When I was five, my doctor recommended ballet to help with the rotation in my hips. I started dancing and never stopped.

I was lucky. My parents helped start a small civic ballet company, and principal dancers from New York City Ballet, Royal Danish Ballet, Boston Ballet and San Francisco Ballet came to dance the lead roles. We danced right alongside them. I was a ballet bunhead through and through.

I studied dance at the University of Colorado Boulder, and at 22 I began teaching at the Atlanta Ballet — everyone from three-year-olds to adults taking their very first ballet class.

Years later, when my dad was sick, I spent a year and a half driving back and forth to Santa Fe. There was no ballet class there, but there was Nia, a practice that blends dance, martial arts and mindfulness. I took a class every time I went down. Nia helped me let go of the control of ballet and let emotion move through my body. Moving was how I got through that time. [Leslie's call whether this paragraph stays.]

I became a certified Nia teacher in [2015] and taught for five years. Teaching Nia meant cueing people to sense their hips, their elbows, their shoulders, their chest, class after class. Somewhere in those years I started calling myself a sensation scientist, and it stuck.

Since then I have become a certified yoga teacher, trained in self-myofascial release, and learned to guide breathwork, meditation and contrast therapy in the sauna and cold plunge. Each of these methods gave me another way to help someone feel what is happening in their own body.

What lights me up is the moment someone moves and says, "Oh, that feels good." It might be a person who has sat at a desk for years, or someone who runs at full speed all day and rarely gets to come down, or someone managing a chronic health issue. Helping someone find that joy in their body, sometimes for the first time, is why I do this work.

Today I work privately with a small number of clients, in person in the Denver area and online. I also teach a few group classes each week, because I love them.

Before movement became my full-time work, I spent 15 years in strategic communications, including at the Colorado Health Foundation. I know what a full calendar - and modern life - asks of a person.