Recharge your soul with Uncutt Art’s ‘Protect Yo Heart Day’ on IG Live
Every now and then, a respite from the seemingly never-ending mental, physical, emotional hustle is necessary.
Nowadays, with so many hunkered down in adherence to stay-at-home orders, it should become a routine exercise that encourages the recharging and redirecting of energy towards the good through oneself and for the world.
It might sound like an activity done in solo, but even under today’s circumstances, it doesn’t have to be because of Uncutt Art.
He’s a multi-faceted creative whose positive messages of self-love and acceptance are spray-painted across nearly every major American city and internationally, is hosting a “Protect Yo Heart Day” marathon on April 23 via his Instagram Live.
Starting with a global meditation at 7:23 eastern time, the digital event will include yoga, art, music, panels about nutrition, healing herbs, collective consciousness, and there will be surprise guests, too.
The date was just a number that Uncutt ran by initially, but it was brought to his attention that it corresponds to verse 4:23 in the Bible that sends a similar message:
“Above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it.”
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But for him and his followers, “Protect Yo Heart” is not just a national holiday. It’s an annual starting point to people’s far-reaching journeys of getting to know themselves with time.
It intends to urge a positive resetting of the “inner, higher self,” as Uncutt puts it, and the nurturing of “energy, the heart, the immune system, vital parts, or what makes [people] who they are.”
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The movement stems from his own experience to transform, heal, and evolve. A little over a decade ago, he started with just one goal, albeit one but brave and ambitious: to “come out” from the dark space in which he had found himself immersed.
His endeavor, though, wasn’t an escape, the kind that is attributed to “fight-or-flight” responses whose consequences of emotional suppression are those with which so many wrestles.
Instead, his was a search for something more — like, self-awareness, tranquility, peace — that was founded by “going deep every day” through questions and answers. Until one day, he freed himself.
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“It was one of my exercises I was doing, and while doing it, a lightbulb hit, and the lightbulb said, “Hey, your energy is inside of this body, in this individual, and this persona you created is not real. It’s made up by you and everybody around you, and everybody around you has been lying to you, not knowing it, and what they said had nothing to do with your energy,” Uncutt recalled.
“It’s like going back home. And we always want to go back home, we always want to go back to ourselves, into a space where we had peace in abundance and in connection with the universe and earth and all that. We want that and still be able to live our beautiful life, so you have to go home first. That’s what I realized.”
Then, he wanted to be one in his own experience of himself, not the product of ideas and concepts and expectations from the external world that he did not create though he might have at first, without knowing better, tended to regurgitate.
A regurgitation of others’ perceptions of themselves, of the world, and of him was no longer towards what he tended. That was on a personal level.
On an artistic level, that was the case, too.
Like Agnes Martin, an abstract Canadian-born American painter once said, “paint with [your] backs to the world,” Uncutt also subscribes to that notion.
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“Whatever you think the world is, turn your back. And don’t think about it, don’t even look at it, because that’s not part of your creation,” he said, mentioning that he intends not to bring his past into his future, and instead to carry his future in his own artistry of imagining the positives.
“Creating means bringing something new into the world. It doesn’t mean pulling from the world and recreating it. Once people find out that there is more inside of them, they won’t be running around looking for anything. They are going to become something.”
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Looking, even, at his past art, propels reflection for his future art, in that it makes him realize that most of his formative years were based on strains of feeling, and whilst he grows and evolves, he learns from his previous art that which he told himself many times before but didn’t pay attention to creating art without particular thought, but with all the particulars of the ingenuity of heart.
“The best thing to do right now is to go inside and figure out who we are, apart from what we’ve been told that we are, and then you will see a big difference,” he went on, adding:
“And then you could create from that space with confidence that it comes from a space of love and appreciation, and with the confidence that whatever you create is what you need, and the confidence that what you want is not for money or fame. It changes your whole aspect of why you are and who you are.”
Uncutt’s “Protect Yo Heart” national holiday-type-movement feels like a profound lesson on spirituality, self-agency, and resilience, but it does not tell us anything; much more than that, it shows to us our capacity to seek and find.
Even now, against all uncertainty.
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