Conscious Combat and the window of tolerance
Conscious Combat and the window of tolerance
By teaching combat in a conscious way, guided by trauma-informed principles, we aim to help people expand their window of tolerance.
Your window of tolerance is your capacity for resilience. It’s a state of being where we can think rationally and make decisions based on multiple pieces of information. We all have a window of tolerance, and we all exit it sometimes. Have you ever been so upset that being told to ‘calm down’ makes you angrier? That’s hyperarousal and it happens when we step outside our window of tolerance.
On the flip side, when faced with a danger we can freeze or dissociate from our bodies. Repeatedly numbing as a safety response is known as hypoarousal and can become a learned behaviour used whenever we exit our window of tolerance.
Trauma and our window of tolerance
Sometimes, after experiencing trauma our window of tolerance shrinks, and things that weren’t triggers before, now send our nervous system into overdrive. In the case of childhood trauma, our window was narrowed early on in life and we may never have known any other way of responding to triggers.
Expanding your window of tolerance
One of the keys to expanding your window of tolerance is being conscious of the physical sensations your body expresses right before you exit your window. This could feel like:
- Tightness in your chest
- A knot in your stomach
- Tingling in your fingers
If we ignore these feelings, our brain will assign an emotion to them such as “anxiety” and each time we experience that same trigger our brain will tell us to feel anxious. At Conscious Combat Club, we work on expanding our window of tolerance by recognising these feelings and working through them in three ways:
Being Present
We help you focus on how your body feels while kickboxing, enabling a meditative experience without sitting and meditating.
Choice
All exercises are invitational and everyone can choose what they do and don’t want to participate in.
Interoception
We invite you to notice what is happening in your bodies during the exercises, and how your body wants to respond.
At Conscious Combat Club, we find strength in vulnerability and support each other to grow — not just our window of tolerance, but ourselves.
Who are we
Meet the women behind the Conscious Combat Club. We think our team is pretty spectacular!
Meet them
A safe space for women living with trauma to reclaim their body, confidence and strength through trauma informed martial arts
We acknowledge and pay respect to the Traditional Custodians of the lands on which we work, live and play. Always was, always will be Aboriginal Land.
