My life’s work is rooted in my desire to share what I have learned from the ancient Chinese classics with dedicated practitioners and students of Chinese medicine. I have spent my entire adult life immersed in these teachings and have been profoundly affected by them. I am convinced that they offer powerful and elegant answers to many of the problems facing us today and can assist all of us in our healing work, as we strive to create harmony between Heaven and Earth.

The vision that I am manifesting here originated on a biodynamic orchard and goat farm two decade ago, where I learned about fertility, irrigating, and the importance of going beyond sustainability to restorative agriculture, by working my right brain and my the left brain, my body, my heart, my spirit, and my soul to produce the best goat cheese west of the Mississippi, as my daughter proclaimed once.

Building on my previous language training in my native Germany in Latin, Greek, Japanese, English, and French, and then two years of studying modern and classical Chinese in Taiwan, I spent two years collaborating closely with Nigel Wiseman, as senior editor at Redwing Books. This work initiated me into the art of producing top-quality translations of Chinese medical texts for a Western clinical audience in a professional context, a skill that I have refined in dozens of publications on texts from early to late Imperial China ever since. During this time, Nigel and I also exchanged thousands of emails exploring how to teach Western practitioners to read the Chinese medical literature, as we were keenly aware that translations could always only scratch the surface of this treasure trove of clinical information.

Those discussions finally took shape concretely when I taught in the Classical Texts program at the National University of Natural Medicine in Portland, Oregon. As the head of the classical texts committee, which became the core of the clinical doctorate, I had the honor of exploring the challenges and joys, limitations and possibilities of this wild enterprise with a group of outstanding academic colleagues: Dr. Long Rihui, Dr. Brenda Hood, Dr. Joon-hee Lee, and Jim Cleaver. With their assistance and on the basis of more than a century of university teaching, clinical practice, and academic research between us, I developed an intentional, rigorous, and systematic curriculum for a three-year series of classes to teach clinically oriented students, mostly with no prior background in Chinese, how to read the ancient medical texts with a solid foundation in grammar.

This was something that had never been attempted anywhere else in the world. And yet, by the time Dr. Long and I got to teach the third year of Neijing Studies to the first round of students who had been through the whole new curriculum, the results were undeniable. It was a magical time and place, with a magical constellation of colleagues and students.

Now you can join me in recreating that magic online…