Esther Gutiérrez Sloan shares about her Nature and Rhythm classes.

Esther Gutiérrez Sloan was four years old when she started dancing in Colombia. She was twelve when her family moved to the United States, carrying that rhythm with her the whole way. Decades later, standing beside the water at the Chicago Botanic Garden as a fitness instructor, she’s sharing her love of dance with anyone willing to take a step.

A recent recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Fitness Hall of Fame, Esther has created something special over her 38-year career. She’ll teach you the cha-cha, the salsa, the merengue—”backward, forward, sideways, upside down”—but once you have the basics, she invites you to make it yours.

“It’s not that you’re learning choreography. You’re learning to feel the rhythm in yourself,” says Esther. “It’s your recipe. You already have the ingredients—your body, your emotion—and you use them.” That’s the philosophy of her signature SALSArobics^®.

For Esther, music is a living, cultural experience rather than a soundtrack to a workout. While the fitness industry cycles through trends, she’s quick to point out culture is not a phase. “A cha-cha rhythm is not going to go out of style,” she says. “Our music, the traditional music, never goes out of style.”

She calls the garden “a safe place” for people to move without self-consciousness. It’s a place people already love, the way they love a song. And just as we connect with nature on a deep level, so too does music activate a core part of what it means to be human. “When someone says ‘I have two left feet,’ I put on a song and say, ‘You walked here with those two left feet. Walk to the beat,’” says Esther. “It’s already inside us. It’s intrinsic.”

That welcome extends to the workout itself, adjusted for whoever shows up. “You can do the music at half the tempo. You can do it at the tempo. You can double the tempo. And if you want to get athletic with it, you can dance-jog!”

And then there’s the joy of it. Esther often teaches her Nature and Rhythm classes in the outdoors of the Garden itself. People passing by stop and take videos. Toddlers jump out of strollers to join in. She once taught a class while a 70th birthday party took place in the garden next door. “The party ended up dancing with us,” Esther laughs, “grandmother with her seven-year-old granddaughter and the whole family.”