10 contact hours · 2 weeks · 2 hours of recorded lecture weekly + a 2-hr supplemental live session
This course teaches you how to read what’s happening in the body through the pattern-differentiating lens of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), applied to menstrual and hormonal health — cycle-phase support, PMS, painful periods, amenorrhea, and irregular cycles.
Over two weeks, you’ll learn to see the menstrual cycle the way TCM does: as a monthly conversation between Blood, Qi, Yin, and Yang, moving through distinct phases that each ask for something different. Rather than matching a symptom to a remedy, you’ll learn to read the pattern underneath — is this pain from stagnation or from deficiency, etc.? Two people with the same complaint often need opposite formulas, and this course teaches you how to tell which is which.
No prior TCM knowledge is required. The framework is built from the ground up, so you can start here whether or not you’ve studied Chinese medicine before.
What This Course Covers
- The menstrual cycle as a four-phase rhythm — menstruation, the follicular/post-period rebuild, ovulation, and the premenstrual phase — and what each phase needs to run smoothly
- The major patterns behind the most common complaints: Liver Qi stagnation, Blood stagnation, Blood and Qi deficiency, Spleen and Kidney involvement, and cold or heat in the lower burner
- How those patterns show up as PMS, painful periods (dysmenorrhea), absent periods (amenorrhea), and irregular or unpredictable cycles — and how the same complaint can arise from very different roots
- The materia medica (Western and TCM herbs) most relevant to menstrual and hormonal health, organized around the patterns rather than the symptoms — so you learn not just which herbs fit, but why
- How to read the signs — cycle history, the quality of the flow, the nature of the pain, tongue and other terrain clues — and let them point you to the pattern
- How to build cycle-phase support for a real person rather than following a one-size protocol
Who is this course for?
If you’re navigating your own cycles — PMS that arrives like clockwork, periods that stop you in your tracks, a rhythm that’s gone irregular or absent — and you want herbal support that goes deeper than “try raspberry leaf,” this is for you. If you’re supporting a partner, daughter, or friend and want to actually understand what’s happening beneath the surface, this is also for you. And if you’re an herbalist or student who keeps running into menstrual and hormonal complaints in the people around you and wants a framework that makes sense of them, this course gives you one.
What You’ll Be Able to Do
- Read the menstrual cycle as a phased, moving system rather than a set of isolated symptoms
- Differentiate patterns that look alike on the surface — stagnation versus deficiency, cold versus heat
- Match Western and TCM herbs to a specific pattern rather than a general symptom
- Build cycle-phase support around a real person’s picture instead of a standard protocol
- Recognize when herbal support is the right primary tool, when it works best alongside conventional care, and when conventional care should lead
Prerequisites
No prerequisites required.
Course material does not overlap with content in other Family Herbalist Program courses. It complements the Menopause & Hormonal Transitions course — where that course takes up the story at the end of the reproductive years, this one works with the cycling years themselves — but neither depends on the other, and either can be taken first.
