Aging with Purpose and Passion

From Trauma to Healing: Alx Uttermann on Resilience and Renewal

• Beverley Glazer • Episode 149

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What if the pain that nearly broke you could become the source of your greatest strength?

That’s the powerful story of Alx Uttermann, whose journey from childhood trauma and family loss to becoming a renowned spiritual healer offers hope, resilience, and transformation for women over 50.

Growing up in rural Missouri, Alx lost her mother young, endured an abusive stepmother, and left home at 15. Years later, everything changed when she met Sri Kalashwar, a miracle healer from India. His teaching was simple but life-changing: healing trauma, resilience, and spiritual transformation aren’t mystical gifts — they are learnable skills available to anyone.

Today, Alx is known as a “healer’s healer”, guiding practitioners, caregivers, and midlife women through burnout prevention and daily energy cleansing techniques that protect their health while serving others. Her practical wisdom blends energy healing with lived experience, helping women reclaim the strength in adversity they’ve often forgotten.

💡 In this episode, you’ll discover:

  • How to turn trauma healing into empowerment and service
  • Why women over 50 are primed for resilience and renewal
  • Practical tools for burnout prevention and daily energy cleansing
  • How to move from brokenness to transformation and turn wounds into wisdom

✨ Alx’s story is a reminder that no one is beyond hope. Whether you’re a healer, a caregiver, or simply a woman navigating midlife empowerment, this episode shows how your deepest wounds can become your greatest gifts.

Resources  

For a similar story on healing and Reinvention, check episode 133 and 137 and if you like podcasts for women over 50 The Late Bloomer Living Podcast embraces change and sparks joy, to live playfully at any age.  Meet inspiring guest who share practical, real-world tips. 

Alx Uttermann – Global Spiritual Healing Leader
📧 Email: babaskitchen@123mail.org
💼 LinkedIn: Alx Uttermann
📘 Facebook: facebook.com/alxindia
📸 Instagram: @alxhealingfeeling
🌐 BlueSky: alxindia.bsky.social

Beverley Glazer – Transformation Coach & Host of Aging with Purpose and Passion
📧 Email: Bev@reinventImpossible.com
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👥 Women Over 50 Rock Group
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Announcer:

Welcome to Aging with Purpose and Passion, the podcast designed to inspire your greatness and thrive through life. Get ready to conquer your fears. Here's your host, psychotherapist, coach, and empowerment expert, Beverley Glazer.

Beverley Glazer:

How do you transform suffering into service and reinvention into joy? Welcome to Aging with Purpose and Passion. I'm Beverley Glazer, a catalyst for women who are ready to raise the bar in their own life. And you can find me on reInventimpossible.com. Alx Uttermann is a global spiritual leader, a healer, and a teacher with over 20 years of experience guiding people to transform their suffering into strength. After five years of intensive spiritual study in India, she co-founded the nonprofit called the Universal Church of Baba's Kitchen, dedicated to healing, meditation, and humanitarian service. Alx is known as a healer's healer, helping people dissolve the roots of trauma and reconnect with resilience, purpose, and joy. Keep listening. Hi, Alx. Hello, good to see you, Beverley. Good to see you too. And you grew up in rural Missouri. And you had politically active parents in a very small town. Your dad was a doctor. How did that shape you?

Alx Uttermann:

Ah, yeah, it shaped me in a lot of different ways, actually. Um, for sure it informed my own activism in the world, you know, as a social and politically aware, uh always trying to do good. That that was the example that I saw in my household, you know, and my dad, particularly as a physician, so it was a very small town, there were 4,000 people. Um, and as a surgeon, he often doubled as an ER physician as well. So my young years were punctuated by my dad being on call for the emergency room. And if I would hear sirens uh in the town, meaning there was an ambulance going by, I knew that he had to go to work. So I saw him perform what I would call relentless service. He was so dedicated to what he did, and had he had come out of the Great Depression, he had come of age in the 20s and 30s, and he had gone to medical school in the 40s and then was in a mass unit in 1944 and 45 in World War II, uh, behind Patton's army in Europe. So he was a trauma surgeon. He knew how to just be woken up in the middle of the night, and now you have to just take care of boatloads of people who are really, really, really horribly injured. And he carried that ethos into his life. So I saw since I was quite young, you know, a guy who would work all day doing early morning surgeries and then consulting with his patients in the afternoon in his office. He'd come home, he'd have dinner, you know, the guy was perpetually tired. And the phone would ring and there would be some emergency. It happened, a car accident or an appendicitis or something. And he would just slug down a bunch of coffee and drive 15 miles into town, and he would joyfully work all night. He didn't care. He had this incredible capacity to help others, and I feel like that really shaped me.

Beverley Glazer:

And and your mom, she passed away when you were quite young. What was going on at that time for you?

Alx Uttermann:

Well, I was a little kid, you know. Yeah, so I didn't understand it too well, and I was yeah, so I have five older brothers and sisters. I'm the youngest of six, and I think everybody else kind of had some handle on what was happening. Um, she had leukemia, and to her, as I understand it, having cancer was a stigma. This was the 1970s, it was unladylike or something. I have no idea. And I know it was very hard for her. You know, she did chemo, she lost her hair. Um, the indignity of that was very difficult for her to bear. And but it was a, it was a we were kind of isolated from people, and in the sense that I think after she died, her best friend didn't even know until it was really terminal that my mother was that ill. I mean, she didn't tell her best friend, which begs the question what kind of a friendship is that, you know. So for me, like she would read to me every night when I was really small, and I got fixated on the book Charlotte's Webb when I was about, I don't know, four years old or something. And I made her read it to me seven times. And I would go completely unglued when Charlotte the Spider dies, which is a painful, difficult, bittersweet reality, right? Everything dies in this creation. We know that. But for me as a little kid, I would just go unglued. I would just be like sobbing on the foot of the bed. And what I, of course, did not know was that my mother was already diagnosed with what was considered terminal leukemia. Uh, and she's watching her little child melt down over the death of a fictional spider. And I I have to assume it went through her mind. Oh my God, what is she going to do when the inevitable happens for me? So I didn't really understand a lot of it. And then it's a progressive disease, right? So she got weaker and weaker. And, you know, I was aware that she was, you know, not operating at full force, let's say that. There were a lot of days on the couch, and there were a lot of visits to hospitals in bigger cities and this kind of thing. And um, but I didn't know what I was seeing. And as a child, you just suspend reality, you know. And then nobody talked about it. So it was really bizarre and so traumatizing because when she her last few days, I think, were in the hospital in a the big city, which was St. Louis, and I wasn't permitted to see her, which uh I think we all agree now, and my family was an enormous mistake. It really would have been a kind of closure and it would have yielded, I think, a strong understanding of how desperately ill she really was. What I knew was my mother left on a gurney from our home, and then she never came back. And sure, they told me what happened, they told me she died, she told me it was brutal a few days in the hospital and all like that, but I didn't witness any of it. And and she didn't want a memorial, she didn't want a funeral, she didn't want anything. So for me, honestly, it was like the switch just went off. My mother was there, and then my mother wasn't. And I spent some years in the kind of magical reality thinking, well, maybe she just got really sick of us and really angry with us for being idiots and just left and like started a new life somewhere else, and they're not telling me. So it was traumatizing.

Beverley Glazer:

Right, right. Well, that's what happens to a young child. You were young, no one talked about it, you didn't know. But then what happened was your dad brought this other woman into yes. So talk about trauma and change.

Alx Uttermann:

Oh, yikes, yeah.

Beverley Glazer:

Tell me about that.

Alx Uttermann:

There was an old saw at the time that women grieve and men replace. And I can't speak to the accuracy of it, but I can say that that was the roadmap for what my dad did. So the gist of it, I think, was he didn't want to get old alone. He was terrified. He was shocked. I mean, he was like, Yeah, I don't even know what the word is. He was really traumatized by the death of my mother, you know, his wife of 32 years. And he thought, well, he better find a new wife. Some of the justification was to have a female in the home to take care of me. I don't think so. I think it was really about him. However, uh, and he was one of those kind of lofty, absent-minded professor types who didn't really know how his household was run. Yeah, so he was he was kind of in pieces in a lot of ways. So uh he married our family piano teacher who had known our family forever. And she um, in fact, she had taught the last three of these six kids, myself included, piano when we were little little kids. Her specialty was little kids. After you got to a certain point, you would go to a more advanced teacher. Um, so we'd known her forever, and she'd socialized with my parents. And I mean, it was not that she was a total stranger, and um, and she was younger than he, and she had never married, and she was totally available, and they commenced a kind of courtship and romance, and then they married, and that's when we discovered that she was a closet drunk. Oh, with plenty of inner demons to work out. My it was very clear quite soon that she had been horrifically abused as a child physically, and my conviction also is that it was sexual. Uh, I'm pretty sure the symptoms were there. So, yeah, she married me.

Beverley Glazer:

Yeah, and you couldn't live in that environment. She was extremely abusive. And and you moved out, you went to your sisters. I did. And was there some kind of peace there?

Alx Uttermann:

No. Oh no. So from the time I was about 11 until 15, I was living in a home with a woman who became increasingly off the rails, abusive, uh, verbally, physically, everything. And, you know, my father was in pretty good denial that this was happening. She was crafty, she only did it when he wasn't there, and it escalated. So by the time he did see it, it was the scenes were just unbelievable. And at one point, she crossed the line when I was 15 and like invaded my private space in my room and my part of the house. And that was it. I was done. Uh so yes, I left home and I went to my sister's in the last eight months of her marriage. Ah in another small town. And she and I were the only two people in the whole town who didn't know that her husband was having an affair with her best friend.

Beverley Glazer:

Oh my goodness. Oh my goodness.

Alx Uttermann:

Great, good times. And at that point, I went to college. I was like, I'm out of here.

Beverley Glazer:

Yes. Oh yes. Oh yes. And and were you supported in college? Did your dad was your dad behind you on any of that?

Alx Uttermann:

Oh gosh, no, he disowned me the moment I left home because he wanted me to stay and he thought that the financial lever would keep me staying there for another, you know, a year till I finished what was left for me of high school. And I was like, yeah, but you couldn't pay me to live in a home where a woman wants to kill me every day. I'm done.

Beverley Glazer:

No, no, no.

Alx Uttermann:

I'm done. So no, financially, I was pretty much on my own. My mother had left me some money for college that my father's brother uh invested. And he kind of took over the wing of like being the responsible adult for me with in terms of college, you know, forms and this and that. Um, and not to say that my dad and I were estranged. We weren't, we sort of patched it together. Um, but essentially I was on my own, which was what the stepmother always wanted because she definitely had a thing for the money. So uh and some of my older brothers and sisters pitched in and like sent me a little bit every month so that I would have something, you know, just to kind of try to live on.

Beverley Glazer:

And from college, you moved on to California. I did. Yeah. And what was life like down in California now, from a small town into that state, that busy state? You were in LA, weren't you? Yes. Yes. Uh-huh.

Alx Uttermann:

It was a shocker. It was a culture shock. So I went to school in upstate New York at Bard College, which is a hotbed of liberalism and Bohemian brilliance. And also in a small place. It's in a rural area. Uh, it's like one street and 800 undergraduates at the time and a thousand acres of Hudson River Valley lands. So it was forests and trails and all the stuff that I had grown up with in Missouri. Great choice of college, I have to say. And I come to Los Angeles and I do remember we drove cross-country. I had a boyfriend who wanted to be a Hollywood director. Well, there's only one place on the planet. You can do that. So we came to Los Angeles. We're driving in, and I remember I started to cry when I saw it. It was very smoggy. This was the late 80s. I have to say that air pollution has gotten a lot better since then, just because of emissions limits and the you know, development of cars are different now and all that. But at that time, it was a smoggy day, and uh uh the sun was a little obscured, and we're driving on these freeways, and I just started to cry. And I was consoling myself by looking at the green shrubbery on the side of the freeways, and I was like, okay, green things grow here, so I can grow here too. I think it was hard, it was a big shock, and it was a film industry, and I have no interest in the film industry. The pretense and the posing and the who's who and yikes! Yeah, that was not fun. And I have to say, yeah.

Beverley Glazer:

But you survived and you wore many, many, many hats as a musician, a journalist, a marketer, a teacher, a ranking master. And what drove you to keep on exploring and reinventing and trying to find yourself somewhere? Curiosity. Yeah.

Alx Uttermann:

Always curious. They used to ask me when I was a little kid, what do you want to be when you grow up? And I had no straight idea about it because my curse, my blessing, and my curse has been I'm interested in everything. Uh, and so I would always just say awkwardly, Well, I just want to keep growing. I couldn't, it seemed limiting to land on one idea or profession. You know, some kids are really clear. Oh, I want to be a fireman, I want to be a doctor, I want to be a teacher. I was like, I want to experience everything. And and honestly, I feel like I'm still like that. I'm still like a big curious kid. You know, I don't want to scream at eyes. Very yes. So yeah. So what drew you you to India? What drew me to India kicking and screaming was healing. And I I was something of an itinerant healer already. That had just sort of smacked me in the head through my involvement with uh the gaming community in Silicon Valley, where I was a journalist and a book author and a developer for a while in there. And a friend was a Reiki master and healer. And so I caught that bug. And then in 1999, I met a young miracle healing saint. Uh, he was at that time 27 years old. I think I was about 32, maybe. Uh, this young blazing lion of a character called Sri Kalashwar, who had miraculous healing abilities. And unlike many characters who display such things, you know, like he was taking terminal cancers in five minutes and um dissolving AIDS symptoms in people. And I he really was came out swinging. Um, his stance was, yeah, I have miracle abilities. That's true. I worked really hard for them. Every human being has these abilities. And if you're willing to do hard work, I will teach everything that I know. That caught me because I'd been spinning as a healer for a few years, kind of in the make it up by the seat of your pants. Definitely adept and understanding how energy works to some degree, but being baffled and having a million questions that nobody could answer. And this generosity of, hey, this is learnable. There's technology. Yeah. So I visited India a couple of times and had my mind fully blown with what I learned there. And then I moved there. And uh I didn't realize at the time it would be a five-year residence. My then partner and I thought, well, maybe it'll be, you know, six months a year. Both of us had this motivation. We wanted to go deep, not just spend a month there and get some idea of some things, but really to go deep. And so that's what happened. So months turn into years. Why did you come back? We were sent out. My teacher said, Well, you got it. So time to go. His attitude was, why hang around me? The world needs it. His motive was to create cadres of healers who could handle human suffering, who could really handle the heartbreak of humanity. And once you have the goods, why are you sitting in India? Get on it, back to America. Okay.

Beverley Glazer:

And you went back to California.

Alx Uttermann:

Again, yes, can I quit California, this time northern? Uh, I had been living in the Santa Cruz Mountains in the redwood forests and like that. So, yes, so we returned. Jonathan and me came back to the hills of California and began doing teaching, healing, helping, helping, helping, helping. We were like country doctors in a way, going around to people's homes and making house calls and assessing their situation and you know, giving them healing energies, experiences, and teaching them how to meditate really effectively. And I it was it was pretty wild, actually. And then we kind of built a community. Or I should say a community got built around us. It wasn't, it just sort of started happening.

Beverley Glazer:

And you describe yourself as a healer's healer. What do you mean by that?

Alx Uttermann:

You know, there are what I saw as a Reiki practitioner, for example, was that there are all kinds of healing modalities out there, and all of them are valid. And this is including, by the way, Western medicine, including natural medicines like acupuncture, uh, homeopathy, naturopathy, and so on. Um, a lot of healers across the board get stuck at certain places and also, so there are certain things that are put in front of them that they they don't know how to address, or they can't get a successful resolution of something. This is natural in every discipline. Um, so the information and the techniques that we got from India are pretty comprehensive and really help fill in the gaps or support an existing healing process for somebody through an incredibly out-of-the-box, supernatural and miracle angle. So that's one thing. But the other thing is that healers themselves tend to get burned out, exhausted, overwhelmed. Um, they start to pick up the energy of the people that they're treating. Again, this is across the board. This is Western medical as well as natural healing, as well as energy healers. Um, over time, people absorb the pain and suffering of the patients and the clients. And that starts to build up in ways that are unpleasant in the human system, can lead to burnout, PTSD, a lot of either mental health issues or um physical or both. So I have techniques that address that and help healers, regardless of discipline, be way more effective at what they do. Because they can do like a daily sort of um, you know, like brushing your teeth. You don't want the plaque to build up and then get a nasty lecture in six months from the hygienist. Yeah. Energetically, it's very similar. You we can't function at full force if we're carrying, you know, days and weeks and months worth of the pain and suffering of the people who came to us for healing. So basically, I teach healers how to be better at what they do.

Beverley Glazer:

And if after all the loss and transformation that you've gone through, what practices keep you grounded?

Alx Uttermann:

I do go to Disneyland a lot. Oh, yeah, seriously, my mental health practice, like I grab my guy and we head down to Disneyland. I live, I should say, 45 minutes from the park. So that's just kind of a gimme. Um, but in seriousness, you know, I meditate, I do healing and service work. And to me, that's the the essence of everything is not thinking so much about myself and my own issues or my own dramas or my own agendas. It's more like people come in front of me and they are so hurting. How can I help? And for me, that's the ongoing practice of staying. You know, I had a lot of experiences in India that are really divine and so far out that describing them sounds a little crazy, really high, high consciousness experiences. That's great. But what's practical in this world is taking care of other people. And so to stay real and to stay authentic and to stay um out of egoism and in a very clear perspective, you know, like just to remind everybody, you know, each of us is an individual spark of the great light, let's say. An individual spark's pretty small. We're like a giant little, a little peanut in a huge ocean of the universe. It's good to hold that perspective, no matter how powerful you may be. And so for me, this the ongoing reality is to stay super grounded, super humble, just like my nose down, do the work and take care of whoever comes in front of me.

Beverley Glazer:

Beautifully said. What would you tell a woman who may be feeling kind of beaten and they're listening to this and they are unsure of their own path? What would you tell the nods?

Alx Uttermann:

Wow, that's how much time do we have? Um I would say no one is hopeless, no one is beyond hope. No matter how broken we might feel that we are, there are ways to come up out of that. And each of us is carrying something so holy inside. We can trust that. We can hang on to that and we can develop that. So it may be something as simple as getting support from people who care about you. It may be something as simple as reaching out online for support if there aren't people in your immediate vicinity who appear to care about you. Um, it might be picking up a meditation practice, it might be finding a really good therapist, it might be we at the end of the day, I feel that we all need each other hugely. Nobody does it alone. And I feel like our society in the West, especially, is geared toward you have to be a superwoman or else there's something wrong with you. And yet, what I've observed in my life and the lives of many powerful women that I've come in contact with, it takes us a network of the sisterhood to bring everybody up together. It's a myth that we can do it on our own and we shouldn't think like that. And so we shouldn't feel less than if somehow we didn't find the magic key that unlocked the door that made us a superwoman. It's just ridiculous.

Beverley Glazer:

Thank you. Thank you. Alex Uttermann is a global spiritual leader, a healer, and a teacher with over 20 years of experience guiding people to transform their suffering into strength. After five years of intensive spiritual study in India, she co-founded the nonprofit The Universal Church of Baba's Kitchen, dedicated to healing, meditation, and humanitarian service. Alex is known as a healer's healer, helping people dissolve the roots of trauma and reconnect with resilience, purpose, and joy. Here are a few takeaways from this episode. Healing begins when you stop running from your past. Service to others helps you heal yourself. And trauma can become a doorway to purpose, not just pain. If you've been relating to this episode, here are some few quick actions that you could take right now. Name one thing that could have broken you, but you survived. I want you to honor that with one small act of service that you can do, not because you should, but because you want to. And appreciate the lessons and the strength you've gained by all that you've carried, and reach out to others. For similar episodes on healing and reinvention, check out episodes 133 and 137 of Aging with Purpose and Passion. And if you like the podcast for women in midlife and beyond, the Late Bloomer Living Podcast is your weekly invitation to embrace change, spark joy, and live playfully at any age. Yvonne Marchez chats with inspiring guests who share practical real-world tips. And that link is in the show notes below. And so, Alex, where can people find more about you? Please share your links in case people want to get in touch with you. What are they?

Alx Uttermann:

So there are two. One is the set of tools that help healers of all walks and service uh occupation professionals and helping professions like school teaching or customer service or hospitality, um, do a daily sort of washout very quickly of stress and strain so that it doesn't build up to burnout. That website is energeticsofselfcare.com. And the second my day job is uh the Universal Church of Baba's Kitchen, as stated, which is you know a healing and training uh legally a church, but our our mission is to help. And that is UCBK.org.

Beverley Glazer:

Okay. And those links are in the show notes and on my site too. That's reinvent itpossible.com. And so, my friends, what's next for you? Are you just going through the motions or are you living the life that you truly love? Get my free guide to go from stuck to unstoppable. And where do you think that is? That's in the show notes below. You can connect with me, Beverly Glazer, on all social media platforms and in my positive group of women on Facebook. That's Women Over50 Rock. And thank you for listening. Have you enjoyed this conversation? Please subscribe and help us spread the word by dropping a review and sending it to a friend. And remember, you only have one life. So live it with purpose and passion.

Announcer:

Thank you for joining us. You can connect with Bev on her website, reinventimpossible.com. And while you're there, join our newsletter. Subscribe so you don't miss an episode. Until next time, keep aging with purpose and passion. And celebrate life.

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