Chery's Story: Facing Trauma As A Small But Mighty Ninja Warrior

At 44, Cheryl Ilov walked into a doctor's office and walked out changed. 

When the people she trusted most refused to believe her, she buried it. For a year and a half, she held herself together. 

And then she didn't. 

What pulled her back wasn't therapy or time. It was an acupuncturist who wouldn't stop talking about ninjas. 

This is the story of a fussy girl in pointe shoes who became her teacher's first female black belt — and what she discovered along the way about strength she'd been carrying her whole life.

CONNECT WITH CHERYL ILOV:

https://www.cherylilov.com/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/cherylilovvitalityconsultant/

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCU0oIAa1eygYtcRPuNnLv1g

FIND CHERYL'S BOOKS HERE.

Hosted by Bernice McDonald — Courage Architect, speaker, and author. 

Need to find YOUR Next Step through a hard thing you're facing? Have a simple conversation with the Tiny Brave Steps Generator AI:  www.tinybravesteps.com.

Connect with Bernice:  

Email: bernice@bernicemcdonald.com
Website: www.tinybravesteps.com

Join me on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bernicemcdonald/

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Do YOU have a Courage Story you'd like to share? Send Bernice a message. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:03

She was 44 years old. A fussy girl, she'd tell you. Ballet class in the mornings, point shoes, manicures, the whole thing. Not a fighter. Not even close to a fighter. And then a man looked at her legs on an acupuncture table and told her he could teach her how to kill with them. She picked up her purse and thought, crazy person. She was right, of course. He was a little crazy. He was also, it turned out, the person who would save her life.

SPEAKER_00 0:47

Surprised everyone, including myself, when I began training in an ancient Japanese martial art called Nimpo Taijutsu at the tender young age of 47. But I did not go willingly.

SPEAKER_01 1:08

I'm Bernice McDonald, and this is Cheryl's Courage Story. Act one. And something in you decides to face it. Before we get to the dojo, the flying bodies and the curtsy that started everything, you need to know who Cheryl was before any of this began. She was a medical woman twenty years as a respiratory therapist, another twenty as a physical therapist. She understood bodies. She trusted her training. She thought she understood the world she was moving through. And then at 44, she walked into a new doctor's office, a routine visit, and walked out, a different person. She doesn't use clinical language for what happened in that office. She doesn't need to. She says she walked in a healthy, vibrant woman and walked out as a statistic. And what came after the office was in some ways even worse.

SPEAKER_00 2:47

When I tried to get help, when I tried to report it, when I tried to get some support even from people who were very, very close to me, instead of getting the love and the outrage and the we'll help you through this that I was looking for, I got the equivalent of what they called, you know, the patent slapping when the patent slapped the soldier across the face for having PTSD.

SPEAKER_01 3:14

The people she trusted most, friends, people close to her, told her she was imagining it, making it up, seeking something.

SPEAKER_00 3:33

And I mean, it was really vitriolic. And it's like, talk about kicking somebody when they're down.

SPEAKER_01 3:41

So she did what women do when they have nowhere left to go. She put a smile on her face and kept moving.

SPEAKER_00 3:51

What do you do in circumstances like that? You're not going to just keep asking for help because you just get kicked in the face over and over again. So I did the only thing I knew what to do. I stuffed everything inside, pasted a big old smile on my face, and walked around pretending like everything was just fine. And it wasn't. And it was obvious.

SPEAKER_01 4:17

She held it together for about a year and a half. And then it all came spilling out.

SPEAKER_00 4:26

Then all of a sudden, I was re triggered, and everything just came spewing out of me. I mean, oh, it was it was bad. It was really, really bad. The anger was the loudest part.

SPEAKER_01 4:41

Her therapist, who she says wasn't much help, was fascinated by how angry she was. Most women in her situation, he said, were scared, fearful. Cheryl was just peed off, and she had no idea what to do with it. This is the waking up, not a gentle nudge, the kind that rattles the whole house. Fear had been running things for a year and a half. Shame had been running things. The voices of people who didn't believe her had been running things. And underneath all of it, that day she put her hand on a doorknob and felt something go cold inside her. She already knew what she knew.

SPEAKER_00 5:35

And I just remember when I put my hand on the doorknob, I got this really weird feeling like, turn around and go home. You're in the wrong place. But you know, women's intuition, and we're told a lot of times, oh, come on, you know, you're just nervous, or this is, you know, new, new physician, blah, blah, blah, blah. So I just I did walk in, and you know, of course, a little too late, I realized that I should have listened to my gut.

SPEAKER_01 6:11

She had known she had walked in anyway, and now she was carrying all of it alone until she made one phone call. Act two, embrace who you are. Embracing who you are means letting yourself be truly seen and allowing someone to see past the smile and reach the real thing underneath. Mark was her acupuncturist. He'd been trying to get her onto a martial arts mat for three years by this point. Three years of gentle, relentless campaigning about ninjas and sensuality and women being good at this art. And three years of Cheryl's eyes glazing over. She'd stopped going to acupuncture after the incident. She'd stopped going to a lot of things. But one afternoon, she picked up the phone and called him. She doesn't know exactly why. Except that somewhere in her she knew he would listen.

SPEAKER_00 7:32

And I remember thinking, because I hadn't been to acupuncture in probably close to a year at that point. And I called Mark again out of the blue and said, I need, I need an appointment. I knew that Mark would listen to me. I knew he would believe me. There was something that I figured there's only one person. And it was basically the last one. I figured if he slammed the door in my face, I'd, you know, you know, I'll just look for the next bridge.

SPEAKER_01 8:02

That phrase, look for the next bridge, is worth sitting with for a moment. She was that close to the edge of herself. He didn't slam the door. He told her he'd always thought something was wrong, but hadn't wanted to pry. He made her a treatment plan. And then he said something she had been waiting, without even knowing it, to hear.

SPEAKER_00 8:35

He was he said to me, You know, it's no secret that you are one of my favorite people. I thought, well, it was a secret to me. And he said, and the thought that somebody did this to you makes me want to hunt him down and hurt him. Wow. And hurt him so bad that he never gets up again. And I thought, oh, that was so sweet. A little scary, but sweet. And it was like finally, someone he didn't listen to me, he heard me.

SPEAKER_01 9:07

He heard her. Not the version of events she was supposed to accept. Not the tidy story that made everyone else more comfortable. Her, the real thing. And with that, his campaign for the mat went into high gear.

SPEAKER_00 9:29

He says, It'll help you get your power back, it'll help you get grounded, it'll help build your confidence. And I'm going, okay, I do not understand how hanging around a smelly dojo with a bunch of sweaty men whose goal is to attack me is going to make me feel any better. Mark came up to me with a big smile on his face and he says, What do you think? And I said something I will not say on a podcast because I don't swear on podcasts. I said, No way, there is no way on God's green earth. And he says, Come on, just try it, try it. And I mean, there were tears in his eyes. He was getting emotional, and I'm like, there is no way.

SPEAKER_01 10:08

She grabbed her purse and left and cried all the way home.

SPEAKER_00 10:15

Because I thought, you know, this might have been the this this was my last thing to try. This was it. There was nothing else I could try. And I thought, well, that's it. I'll just have to try and live with this. Find some other way. I don't know.

SPEAKER_01 10:30

That night she had dreams about tigers and swords and men in black. Two days later, she called Mark and said she wanted to come watch another class. Just to see. The thing that finally got her onto the mat wasn't inspiration. It wasn't readiness. It wasn't a moment of clarity about her own strength.

SPEAKER_00 10:56

I walk in on a Friday morning. This class was even more packed. I mean, there must have been 20 guys in there. Didn't see a woman in sight. And bodies flying everywhere. I noticed there was this guy on the mat, really big, bulky, older guy, gray hair, and he was eavesdropping. And he came sauntering over to where we were at the entrance of the dojo. And he had the most obnoxious voice. And he said to me, Do you know what typically happens to timid little ladies like you? After just a few weeks in here, you turn into sadistic little killing machines with eyeballs flying across the dojo and crushing testicles.

SPEAKER_01 11:43

And I went, and I looked at Mark and I says, Maybe I can do this. She signed up on the spot, wrote the check, handed it over. She was 47 years old. She had no idea what she was walking into.

SPEAKER_00 12:07

I mean, that's all I could think of. No, I belong in a ballet class. You know, I belong, you know, doing beautiful things. I belong, you know, in a place where I could learn to use my body, but I did not know that that was another gateway to learn how to use my body in a different way.

SPEAKER_01 12:33

Act three, stand up for you. Standing up for you is where the inside work starts showing up on the outside, where the strength you've been rebuilding quietly starts moving through the world. The first day on the mat, Mark wasn't there when she arrived. She hadn't slept very well, and she was nervous. She walked into a room full of men in black ghis, her own ghee in her arms, no idea how to tie it. When Mark finally walked in and the class started, she stood at the edge of the mat with her eyes closed. Then a black belt made a bee line straight for her.

SPEAKER_00 13:26

He bowed and he said something in Japanese, and I just stood there and I stared at him. Yeah. And he's like, I didn't know what to do. And you know, he just kind of bowed again and said it again. And I thought, well, okay. And I just took the edges of my ghee like I had a little skirt on and I curtsied. And I said, Enchante, because I didn't know what else to do.

SPEAKER_01 13:49

He looked at her like she was speaking another language. She was, in a way.

SPEAKER_00 13:56

Then he asked her to kick him. And I says, Well, no, I'm not gonna kick you. And he says, You can do it. I want you to kick me. And he's explaining how. And I'm twirling my ponytail, and I says, I've never kicked anybody in my life, and I'm not gonna start now. He says, Well, you know, you can do it. And I says, Well, besides, I'm afraid I'm gonna hurt you and I don't want to hurt you. And then he just got a big grin on his face. She'd never kicked anyone in her life.

SPEAKER_01 14:24

She didn't know how. So she did what she always did when she didn't know what to do.

SPEAKER_00 14:32

She did what she knew. So I just picked up my right leg, bent my knee, and thrust my pointed toes deep into his abdomen as hard as I could, as if I was doing a grande across the ballet floor. He flew.

SPEAKER_01 14:52

He actually flew a few feet and landed on the floor. Mark was watching from across the room. He walked over, put his elbow on her shoulder. He was tall enough to lean on her that way, and looked at the black belt, picking himself up off the ground.

SPEAKER_00 15:13

And he said, How many years of ballet? And at that time, it was 27. So I says 27. And he nodded his head and he looked at Wes and he says, Don't let the package fool you. She's a lot stronger than she looks.

SPEAKER_01 15:30

Cheryl says this was a head smacking moment. 27 years of ballet, 20 years of physical therapy, a body she had trained and studied and understood better than anyone. And she had walked into that dojo thinking she had nothing. The strength had been there all along. The package just didn't look like what anyone expected, including her. And if you don't know what to do, do what you know. She kept coming back. Month after month, she kept signing the check. And she discovered something she hadn't expected. She was sneaky. Always had been, she said, even as a little girl. And the art of the ninja, it turned out, had a place for that.

SPEAKER_00 16:29

So I'd stand in front of them, and I was really scared for the first two years, I have to say. And you know, we'd be getting ready for they would be getting ready to attack me, and I'd be in my stance, and it's like, okay, okay, no, don't hurt me, don't hurt me. I'm just a tiny little, you know, timid little middle-aged lady just trying to get by. And they'd go, okay, okay, and they would barely touch me. And it's like, I'm seeing something here. So then that was my thing the whole time.

SPEAKER_01 16:59

She used the curtsy, she used the don't hurt me, I'm delicate routine. She used every inch of the girly girl they underestimated. And she took them down every time. It took the men a few years to catch on. This is the hidden jewel. Two of them. Strength built in a ballet studio over 27 years. And the softness she'd been told was weakness, which turned out to be the most powerful move she had. She wasn't becoming someone else on that mat. She was finally meeting herself. And the woman she met knew how to protect herself, not just physically, the way she stood, the way she looked people in the eye without apology.

SPEAKER_00 17:57

After the trauma, even going to the grocery store was really hard for me. I thought people were staring at me. I thought they were laughing at me. I thought they could see through, you know, through me and see my shame and my pain and all that. But I would walk around and people would just clear the room, you know, they was just clear the aisle and they'd smile at me and I'd smile back. And it was just such an incredible feeling of really being in your own skin and loving the skin and the body that you're in.

SPEAKER_01 18:28

This is what courage looks like when it takes root. Not a moment, not a single brave step, a practice, a decade of showing up day after day in a smelly dojo with a bunch of sweaty men. And one day, 10 years after she walked into that dojo with her little ghee and no idea how to tie it.

SPEAKER_00 19:04

And I did it reluctantly. And 10 years later, I became my teacher's first female black belt.

SPEAKER_01 19:12

She was 57 years old, the least likely person in the room. The first woman in 20 years of his teaching to do it. The only other woman to follow her was thirty years younger. And she quit. Cheryl didn't quit. Act four, create your impact. Creating your impact is what happens when courage stops being something you practice in private and starts becoming something you give away. There's a wall in Cheryl's home. On one side, swords. On the other, her belts. Every one of them, stacked in order from white to black. She walked away from Colorado recently, from the life she'd built there, and she carried those belts with her. Mark came with her too, in a way, except he didn't. Right before she and her husband left Denver, her sensei died suddenly, unexpectedly. The man who had spent three years wearing her down, who had stood beside her on the mat and told the room not to let the package fool them, was gone.

SPEAKER_00 20:48

And, you know, we were even talking about maybe me starting a small group out here, and you know, he would be able to come and help teach. I haven't been training, but I still have the mindset, and I still have that warrior spirit, and I rely on that a lot.

SPEAKER_01 21:08

She's in a new state now, a new town, driving to Kansas City twice a week for things that take her out of her comfort zone. There's no ninja school nearby. The closest is four hours away. The next is in Canada. The next is Texas.

SPEAKER_00 21:28

So she walks past her wall. I walk by them sometime and I looked at them and it's like, how did you do this? And you know, when you it's not that I wanted to get a black belt. I didn't. I didn't even want the white belt, but it came with the ghee. But when I look at that, it's like if I did that, what else can I do?

SPEAKER_01 21:50

That wall is Cheryl's current container. The proof that lives there when she can't feel it in her body. When she's in a new place. And the mat is four states away, and Fred is whispering that maybe this new chapter is too much. She walks past that wall. And the bell answered back. She did eventually report the doctor. It wasn't immediate. It wasn't clean. The letter from the medical board told her he'd been reprimanded. A slap on the wrist, she thought, for what he'd cost her. But as she read the letter with her husband standing behind her, something caught her eye.

SPEAKER_00 22:38

My husband was reading the letter over my shoulder, and I was like, wait a minute. They just gave me a great big present. I said, It's Christmas in August. And he looked at me like, okay, she's going off the deep end again. And I said, No, what they got him on was overbilling. I said, I think that the insurance company might be interested in this. I think Medicare might be interested in this. He has Medicaid. I'll bet they'd be interested in this. So I, you know, made copies of that letter and I made, you know, um cover letters, put it off in the mail, and it's like, I'm done, I can leave this behind me now.

SPEAKER_01 23:20

She left it behind. Not because justice arrived the way she deserved, but because she had done everything she could. She had shown up, she had fought on the terms available to her, and she had walked away, still standing, which is perhaps the most ninja thing she ever did. Who was this person? I'd like to meet her. She wrote a book about it. She had threatened to from her very first day on the mat, standing there watching Mark demonstrate techniques with her eyes almost closed, thinking, I'm going to write a book about this someday. She never thought she really would. But she did.

SPEAKER_00 24:11

I ended up writing my first book. And then I thought, I really need to get the ninja out there. The message is the same. You can do anything.

SPEAKER_01 24:22

That's the impact. Not the black belt, not the report, not even the wall of the belt. Listen to it. It's the message she now carries into the world, into self-defense classes, and onto podcast stages, and into the pages of her books. You have more than you think you do. The skills that look ordinary, they're not ordinary.

SPEAKER_00 24:51

And I think that's something every woman who's listening to this right now, you need to know that. Key points here, you have a lot of life skills that you can don't think are that important, that you can take out into the world and you can use them to either protect yourself or to get what you want and what you need in life.

SPEAKER_01 25:16

If you are a woman who has been handed something you didn't ask for, if the people you trusted most looked at your pain and told you it wasn't real, if you spent time with a smile pasted on your face and something buried underneath it, Cheryl has something for you.

SPEAKER_00 25:46

Or, you know, give you their hand and say, come on, I'm gonna help pull you out of this. You can learn to be brave. It really sounds hard. When you're in a bad spot, it sounds impossible. But a few things that can help, and I know this sounds ridiculous, but it is the truth. Work on your posture. Look at yourself in the mirror. If you're standing, you know, with your shoulders slightly hunched, you're looking like a weak person. If your shoulders are back and you're standing tall and you're looking people in the eye, you are not a target.

SPEAKER_01 26:22

Shoulders back, eyes up, do what you know. You are a lot stronger than you look. You have always been. I'm Bernice McDonald. Thank you for listening to Cheryl's courage story. Cheryl has written two books: Forever Fit and Flexible, Feel Great at Any Age, and her ninja memoir is The Reluctant Ninja. How a Middle-aged princess became a warrior. You can find Cheryl and her work at CherylILove.com. You'll find the link in the show notes. And if you're ready to take your own step, the small, honest, doable one that doesn't require a gi or a dojo for 20 years, come find it at tinybravesteps.com. Because courage is not a personality trait, it is a practice, and you've been practicing far longer than you know. Remember, you are brave enough for this. You always have been.