Charlotte Selver was born in Germany on April 4, 1901. At the age of 19, she became a student of Elsa Gindler in Berlin, and that work transformed her life. In 1938, with the rise to power of Nazism, she moved to the United States, and for more than 75 years she shared the practice of Sensory Awareness with thousands of students around the world. She died on August 22, 2003 at the age of 102.

People such as Erich Fromm, Alan Watts, Paul Reps, Fritz Perls, Richard Baker, Shunryu Suzuki Roshi, Ruth Denison and Zoketsu Norman Fischer participated and collaborated with her in the workshops. When Alan Watts discovered the work of Sensory Awareness, he described it as "Living Zen."

Charlotte Selver was one of the pioneers in introducing the connection of body awareness with psychology and health into her proposals. In 1950 he introduced Sensory Awareness at the New School for Social Research in New York and in 1963 at the Esalen Institute in California.