With the expert aid of a wonderful support team, we have been updating, revising and reformatting our East West Herb Course for nine years now – NINE YEARS!!! The first half was completed in 2011 but then a few years filled with a birth and several deaths followed. The last two and a half years we have worked on the materia medica portion and now the entire course is complete. This is the reason my blogs have been so sparse this last year! I hope you don’t mind if I brag a bit – but we are one of the first original distance-learning courses in herbalism! I first met Michael when he was writing lesson 2 and 37 years later, we have 36 lessons, nearly 2200 pages, well over 600 herbs, 264 formulas, 944 health conditions, plus much, much more. We are not only one of the first distance-learning herb courses but also THE first and only one that teaches Planetary Herbology.

Here are just some of the additions in this newest version of the course:

• Beautiful new formatting of the materia medica with generous margins for personal comments and notes
• Comparisons of herbs in each of the 44 herbal categories covered, helping the reader decide when to choose what herb over another for a given condition to best match a person’s needs
• Extensive and comprehensive indexes that make the course an incredibly useful and valuable clinical manual, including herbs by common, Latin, Chinese and other names, a large formula index, and a huge general index
• Hundreds of additional tables, figures, recipes, charts, boxes, and important notes covering related information and the authors’ personal and clinical experiences

Of course none of this mentions our already in-place and much-used student forum, four different levels of monthly chats, regular webinars, annual hands-on seminars, incredible faculty, lesson-graders and mentors, some of the most prominent herbalists today as our graduates, and the best ever student body. Together we truly form the East West Family!

So what’s next for the East West School of Planetary Herbology?

A completely new website will be up and running before the end of this year; a clinical manual is in the works for our students;  online lessons will be available in the near future; and more webinars, personal videos and more is to come. I must give thanks to the incredible team who helped generate this new course: of course Michael Tierra for his research and deep herbal knowledge; Anne de Courtenay for her unflagging editing and formatting genius (she’s the one who gave birth!); Pamela Shaw, Holly Hutton and Kristi Shapla for their creative re-writing of the lesson tests; Frances Buran for her incredible indexing and proofing skills; and of course all of you who have studied the lessons over the last almost four decades for your comments and input. Together we keep making our course and school better and better!