Havi Mandell, PhD, LCSW is a Kabbalist of Living Arts, Intentional Creativity® Coach,Teacher, Cura, and Visionary Artist, and a healing muse for the soul. She is a psychotherapist with 40 years of experience, specializing in trauma and mood disorders and integrative healing practices. She is trained as a reiki master in several traditions, polarity therapist, shamanic practitioner, and, with meditation, painting, and writing, teaches kabbalistic concepts and practices. Havi seeks to live each day in radical amazement and to embrace life and be embraced by life. Her work is dedicated to facilitating others to find paths of healing, meaning, and personal empowerment and live and express the fullness of their creative soul in harmony with all of Life. She has presented nationwide on mind-body healing and creative process, was part of two UN presentations, and, with Shiloh Sophia McCloud, has taught thousands of women kabbalah, intentional creativity, and spiritual expression. Her dissertation was on the experience of coming to feel at home in the world after childhood trauma.

Havi is the child of Holocaust survivors. Her parents were from Poland and France. She grew up hearing her mother’s stories of the Holocaust starting at a very young age and was 8 years old when the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated. She struggled to understand hate in all its vicious and pernicious forms and longed for a way to transform hate to compassion and at-homeness for all. With her very creative mother (scientist and artist) as her inspiration, she turned to creative expression for her own healing and for envisioning a more healed world. Her first love was dancing, then writing. Art emerged more fully as she began working with children as a therapist. Her grandfather taught her about the Ba’al Shem Tov, offering a type of Judaism that danced and prayed ecstatically with nature and gave her a love and appreciation for a Judaism not bound in persecution.

She received her B.A. in Economics at the University of Michigan, focused on workers (her grandfather was very active in the Bund). While in college, she volunteered at the Ann Arbor Women’s Crisis Center, leading to her decision to become a social worker. She earned her MSW through the University of Michigan and worked with children in groups and then foster care. As she worked with traumatized children, she began to work with the intergenerational abuse and neglect of their parents. She became an existential humanistic therapist, seeking a therapy focused more holistically on meaning, potentials, strengths and values. She received her Psy.S in Clinical and Humanistic Psychology and Education from the Center for Humanistic Studies in Detroit and then her doctorate in Clinical Psychology with a subspecialty in Art from the Union Institute in Cincinnati, Ohio. She sought to move beyond the limits of “talk” therapy, learning and working with the body through Bioenergetic Analysis, Core Energetics, somatic and energy therapies (EFT, Psych- K, Shamanic Healing, Reiki, and Polarity Therapy) and inviting creative expression through art, music, and movement into therapy sessions. And, at home, she sought to raise her children to be, as Dr. Chaim Ginott would say “humane and strong”, nurturing values of kindness, justice and compassion and celebrating their creative spirit. They have indeed become wonderful adults, now raising their own children (my three magical grandsons).

She moved to Las Vegas in 2006 and taught healing workshops at the WomensCare Center of St. Rose Hospitals before becoming Clinical Director of the Jewish Family Service Agency of Southern Nevada in 2007. She developed a job training program and worked to expand the Tzedakah program to address the economic collapse.

In 2010, her passion for painting exploded and she was trained in the Color of Woman method, a process of Intentional Creativity that deeply honors the Divine Feminine and brings artmaking into an intentional, visionary, and prayerful process. She began teaching in person workshops and exhibiting her art. In 2013, she began teaching Kabbalah and Intentional Creativity online through the Red Madonna program, an interfaith sisterhood focused on the Sacred Feminine in all Her forms. She has been teaching in Red Madonna since, and also co-directed Artist Erotica, focused on Intentional Creativity and embodiment, harmonizing the dance of soma and spirit, and Animystica, focused on animism and co-creating with nature. She is developing the concept of Intercreativity, bringing Thich Nhat Hanh’s Interbeing concept into the realm of the creative… that all creativity is and intercreative process with all of Life.