Q3 Calendar and Overview

Q3: Tending the Flame

The Heart Quarter  ·  Summer through Autumn ·  Circulation & Connection

Fire, Circulation & the Reproductive Heart

Summer into Autumn, the Heart takes center stage. This quarter gives practitioners a clinical map for the axis linking emotional state, circulation, and the reproductive cycle — and the herbal strategy to treat it safely.

Quarter Overview

Every reproductive cycle runs on more than hormones — it runs on Fire. Q3 explores how the Heart governs circulation, warmth, and Shen, and how that governance shows up clinically in two critical axes: the Heart–Uterus connection that ties mood to the menstrual cycle, and the Heart–Kidney (Shao Yin) axis that unifies the entire neuroendocrine system. You’ll leave with a repeatable method for reading heat, rhythm, and Shen disturbance in your fertility and reproductive patients — and the herbal formulas to treat what you find.

Q3 turns to the Heart. Where Q2 built and held the substrate through the Spleen, Q3 asks what animates it — circulation, warmth, and Shen. The Heart governs the vessels and houses the Shen, and in reproductive medicine it sits at the top of two axes at once: the Heart–Uterus connection (the Bao Mai) that ties emotional state to the cycle, and the Heart–Kidney (Shao Yin) axis that integrates the neuroendocrine system as a whole. This is the quarter of Fire — how to keep it circulating without letting it flare, how to cool heat without extinguishing the warmth conception requires.

Q3 also completes the second confluence pair of the Axis-Confluence Framework named in Month 6. If Q1 (Jue Yin) and Q2 (Tai Yin) were the first two confluences, Q3 is where Shao Yin — the master neuroendocrine axis — comes into view, setting up the Yang axes of Q4.

What You'll Master

Month 7 — The Heart–Uterus Connection

Learn to differentiate Heart Fire, Blood heat, and empty heat as distinct drivers of cycle disruption, ovulation problems, and implantation failure — and why clearing heat too aggressively can backfire in a fertility patient.

Month 8 — Shen, Sleep & Hormonal Rhythm

Map the Heart’s role in circadian regulation and the cortisol–melatonin relationship, and learn to settle an anxious, sleepless Shen without over-sedating your patient.

Month 9 — Shao Yin, the Master Neuroendocrine Axis

See how Heart and Kidney — Fire and Water — integrate the HPA, HPG, and HPT systems into one axis, with a signature point protocol you can use the same week.

Herbal Intensive — Cooling Blood, Calming Shen

A dedicated capstone module on formula strategy for the Fire quarter: nourishing Heart and Liver Blood, reconnecting Fire and Water, and cooling the blood safely across the cycle.

Course Details

• Format: 3 live Core Lectures + Grand Rounds, plus a quarterly Herbal module
• Core Track: 12 CEU
• Complete Track: 16 CEU (includes Herbal Intensive)
• Attendance: Core Lectures available asynchronously; Grand Rounds require live attendance for CEU credit

The quarter at a glance

Core Track: 12 CEU  ·  Complete Track: 16 CEU (adds the quarterly Herbal module)

Live attendance preferred for Grand Rounds; asynchronous CEU credit is always available for Core Lectures and Grand Rounds.

Inside the Heart quarter.

MONTH 7 

Core Lecture: Sunday, October 4  ·  9:00–11:00 AM Pacific  |  Grand Rounds: Monday, October 5  ·  4:00–6:00 PM Pacific

4 CEU

Month 7 opens the Fire quarter with the Heart's most direct reproductive relationship — the Bao Mai, the vessel that connects Heart to Uterus. When the Heart is disturbed, the cycle knows it. The lecture builds the biomedical correlate: how psychological stress, inflammation, and autonomic tone reach the endometrium and the follicle, and why cooling heat in a fertility patient is rarely as simple as clearing Fire.

Core Lecture — Focus

• The Bao Mai and Bao Luo: the Heart–Uterus and Kidney–Uterus vessels, and what they govern clinically.
• Heart Fire, Blood heat, and empty heat: differentiating the heat patterns that disrupt the cycle, ovulation, and implantation.
• The biomedical correlate: inflammation, cytokine signaling, and autonomic arousal at the endometrium and follicle — heat as a functional, not only symptomatic, category.
• Cooling without extinguishing: why aggressive heat-clearing can suppress the warmth conception requires, and how to hold the line.
• Emotional expression and the cycle: Shen disturbance as a reproductive variable, not a footnote.

Grand Rounds — Focus

• De-identified cases where heat or inflammation — not deficiency — was the obstacle, and reasonable tonifying plans stalled.
• Reading blood heat vs. empty heat vs. inflammatory heat in the fertility patient.
• Markers in context: inflammatory markers, luteal-phase symptoms, and cycle signs that point to a Fire pattern.
• When to cool, when to circulate, and when the heat is protecting something underneath.

MONTH 8 

Core Lecture: Sunday, October 18  ·  9:00–11:00 AM Pacific  |  Grand Rounds: Monday, October 26  ·  4:00–6:00 PM Pacific

4 CEU

Core Lecture — Focus

• Shen as rhythm: the Heart's role in circadian regulation and the sleep–hormone relationship.
• Cortisol and melatonin as the biomedical language of Shen disturbance; HPA rhythm and its reproductive consequences.
• Sleep architecture and fertility: why disrupted sleep is a reproductive problem, not only a quality-of-life one.
• Joy without mania: Fire in balance vs. Fire uprooted — insomnia, anxiety, palpitations, and the empty-heat presentations that mimic excess.
• Settling the Shen without sedating the patient into deficiency: point selection and pattern reasoning.

Grand Rounds — Focus

• Cases where anxiety, insomnia, or dysregulated rhythm was the primary reproductive obstacle.
• Distinguishing Shen disturbance from a primary mood disorder — and when to co-manage.
• Cortisol rhythm and melatonin: what to ask, what to test, what to refer.
• Collaboration with mental-health providers: scope, language, and the referral that protects the patient.

MONTH 9  ·  THE AXIS-CONFLUENCE FRAMEWORK

Core Lecture: Sunday, November 15  ·  9:00–11:00 AM Pacific  |  Grand Rounds: Monday, November 16  ·  4:00–6:00 PM Pacific

4 CEU  ·  The conceptual centerpiece of the year

Month 9 names the architecture beneath the Fire quarter. Shao Yin — the Heart–Kidney confluence — is the master neuroendocrine axis: the deepest level of physiological communication in the body, where Fire and Water, above and below, ascending and descending, meet. In biomedical terms this is the HPA, HPG, and HPT axes operating as a single integrated system, with the hypothalamus and pituitary as Kidney-Marrow substrate executing the Heart's directive. Mirroring Month 6, the lecture reveals that the Heart work of this quarter has been Shao Yin all along.

Core Lecture — Focus

• Shao Yin as the constitutional axis beneath anovulation, luteal insufficiency, perimenopausal collapse, and thyroid–adrenal–gonadal cross-talk.
• Fire and Water: the Heart–Kidney relationship as the integrating principle of the neuroendocrine system.
• HPA, HPG, and HPT as one system: the hypothalamus and pituitary as Kidney-Marrow substrate executing the Heart's directive.
• Chong Mai and Yin Wei Mai as the extraordinary vessel anchors — Chong as the cross-confluence integrator, accessed along the KD 13–21 line; the Pericardium–San Jiao ministerial-fire pair bridging Jing to Shen via Ming Men.
• SP 4 + PC 6 as the master neuroendocrine prescription: why the pair functions as a systemic intervention across the endocrine cascade.

Grand Rounds — Focus

• Applying the Shao Yin lens to de-identified cases spanning more than one endocrine axis.
• Recognizing when a reproductive problem is a whole-axis problem — and treating the axis rather than the symptom.
• Translating the framework for other providers: the biomedical correlate that makes the referral or co-management legible.
• Practicing the axis as a diagnostic habit heading into Q4's Yang axes.

HERBAL CEU  ·  Complete Track

Sunday, December 6  ·  9:00 AM – 1:00 PM Pacific

4 CEU  ·  Complete Track only

The Fire-quarter herbal capstone takes up the central clinical problem of the Heart quarter: how to cool heat and settle the Shen without draining the warmth and Blood the cycle depends on. The Heart formula families receive dedicated treatment, and the cooling-Blood strategy is stitched into cycle-aware sequencing.

Focus

• The Tian Wang Bu Xin Dan, Gui Pi Tang, and Suan Zao Ren Tang families for nourishing Heart and Liver Blood, calming the Shen, and resolving deficiency insomnia — carrying the Heart–Spleen line back to Q2 and tying directly to the Month 8 sleep material.
• Jiao Tai Wan and the Fire–Water reconnection: restoring Heart–Kidney communication in Shao Yin patterns.
• Cooling the Blood without cooling the uterus: heat-clearing and blood-heat strategy for the cycle — menorrhagia, luteal heat, inflammatory presentations.
• Safety in Shen-calming and heat-clearing herbs: cold, bitter, and heavy sedating substances in the fertility patient, and how to modify across the cycle.

The Q3 Through-Line

Q3 does not only teach Heart content — it asks practitioners to tend the flame: to keep Fire circulating without letting it consume, to settle the Shen without deadening it, to cool heat without putting out the warmth conception needs. The quarter moves from the Heart–Uterus connection (Month 7) to the Heart's rhythm (Month 8) to naming the axis beneath both (Month 9), closing with the herbal strategy that makes cooling sustainable.

By the end of Q3, practitioners carry a clinical method for reading Fire patterns in reproduction, a working understanding of Shen and rhythm as reproductive variables, and — through Shao Yin — the neuroendocrine axis that reorganizes the Heart quarter and opens the ground for the Kidney quarter and the Yang axes ahead.

Your Instructor

Dr. Laura Erlich, DTCM, LAc, FABORM, teaching in partnership with Yo San University. Licensed by the California Acupuncture Board, NCCAOM, and ABORM.

— Yin Learning for Yang Times —

CEU credit issued through Yo San University, our CEU partner. Yo San University is not affiliated with the development, content, or instruction of the Yinstitute curriculum.

CA Acupuncture Board (No. 0128)  ·  NCCAOM (No. 169556)  ·  ABORM (No. YO18)