John S. O'Hearne

John Stephen O'Hearne, 69, of Boulder County, Colorado, passed away peacefully on July 9, 2025 after a courageous battle with illness. He was born to John Joseph O’Hearne Jr, MD and Lillian (Plattner) O’Hearne, MD on January 30, 1956 in Kansas City, Missouri.

He attended Pembroke Country Day School for boys in Kansas City until 8th grade. In sixth grade, he was teamed up with the future head of Hallmark Cards, Don Hall and and another classmate, Bill Berkeley, to prepare a science fair project on Malaria, revealing his early interest in medicine. They proudly took second place. John continued at Shawnee Mission East High School, in Kansas City.

Graduating from high school in 1974, he ended with more than 45 hours of college credit. He entered the University of Missouri Medical School in Kansas City, just one of two universities in the nation that had a joint undergraduate and medical school combined into a six year program. John graduated in the top 90 percentile of his class and had over 220 college credits. Of the 750 applicants applying for residency John was one of only 25 people be accepted into the program at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. He was the youngest resident to complete residency in 1983.

John proceeded with two years of work in emergency medicine at Trinity Lutheran Hospital, Kansas City, Missouri. During this time he attended two international conferences on holistic medicine. He met Dr Rudolph Ballentine who encouraged John to attend the Himalayan Institute of Yoga Science and philosophy at Honesdale, Pennsylvania. He studied Diet and Nutrition, Ayurvedic Medicine, Yoga Meditation, and Psychosomatic Medicine. When first arriving at the institute Swami Rama remembered John from a crowd of over 2,000 people at one of the conferences. This encounter led him to grow deeper in the knowledge of Yoga Meditation.

While working at the hospital in NYC John met De Marie and they married in 1991. They had two children, Nicole and Michael and moved from Pennsylvania to Colorado. They were divorced in 1999.

John worked for Avista Hospital for about a year and then moved into private medicine. He went to India to participate in the Kumbh Mela, a religious event that brings as much as 30,000,000 people for ritual washing in the Ganges in India for the renew of life. This was also the time of the first teaching of Swami Veda, the student of Swami Rama. He would return to this event again.

John met Nuzhat in Boulder, Colorado and they were married in 2007. Their son, Alexander, was born in 2009.

John is certified in Emergency Room Medicine, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Internal Medicine, Sports Medicine, and Homeopathy. He loved the outdoors and he particularly enjoyed skiing, hiking and biking. In 2009 John participated in the “Ride the Rockies” event which covers hundreds of miles and great changes in elevation over a weeks time. John devoted his life to the love and care of family and practice of medicine, leaving behind a legacy of healing and spiritual awareness.