Wabi-Sabi - It’s a Japanese principle centered on the idea that the beauty of any object lies within its imperfections. It’s also the aesthetic that changed the direction of Cheryl Hunter’s life forever. At just 18 years old, she was kidnapped for days, raped, and left for dead by two criminals posing as modeling agents. After surviving the trauma of her attack, Cheryl set forth on a mission as an author and speaker to connect each of us going through painful experiences, and help others find peace and forgiveness in the life-changing moments that we didn’t chose for ourselves. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
There was this shimmer that would occur on the wall, this spark of light, and it was dark inside there.
But once in a while, this flicker of light would appear, and I kept staring at it, and I thought, whatever that is, whatever's causing that is free.
It's outside of here, and if I stare at it hard enough, I could become that.
Hi, I'm Dr. Oz, and this is the Dr. Oz Podcast.
Wabi Sabi.
It's a Japanese principle centered on the idea that the beauty of any object lies within its imperfections.
Remember that word, wabi-sabi.
It's also the aesthetic that changed the direction of my next guest's life forever.
At just 18 years of age, Cheryl Hunter was kidnapped for days.
She was raped and left for dead by two criminals posing as modeling agents.
After surviving the trauma of her attack, Cheryl set forth on a mission as an author and speaker to make sense of all of this, all these painful experiences that so many of us live through, but also to help all of us find peace and forgiveness in the life-changing moments that we didn't choose for ourselves.
The author of Use It, Turn Setbacks into Success, Cheryl Hunter joins me now.
Setback, I mean, it is a clear understatement.
You look so cheerful sitting here in front of me.
As you walked in, you were talking about surfing this past weekend.
You've obviously found a way to make sense of something that was tragic and brutal.
But reading through the pages in the book where you discuss what happened to you, it is hard to get past it without acknowledging that it has left its marks on you.
And I'd love to have you walk us through when you first realized you had a path to freedom.
Well, after the men left me, I was faced then with this new life.
This thing has happened, and I don't know how to make sense of it.
And at the time, as a teenager, the best I had was to pretend it didn't happen.
That was truly the best I could concoct at the time.
I thought if anybody knew what happened, they would know that I was...
Ruined, dirty, damaged, and stupid for having gone in the first place.
And then I'd be forced to go back to my family's horse ranch in the mountains of Colorado, which, as I say, that sounds great.
But as a teenager, we were so remote, there was literally no other signs of civilization.
and I thought, I can't be left alone with the thoughts in my head.
So I set out to figure a way to live, to create a new sense of normal as it was.
And on my journey back, I realized that I somehow was feeling more captive then when I was free than I had been when they physically held me captive.
And I really realized what was holding me captive were all the thoughts in my mind.
I should have done this.
What if and how do I get back at them now?
And all that negative kind of thought loops kept me trapped.
And I realized on the journey back that that sense of captivity is something that's the human condition.
Not something I faced because I'd been physically captive, but something each of us faces when we're dealt a challenge that's bigger than we know how to handle.
It's something leaves us trapped in the aftermath.
We're closed down.
It's as if something splintered off.
And we've killed off the part of ourselves that was blindsided, that was gullible or naive.
And we move forward into the future sort of a part of ourselves missing.
And I thought, if I'm going to crack the code on this, I'm going to do it for all of us.
I felt like just the motivation of doing it for myself wasn't big enough.
But if I could help other people overcome, that gave me a reason to try it.
So I just started out.
I thought, you know what?
There are other people who have gone through challenges way bigger than I have.
I'm going to start talking to them and see why some of them overcame while others didn't.
And I started there, and I've made it my life's work ever since to dissect why it is that sometimes we're able to overcome challenges and sometimes we're not.
And then how do I codify that journey so that any of us can use it to become, as crazy as this sounds, better for what we faced?
That's the principle of the wabi-sabi that Mehmet mentioned in the beginning.
Can you describe that a little bit for people who've never heard it before?
Absolutely.
And what relevance it has in your own journey.
Yes.
So, as a teenager, I set sail.
I mean, not literally a sail.
I went with my best friend.
I had taken a personal day, a me day.
I played hooky from school, let's face it, in high school and thought, it was my senior year.
I have no idea what I want to do.
I just want to get out.
I love how you said that.
I took a personal day from high school.
That's right.
Also called hooky.
I hopped on my mini bike and rode the hour and a quarter round trip to the closest place that had a store, a convenience mart.
Picked up a Glamour magazine for, you know, career advice, and looked, and I was like, what could I do?
Oh, model.
I'm tall enough.
I was on the boys' basketball team.
That's what I'll do.
Well, where in the heck do they need them?
And I was, oh, Europe.
Talked my best friend into going with me.
We got a few jobs apiece, saved up, and the big day came.
We got to France, and, you know, this man with a camera around his neck said, hey, are you a model?
I can make you one.
And then you, you know, described what happened then.
It's the movie Taken in real life.
Yeah.
Only worse.
Are you okay for our listeners just outlining, especially that first day when they tricked you?
I just want people to understand because it seems as an adult, a mistake that you couldn't make, but I would see it so obviously possible for a young woman.
So you get off the plane, you have high aspirations...
And these two men approach you.
Well, I decide I'm going to figure out a way, while I'm there, some way to stay.
Not in Europe, per se, but some way to stay in the city.
Because, I mean, there was no real possibilities.
I wanted to reach people and get to know people that I wasn't related to by blood, wear any clothes other than bootcut wranglers or, you know, I had no path out.
And I thought, I will figure something out and something will present itself.
And voila, you know, this man with a fancy looking camera says, are you a model?
And that's all I needed.
Now, my best friend said, over my dead body, you're not going anywhere.
But she wanted to go home.
Already?
No, but when we were done with Europe, she had every intention of going home.
She had a boyfriend.
She had no other aspirations, and I thought, I'm going to do what any sane person will do.
I'll ditch her.
I mean, it sounds absurd.
So when you went with these guys, where did she go?
Well, she had met some people.
France wasn't actually our first stop.
We'd been traveling around Europe.
We had Eurail passes, and she'd met some people, and they were off and went out, and were going to go to the beach and drink and play and swim or whatever they were going to do.
And I wanted to make this, you know, my big move.
And they took me and said, you know, we're going to meet you here at this restaurant.
And it was closed, which seemed odd to me.
And it was dark inside.
And they said, we're going to have some wine, have a glass of wine.
And I thought, well, I don't want to be tipsy for the photos.
You know, I want to be my best.
So I declined.
And they said, oh, well, you know, don't be an American prude, you know, or something like this.
And Have a glass.
It was Sauvignon Blanc, which sounded so, you know, hoity-toity.
French.
Right.
Well, okay.
And the next thing I knew, I was in a car in the front seat with my head hanging out the window like a dog, you know, kind of tongue out, and it was drugged, I mean, obviously.
And they took me to an abandoned construction site, and that was that.
I mean, I thought...
I mean, I've seen their faces that they're going to kill me.
That's that.
And for some reason, I just started talking.
I don't know why I started talking about my little brother.
He was held back in school and started just talking.
There was no logic to it.
It wasn't some premeditated, oh, I'll make them like me as a person.
But as I've dissected it over the years, I wonder if that had something to do with it.
But there was this shimmer that would occur on the light.
I mean, on the wall, this spark of light.
And it was dark inside there.
But once in a while, this flicker of light would appear.
And I kept staring at it.
And I thought, whatever that is, whatever's causing that is free.
It's outside of here.
And if I stare at it hard enough...
I could become that.
I could merge into it.
And I thought, I'm not this heap of a trash lying on the ground on the hard cement floor with a demon on top of her.
I'm just the shimmering spark of light that could fly away at any moment I chose.
And then finally when they dumped me, it's as though I became that spark of light, but I just pushed it way down deep inside of me.
And I thought, I'm going to become a model anyway.
And I found a way to do that.
I was in Europe, you know, and it's kind of a...
Grass is always greener phenomenon in the modeling world.
I went to London.
They're like, oh, great.
We're going to send you to Paris.
I was like, oh, awesome.
Oh, we're going to send you to Milan.
Oh, we're going to send you to New York.
Well, we'll send you to Tokyo.
That's the hot place.
It was just bouncing all around every place.
And it was in Japan that I learned about wabi-sabi.
Whenever I... Wasn't actually on set shooting.
I kept far away from people.
I didn't want anyone to know my deep, dark secret.
And I found it easier just to keep to myself.
I became a loner and I just read all the time.
You know, the complete works of Shakespeare.
I never was a reader before.
Complete works of Stephen King.
Go, Greg.
Whatever.
Can I take you back one second?
This idea of a shimmering light being free and outside and wanting to be like that is incredibly powerful.
But you probably still felt that you were going to die.
You mentioned that earlier.
And I don't even know why they released you.
Were they ever merciful to you at any point during this time?
Well, you know, letting me go, I suppose.
How did they tell you that?
Did they say, get up, we're leaving?
How did that go down?
They, there was a, it was in construction and there was some water pipe coming out of the wall and gave me, you know, told me to go clean up.
And there was a piece of sandpaper in there, or some sandpaper, and I used it on my body.
I don't know that I ever actually said that before, but I used it to try to get clean, you know, to get them off me.
But they, when they took me, they took me to Nice and pushed me out of the car, dumped me in the park.
But as I was just exiting the car, one says, darling.
And I looked and he snapped my photo.
I kept saying all along, and this sounds incredibly naive, I mean the whole thing does, but I kept saying, when are we going to take the photos?
When are we going to take the photos?
Still thinking that that was going to happen.
And I looked around, waited until they were gone and got up.
And then one of them chased me, you know, the ringleader, the guy who had the camera in the first place.
And finally, I just went back to the cruddy little pension where my friend and I were staying and got her and we grabbed whatever we could and got out and went to the train station.
You mean he chased you?
After they dropped you off in the car, they ran after you?
No.
It was those days when you couldn't make a phone call yourself.
It was like before cell phones.
You had to go to an Amex office or the post office or whatever.
And so I went to make a call to my mother.
My birthday was the time period over which I was gone.
There was a few days there.
But my mom and I spoke all the time.
Plus, I had made her a vow never to split up with my friend.
And I... Broke my word to my mom for the first time.
So I went to call her and, you know, sometimes in those places where they made the phone calls for you, there were individual phone booths, but this was not the case.
It was just a bank of phones against the wall with two to three feet in between.
It was not much privacy.
And they connected my phone call and my mom answered and I just, all I could say was, I'm okay.
I'm okay.
It was two in the morning or something in Colorado.
And as I'm standing there, the ringleader comes up and leans on the wall right in front of me and goes, what are you doing?
And I just hung up the phone and said, oh, no answer.
And he said, let's go have a drink.
As if we were friends or something.
And I said, I excused myself, I said, I need to use the restroom.
And I nonchalantly walked outside, it was this big open door there, and ran literally for my life.
Went back, woke my friend up, and she started screaming, and I leaned all my body weight on her and held my hand over her mouth and just said, stop, stop.
Get everything.
This is the friend you had left?
Yeah, that I had gone to Europe with.
So, one last question.
Yes.
Because this is an important part of the story, because I think so many people who've had trauma have the exact same experience.
The metaphor of the sandpaper, not the metaphor, which I actually tried to do, but it's metaphorical for most, is so true.
You couldn't talk to your family.
You couldn't talk to people you care the most about, I suspect, about this.
You know, I could have...
I just didn't know how.
I thought if I had to recount it, it would kill me.
And if I said it to anybody that I loved, it would kill them.
And I thought, you know, it's best for everybody if I just pretend it didn't happen.
So let me just go on and live.
And the best I had, like I said, was books because it kept people away.
If somebody's reading, you don't usually talk to them.
And I thought, oh, that's good.
That's my new thing.
So from that one, if you're listening, if you see someone reading a book, interrupt them.
Precisely.
I'm trying to signal you, yes.
We've got some more questions after the break.
So now we're in Japan again.
And you're separating yourself, using tactics.
I suspect people, the human brain is so uniquely special that people have all kinds of tactics for avoidance.
And is there an epiphany at some point in here that I got a breakthrough?
Yes, and, you know, modeling was perfect.
Nobody talked to me, and books were perfect.
What an indictment.
You say that in the book, it is hilarious.
There's two lines, no one ever talks to you, and the grass is always greener.
From city to city.
I mean, you're basically a human mannequin.
Nobody wants to hear anything you have to say.
I was like, I can last a long time in this business.
I've got longevity, career security, I'll never talk.
Yeah.
So whenever I wasn't shooting, I'd hang out in my agent's office.
There was nobody there except my agent and her grandparents.
And in Japan, they revere their elders and they keep them around should there be any important decisions to be made.
And they had this big conference room.
I would just sit there and read.
And there was a massive table that was in there.
I'd never seen anything like it.
It was wide at one end, like the tree must have been, and then narrow at the other end.
It was as if they just sort of Cut down a tree, planed a center plank, and smoothed it up just a little bit so it didn't give you splinters.
But they left the eyes of the wood in and all these divots and nicks.
And it was odd.
It was beautiful, but odd.
I'd never saw anything like it.
And I was one day sitting, reading in the conference room, absentmindedly, plotting my revenge against the man in France.
And the grandmother walked in as I was tracing my fingers over to one of the divots in the table.
And she said, oh, wabi-sabi.
And I looked up, thinking she meant wasabi, you know, like with sushi or something.
You corrected her, of course.
Wasabi?
Is it time for lunch?
And she said, no.
She chuckled, wabi-sabi.
And she and the grandfather took turns telling me what wabi-sabi means.
They said it was the most important of all the Japanese principles.
Wabi Sabi states that the beauty of any object lies in its flaws, and something can only be seen to be perfect to the exact degree that it holds imperfections.
Naturally, I thought, wait, could this apply to people?
It was blowing my mind to such a degree.
I had to get out.
I had to walk and be able to process this and think.
So I excused myself, gathered up everything, and walked as far and as fast as I could.
Does this mean people?
Could this mean there's life after all this nonsense?
Eventually, I realized I was starving.
I hadn't eaten all day, and I stopped at the closest sort of fast food restaurant, and I ordered my French fries or whatever, sat down in this little outdoor patio area.
And I was sitting at a table.
I started to pull out my book, but I just couldn't concentrate.
There was a table blank right opposite me, and then two tables away, there was a woman facing me with nobody at her table.
So we were facing one another with an empty table in between.
She started, she had a lot of bags with her, quite likely homeless.
And she started rustling through stuff and speaking loudly.
And I saw she was looking at me.
And she started saying, Waze, senso nihon, senso nihon.
And she was looking at me and people started glimpsing around and looking at me.
And a man at the table next to me leaned in and said, she asks why you make war on Japan.
"War on Japan?" What is she talking about?
Who does this crazy lady think I am?
And she keeps rustling around and she takes something out of her bag and it looks like a little cloth envelope.
And she opens it up and it's got two little photos, like passport style size, black and white photos.
One's a man and one's a woman and she clasps them and holds them over her head.
And keeps shouting.
And even more things she's shouting.
And the man next to me leans in again and says, she asks why you kill her parents.
Now, everybody's looking because she's really shouting.
I mean, runny nose, crying, spitting all over the place.
And I start talking back, you know, what do you think I am?
I wasn't in...
I don't make war on Japan.
You think I'm some man in an army uniform?
I wasn't alive.
My parents weren't alive when we made war on Japan.
What are you talking about?
Look at her.
And why are you all looking at me?
And they were looking at me, not the...
Flesh mannequin that got photographed, they were looking at me and it made me very uncomfortable.
You should look at this crazy woman.
Look at her.
Spit coming out of her mouth and those eyes.
And I caught her eyes.
And when I did, I didn't see a crazy woman.
I saw somebody who was confused and frustrated and Bewildered and trying to make sense of it all.
And I no longer saw this raving lunatic.
I saw me.
And I stopped and bowed to her and said the only two words that made any sense, wabi-sabi.
And she stopped screaming.
She just stopped and became silent.
And people were still looking and I just gathered my belongings.
They were still staring, so I bowed to them.
And by and large, everybody bowed back.
I used to pray, you know, that Japanese could translate, you know, into English and wabi-sabi could apply to people and people would understand and I wouldn't have to live in Japan forever to be considered anything but damaged.
And I realized...
That Wabi Sabi applies to each of us.
You know, it's not the perfect, shined-up, polished stuff that connects us with people.
It's everything else.
It's our humanity.
And, you know, if I may, Dr. Oz, the thing that most endeared me to you is when you had...
50 went through the colon cancer screening, and rather than squash that story when they found the polyp, you...
Spoke about how you'd been arrogant in the past, and this really humanized you.
You said, you know, I was arrogant, and now I know what it's like to face a diagnosis.
And for me, I was like, wow, that won me over completely.
And I thought, that's what's possible for each of us, to share those things that we think are not the greatest, to share those things that...
We think make us less than perfect.
I don't mean trauma share or any of that other nonsense, but to authentically share those things we've been hiding or have a proclivity to hide because that's what gives other people the freedom to do the same.
Yeah.
There's lots more when we come back.
You only get what you give away.
And I think this is a profound insight because it's not material things you're speaking to.
Yeah.
There's...
When I... For years I never told my story.
I started going to personal development seminars and then decided to start leading them because I felt better when I was there.
You know, I did all the trainings there were and thought, ooh, I'm not ready to be done yet.
I feel like it gives me oxygen.
But it kind of does to the people around me as well.
And I just started leading them because I felt better.
And then eventually I... Thought, well, there's a lot of pieces missing here, from my perspective, that would help a person recover, so I really did codify my own journey and thought, I'm just going to give it away to people, but I never told my own story until not that long ago.
I waited more than a decade.
What prompted you?
What was the epiphany that said, you know, I'm ready now, I'm strong enough to go to that place?
It wasn't premeditated.
Really what happened was one night I was leading a program for a couple hundred people and we were talking about forgiveness.
And a woman stood up and said, nope, nope, some things can't be forgiven.
And she had a story that, you know, bona fide trauma.
For her and her kids.
And, you know, anybody would agree with her.
And, in fact, that's what was happening in the room.
The room was starting to turn.
Like, how dare I say she forgave that?
People were throwing their stuff down and standing up and milling around and going to the exits.
And I thought, you know what?
A, I'm going to lose them.
But B... Really, you can forgive anything.
And I'm not that teenager anymore.
I'm not 18 years old.
I was terrified of telling my story originally because I thought people would think I'm damaged, and then I got over that.
But I thought people will say, well, why didn't you see justice served?
Why didn't you have these men put in jail?
And I thought, you know what?
If people say that, I'll deal with that too.
I didn't.
I did the best I could.
I ran for my life.
So I thought, all right.
I had a little moment with myself and said, I'm going to open my mouth about this.
And I did.
I told my story.
And you could have heard a pin drop.
I mean, people had known me.
They'd been in the program with me for a while.
And more importantly, this woman just burst into tears because she saw that forgiveness isn't about setting them free.
It's about setting yourself free.
And she saw that it was possible for her for the first time.
You know, we've been doing a fair amount of programming around crime.
And I'm interested in helping people who have been traumatized, but also trying to make sense of the whole process.
Every single person that I've been blessed to meet who's been able to get past some of these horrific events I said that same thing.
You end up heaping yourself hostage.
The pain that's felt is no longer as sharp when you let it go.
And it's interesting because it's so much a part of our mythology, so much a part of the stories we've been telling each other for 70,000 years of modern human existence.
And I think we forget it sometimes.
And it's that ability to let go of the anger that you're appropriately feeling that lets people get past all the obstacles they face in life.
That's why, I mean, I must say, you're saying it so beautifully.
You're not that 18-year-old little girl anymore.
You're a woman who's been through a lot in addition to that.
And it's right to let go.
And it feels good just when you say it.
And I'm sure people listening at home right now who have had different types of trauma, hopefully much of it much less severe than yours, but trauma is trauma and the human mind grows it to fill whatever it's basic and it can suffocate.
It's nice to let those people feel that sense of freedom as well.
If you could speak to those horrific men, what would you tell them?
As a grown woman many years later who spent a good part of your life changing in order to adjust to what they did to you.
Wow.
If this would occur or someone would hear this out of context, they would think I've lost it.
But part of the methodology that I created is allowing people to get out all the venom and vitriol and hatred, not to the person, but in a particular kind of exercise.
And then subsequently, do another exercise where they look for the gold or the gifts that the event allowed them to have now.
And somebody might say, well, This person lost a child.
How dare you assert that there's something good out of it?
But if we allow ourselves to find something good, even who we had to become or got to become, there is some gold there, I assert, no matter what the trauma was.
So this may sound crazy, but I'd say thank you.
I, as a kid in Colorado, longed to make a difference, longed.
Longed to get out into the world.
And I, you know, I had a very limited skill set.
I knew how to train horses, you know, break horses from scratch.
I knew how to milk a goat.
Not a whole lot of marketable things, right?
And not a whole lot that people would long to connect with me over.
But this experience has given me the profound honor of being able to impact people and touch people and help them in Myriad ways that I could never have dreamt before.
And I believe that, you know, in some divine way, we're the creators of all that existence.
And so, would I like to experience that whole thing again?
No.
But I wouldn't change the experience because it's allowed, it's transmuted me in a way that I wouldn't ever exchange for anything.
It has been wonderful speaking with you.
I'm going to share a story with you.
It may come in handy as you go through your life.
So this issue of Wabi Sabi is something that I've never understood it, as you've beautifully explained it.
But we have four children.
Three of them are girls, the older three.
When they were young, we would take them to the Natural History Museum, which is here in New York City.
It's not far from the studio here.
And we would take them to the gym exhibit.
I don't know if you've ever been there.
This is the Night of the Museum.
It's iconic.
And there are all these gemstones there.
And they would always...
But they thought they were shopping.
They keep track of...
They literally make a list of, I want the Hope Diamond, and picking out which ones they wanted.
They fight over which ones they wanted, because they sometimes like the same one.
But there was this beautiful, large jade stone in the middle.
And they never picked it.
And I was always caught by that because it was the biggest stone.
It was perfect.
I mean, really, just sort of an opaque jade color and greenish and without any blemishes whatsoever.
And what I teased down to why they didn't want that stone is because it was too perfect.
It was boring.
It's tedious.
Wow.
What makes jade spectacular are the gold inlay, the little cracks, the blemishes.
That's what makes it interesting.
Like us.
Yes.
And Swami is not just an optional multiple choice question answer.
It's an essence of why we are who we are.
And our brains, I think, evolved to the size they are because we needed to be able to deal with each other's flaws.
Of course, the biggest flaw is the ones inside each and every one of us.
I think you tell yourself beautifully.
Your TED Talk is spectacular, by the way.
And you're as charming in person as I had hoped.
God bless you for all you've said and done and for sharing it.
I hope you get much more back in return.
Your book is called Use It, Turn Setbacks into Success.
