Episode 1146: Carrie Schmitt on Creativity as a Healing Force

In this profound conversation with artist and author Carrie Schmitt, we explore how creativity isn’t just a skill or hobby—it’s a living, healing force that can transform lives. Carrie shares her personal journey of how painting saved her during a debilitating health crisis and how creativity became her most meaningful relationship. She challenges conventional views of creativity and offers insights into how anyone can reconnect with their innate creative spirit.

Key Topics Discussed

• Carrie developed a rare, life-threatening allergy to heat and her own body heat in 2009, which left her bedridden and severely depressed.

• A voice told her: “Now that your life is over, you might as well do what you want and paint.” She began painting in bed as a means of survival.

• Creativity became a source of peace, love, and comfort that no human could provide—it literally saved her life.

• Carrie views creativity as a living, breathing force with a personality—messy, chaotic, unpredictable, and loving.

• She emphasizes that creativity is not something you “get good at,” but something you get closer to—like a relationship.

• “It never judged me. It never criticized me. It only loved me.”

• Creativity is not limited to art—it’s the same force that guides nature, evolution, and all tangible existence.

• It’s about process over outcome, connection over judgment, and play over perfection.

• “We make creativity really small, but it’s literally the force that has led everything into existence.”

 

 

About Carrie Schmitt:

Carrie Schmitt is an artist, author, and creative guide devoted to helping people reclaim their creative spirit as a path of healing and wholeness. She began painting as a therapeutic practice after the onset of rare condition - a life-threatening allergy to all forms of heat, including her own body heat.

 

 

While bedridden and unable to move without reacting to her own body heat, she heard a voice tell her to paint, and thankfully she listened. Creativity saved her from deep despair and comforted her in a way no human could. It carried her across the painful threshold of the death of her old life into a new way of living a life in devotion to Spirit. She vowed to love her creativity, just as it had loved her, and share the truth of its love to others.

Today she is full-time artist, teacher, and author of Awakening Creativity : A Sacred Journey to Reclaim Your Inner Artist, The Story of Every Flower, A Flower in Her Heart, and Painted Blossoms, and host of the Awakening Creativity podcast.

For over a decade, Carrie has led retreats, workshops, and creative communities that weave art, spirituality, ritual, and storytelling.Her work has been featured in BCC News, Spirituality & Health.Where Women Create, Evening Magazine news, and other publications, and her books Creativity as something as loving relationship, not something they must earn or judge.

Carrie’s Resources

• Website: carrieschmitt.com

• Books: wakening Creativity : A Sacred Journey to Reclaim Your Inner Artist

• Online classes and community for those looking to reconnect with creativity