about us
Vital Wave is built by people who genuinely care about people.
We’re a team of nurses and professionals who share a passion for Breathwork, nervous system wellness, education, and community.
We each bring something different to the Wave, but we’re united by our shared mission: to make nervous system wellness accessible to everyone and give people practical tools to reconnect, build resilience, and feel more present in everyday life.
Because wellness is for real life.
The Faces of Vital Wave
Yvonne Karolski
After more than 30 years as a Registered Nurse, Yvonne has witnessed firsthand the physical and emotional impact of stress, burnout, long hours, and compassion fatigue that come with caring for others. After years of putting everyone else first, she found herself struggling with chronic stress, poor sleep, and chronic pain that had become part of her everyday life.
Her journey led her to a multi-dimensional breathwork and education program where she experienced the shift she had been searching for. Through consistent breathwork practice, she began to experience meaningful changes in her sleep, stress, and relationship with her body. This experience became the inspiration for Vital Wave and her passion for helping others discover their own capacity for resilience and well-being.
For Yvonne, Vital Wave is more than a business—it is her purpose. She is passionate about walking alongside people through grief and loss, life transitions, anxiety, and the emotional weight we all carry. She especially loves working with those whose nervous systems feel constantly “on”—wired, overwhelmed, and unable to truly turn off.
Yvonne is passionate about the Wave Foundations and Wave Mastery programs, helping people build a strong foundation in breathwork and nervous-system education before taking a deeper dive into their own patterns, experiences, and the areas of life they are ready to explore.
She would be honored to walk alongside you, help you reconnect with yourself, and find your wave.
Jillian Koehler
As a pediatric Registered Nurse, graduate student, and first responder wife, she brings both professional and personal experience to her work with Vital Wave. She understands firsthand the unique demands of caring for others, supporting a first responder family, and navigating the many transitions that come with different seasons of life.
Jillian knows what it feels like to live with a nervous system that is constantly “on.” As a student, test anxiety and ADHD have made focus, overwhelm, and the pressure to perform a very real part of her journey. Breathwork became a powerful tool for learning how to slow the noise, regulate her nervous system, reconnect with her body, and approach challenging moments with greater clarity and confidence.
She understands the experience of being in your twenties—a season filled with big changes, new responsibilities, uncertainty, and figuring out who you are and where you’re going. It’s easy to get caught in the cycle of constantly doing, adapting, and pushing through, leaving your nervous system stuck in a constant state of “go, go, go.”
These experiences have shaped her passion for helping others recognize when they’re living in survival mode and giving them practical tools to pause, reconnect, and reset. Jillians is especially passionate about supporting healthcare professionals, first responders, and their families, as well as children and teens.
She is particularly drawn to Shift 2 Shift, youth and family experiences, and energizing breathwork journeys that help people create more clarity, connection, energy, and resilience for whatever life brings next.
She believes that learning how to care for your nervous system is not a luxury—it’s a skill that can change the way you move through life.
Lucas Karolski
Lucas has spent the years leading up to now building real world experience, from long stretches of solo travel across unfamiliar countries to the everyday work of learning how to lead. For six years, he led and trained teams and managed logistics at a small family run company, a role that shaped how he thinks about structure, people, and what it actually takes to run something well.
Along the way, Lucas found himself drawn to anything that helped him slow down and actually reset: saunas, cold plunges, float tanks, guided meditation. What started as curiosity turned into something he genuinely relied on, and he began to notice real changes in how clear his mind felt, how well he slept, and how present he could be in his own body.
At Vital Wave, Lucas leads the financial and operational side of the business, a role shaped by everything he learned leading and building before this. He's the guy behind the scenes making sure things run the way they should, so the facilitators can focus on what they do best.
He's especially passionate about bringing breathwork into spaces where it's rarely talked about, from corporate environments, leadership, athletics, and student life, to young men in general who were never given the tools to slow down. He believes strongly that men's mental health doesn't get the attention it deserves.
Too many young men, athletes, and leaders are taught to perform, push through, and stay silent, when what they actually need are real tools to manage stress and pressure. Lucas is here to help change that, for men everywhere trying to figure out how to carry it all.