Jim Soha
Physician, Life and Wellness Coach, Dad, Daddy and Spiritual Seeker
Born on the rural eastern shore of Maryland, I have always honored the simple and humble roots of my beginning while enjoying the lifelong quest to learn more and to live larger. From an early age, I was captivated by the God questions planted by my the Lutheran Church I attended with my mother, while being intrigued by the bells and smells and mystical sounds of the Catholic Church of my father's family. I've lived the bifurcated life of the child of divorce, as well as the the inner bifurcation of coming to terms with my sexuality which wasn't always accepted within the cultures I was raised. I found refuge in the praise I received from academic pursuits and intellectual spaces, and after getting myself into boarding school outside Baltimore at the age of 13, I was off to a whole new world of multiculturalism and ideas that had not been readily available to my rural upbringing. In college, I found comfort and safety in novels and poetry and majored in English, while my spiritual and intra-personal questions looked for safety in the somewhat black and white world of Christian Evangelicalism. At the end of my senior year at Boston University, I decided that I wanted to spend my life studying religion and medicine, 2 disciplines that I thought would allow me to dive into my intellect while, perhaps, setting aside the questions of the heart that my sexuality was asking of me. After a Master of Divinity degree from Princeton Theological Seminary, I married my female seminary sweetheart and then attended the College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia University in NYC for medical school and my residency was in the adrenaline addicted world of Emergency Medicine. I remained married for 9 years, had 2 children ( a girl and a boy, now 21 and 19 respectively), divorced, and then met the love of my life, a man, with whom I was together for almost 10 years (married for 4 when marriage equality passed) but who died suddenly in 2018, so now a widower. Last year, after almost 20 years of clinical medical practice, I decided to gift myself with a year long sabbatical in order to rest, regenerate and refocus, and to reconnect to the desire to have my lifelong spiritual questing be married to my career path, and I became a Life and Wellness Coach while exploring alternative and complementary medical practices including meditation, yoga, prayer, and plant medicine. I continue to honor my religious history, nut now consider myself a Red Letter Christian Universalist, someone who seeks to live his life based on the words Jesus spoke, and not based primarily the words or theologies constructed around him, while believing that the Love of God is from everlasting to everlasting to all people, in all places, at all times. This belief is informed by a deep affirmation of the dharma, the truth, of all religious and spiritual traditions. I'm currently finishing my sabbatical year, refining my entree back into clinical practice while developing a holistic mindset and goal to reimagine myself as a healed man who seeks to bring healing to the world in whatever way and form I can.
