdom Circle

The ideas in The Communal Heart are not meant to remain on the page. They are meant to be lived, practiced, and shared in community.

To continue the journey, visit Wisdom Exchange—a growing network of small Circles of Trust where people gather to cultivate presence, listen deeply, and discover the wisdom that emerges among us. There, you’ll find simple guidance for beginning a Wisdom Circle of your own or connecting with others who are drawn to this practice.

Because belonging is not something we find once and for all. It is something we create, one conversation at a time.

About The Author

Claudia Dommaschk is a licensed Marriage and Family Therapist (LMFT) with nearly thirty years of clinical experience, a long-time student of Gestalt Practice, and the founder of Wisdom Exchange, an international community exploring what it means to cultivate belonging in a fractured world.

As the familiar structures of modern life continue to unravel, many are awakening to a deeper longing for connection, coherence, and meaning. Claudia believes this liminal space between what has been and what is emerging offers an invitation to live differently. Through her writing, teaching, and community-building, she invites us to slow down, turn toward what is real, and discover the wisdom that emerges when we learn to listen deeply to ourselves, one another, and the living world we share.

Substack

Speaking & Events

Claudia speaks on the urgent need to restore connection in a world marked by disconnection, burnout, polarization, and loneliness. Drawing from more than thirty years of work as a psychotherapist, as well as her writing on The Communal Heart, she invites audiences to explore a more relational way of living, leading, and being with one another.

Her work helps individuals, communities, and organizations understand how presence, mutuality, and coherence can become practical pathways for healing, repair, and meaningful change.

Available For:

Select Media Interviews

For podcasts, articles, broadcast segments, and thoughtful conversations centered on connection, belonging, relational repair, leadership, and the themes of her book.

Corporate & Personal Consultations

For organizations, leaders, groups, or individuals seeking guidance on relational intelligence, communication, healing, and more connected ways of living and working.

Speaking Engagements

For conferences, retreats, organizations, communities, and events exploring leadership, emotional well-being, relational intelligence, and cultural healing.

Panel Discussions

For moderated conversations, expert panels, and events focused on relationships, mental health, leadership, spirituality, community, and the future of human connection.

Watch Claudia Speak

Get a feel for Claudia’s presence, message, and approach to helping audiences reconnect with what matters most.

Speaking Topics

Relational Intelligence in a Disconnected World

How we can rebuild our capacity to listen, attune, and respond with greater presence and care.

The Communal Heart

An introduction to Claudia’s central framework for restoring connection within ourselves, between one another, and across the systems we share.

Leading Through Relating

A new model of leadership rooted in presence, trust, generativity, and “power with” rather than “power over.”

From Fragmentation to Wholeness

How burnout, loneliness, polarization, and ecological distress point back to a deeper relational rupture.

Repair, Dialogue, and the Practice of Belonging

How individuals and groups can move through rupture with honesty, responsibility, and relational courage.

Invite Claudia to Speak

Claudia is available for select media interviews, corporate and personal consultations, speaking engagements, and panel discussions centered on relational intelligence, healing, leadership, belonging, and the future of human connection.

To inquire about availability, topics, or fit for your audience, please reach out below.

Praise

The Communal Heart by Claudia Dommaschk is a groundbreaking work that plants seeds of liberation in the collective imagination. It is a rare and necessary book—one that speaks directly to the ache of our times. With exquisite clarity and mythic sensitivity, Claudia maps how we move from isolation to belonging, from collapse to coherence, from the fractured self to a shared pulse that feels both ancient and radically new. This is not merely a book about community; it is a blueprint for rehumanization. Every page beats with insight, courage, and a fierce tenderness for what we are capable of becoming together. Few writers can hold complexity with such grace—fewer still can translate it into frameworks that feel both intellectually rigorous and soulfully alive. The Communal Heart is required reading for anyone who cares about the future of our shared humanity and seeks a new way forward. It’s one of the clearest, strongest, and most transformative works in the space of non-religious spirituality.

Most books about belonging are written from within the fragmentation they claim to diagnose. Dommaschk has done the harder thing: she’s written from integration, which means the structure of the book performs what the content describes. This is what genuine metamodern work looks like in practice.

The Communal Heart is a timely call back to belonging within ourselves and with one another. Claudia Dommaschk weaves Gestalt insight, somatic wisdom, and grounded practice into a clear invitation toward the communal coherence our world is asking of us.

Claudia’s work is a potent reminder of just how far we can go if we slow down enough to collectively rediscover our communal heart. She’s an active trailblazer in the field of community weaving, and her first book has eloquently laid out a pathway towards that most rare and sacred of things...sustained relational resonance! We need so much more of what Claudia’s doing in the world, and I sleep better at night knowing she’s out there leading the way. Her words shine forth with a mother’s love, a therapist’s keen insight, and a practitioner’s hard-won wisdom. This book is for everyone who’s genuinely ready to belong.

In this beautiful book, Claudia Dommaschk’s writing unfolds like a watercolor painting, layer by layer, revealing a path that comes gradually into view. And somewhere along the way, something in us softens and recognizes itself. The heart responds with a quiet ‘yes’—a felt sense that, beneath the surface, belonging has always been true.

Dommaschk has a rare gift: rigorous models that you can actually feel your way into. Again and again, she finds the counterintuitive angle on material that could easily have been predictable. Essential reading for anyone who leads people.

In this book, Claudia Dommaschk presents us with a systemic analysis of the forces pulling us apart, which is a great step in our healing journey. She also offers us an evolutionary path to transform our individual selves and to use relational intelligence to create loving relationships and wisdom communities, thus contributing to a better world.

This is a beautiful book as it will hold you, entrance you, and activate what’s within us all. However, it’s far more practical and powerful than this—merely coming home to ourselves. Our boundaries don’t stop there; what matters is between us and among us—taking us into the fractals of coherence—our awareness, sensing, and feeling, changes the world.

The Communal Heart carries a timely message on the connections we’ve lost, the toll this loss has taken, and why a return to community will be a critical part of our individual and collective journeys back toward wholeness. Perhaps even more importantly, Claudia shows us how to find and nurture the connections we’ve all been looking for.

In The Communal Heart, Claudia Dommaschk brings us back to something ancient and essential: the relational intelligence of the heart. Both a clear-eyed diagnosis of our cultural fracture and a compelling path toward repair, this is a book for anyone seeking to meet the crises of our time without losing their humanity.

As the metacrisis deepens, the need for healthy masculine energy supporting healthy feminine energy grows. It is time for the Queen and her Knights. In The Communal Heart, Claudia Dommaschk shows us a way. Her book is special to me because she is a dear friend. It is now my intention to direct some of my masculine energy towards supporting the healthy feminine energy evident in Claudia’s book.

THE COMMUNAL HEART