It’s the pause that matters
Shane Saunders is a breathwork teacher on the Gold Coast of Australia who, with his partner Angelina Saunders, has spent years on a question most of us never ask: not how much we breathe, but how. Marek and Aleksander filmed a session with them in January 2024 — and where Angelina opens with awareness, Shane goes to the physiology.
His starting point is where breathing sits in the hierarchy of survival. You can go weeks without food, days without water — but only minutes without breath. That makes it the most fundamental of Longevity Basics, and the one we abuse most, because modern, high-stress life quietly teaches us to over-breathe.
The heart of Shane’s message is counter-intuitive: the magic isn’t in the big inhale, it’s in the pause — the small, natural space after you breathe out. That pause is where CO₂ rebalances, and CO₂ is what lets oxygen actually cross from your blood into your cells. Breathe too fast, blow off too much CO₂, and paradoxically less oxygen reaches the body. Learn to sit in the pause and the whole exchange becomes more efficient.
From there he goes further — into hormetic stress and altered states: circular breathing that drives CO₂ down on purpose, as a controlled dose, and can even reopen memory and emotion the body had learned to breathe around. Deep science, taught simply, and free to anyone with a few minutes a day.
