Our Teachings &
The Questions that Guide Us
The Dharma Academy is dedicated to offering an accessible path, a supportive community, and a digital environment for seekers to develop the human potential for happiness, wisdom, and compassion. Our methods are grounded in the cultivation of stillness, embodied mindfulness, and the innumerable lessons to be learned from everyday life.
The teachings we are drawing from have evolved in response to three timeless questions that echo through human history:
- What is suffering and how can we be free from it?
- How can we cultivate clarity, insight, and reliable ways of knowing?
- How can we live ethically and naturally respond to our circumstances in beneficial ways?
As a Dharma Academy student, you will learn how to explore, live, and grow within these questions in the context of your daily life.
These existential questions are not just personal—they arise from our very nature as a species, shaped by biology and evolution, inseparable from the fabric of the human condition. They have been asked by those who came before us and will be asked by those who follow. These questions are especially relevant in our world today.
We believe, as humans, we can be happy, wise, and compassionate.
Engaging these questions skillfully and with subtle instruction will awaken and ripen our human potential - and responsibility. The Dharma Academy offers a supportive community, a flexible curriculum, and a digital environment to create a space for you to flourish: wherever you are, with others, and under the guidance of exceptional teachers.
A Path for Seekers
We offer a path for seekers who cherish intellectual precision, open-mindedness, and the possibility of embodied spiritual transformation. We are dedicated to creating a space in which views can be opened and compassionately shaped in relationship to the pressing global and societal challenges of our time.
On your path with the Dharma Academy, you will discover how to:
- reveal, release, and reform cultural and biographical patterns that contribute to suffering
- inhabit your experience not as fixed, but as fluid and capable of profound change
- live within the immediacy of sensorial aliveness
- engage your everyday life and the world itself as your teacher
- shift your primary sense of identity from your personal perspective as a human being to your more fundamental nature as a sentient being
Meet the Main teachers
Our founders and dedicated teaching team at the Dharma Aacademy.
Tatsudo Nicole Baden Roshi
Abbot of Dharma Sangha &
Founder of the Dharma Academy
Nicole Baden Roshi is a Dharma heir of Zentatsu Baker Roshi and has practiced with the Dharma Sangha since 2001. She holds a background in psychology and somatic work, and trained for several years at the Crestone Mountain Zen Center. In 2024, she formally stepped into the role of Abbot and now guides the spiritual direction of the Dharma Sangha and the Dharma Academy.
Ryuten Paul Rosenblum Roshi
Vice Abbot of Dharma Sangha
Ryuten Paul Rosenblum Roshi began practicing with Shunryu Suzuki Roshi in 1968 and is a Dharma heir of Zentatsu Baker Roshi. He serves as Vice Abbot of the Zen Buddhist Center Black Forest and leads seminars in Germany, Austria, and beyond. He lives in California and continues to support the international Sangha with teaching and presence.
Zentatsu Richard Baker Roshi
Founder of Dharma Sangha &
Teacher at the Dharma Academy
Zentatsu Baker Roshi is a Dharma heir of Shunryu Suzuki Roshi. He founded the Zen centers in Crestone (USA) and the Black Forest (Germany), and has been teaching for over five decades. Today, he continues to guide students both in person and online — most recently through his weekly online format WeeklyZen.
Sarabinh Levy-Brightman
Educator and Workshop Consultant
Sarabinh Levy-Brightman is a university educator and curriculum developer with a focus on religious literacy and transformative education. Closely affiliated with Harvard Divinity School, she has worked with Harvard’s Religion and Public Life initiative since 2016. Her teaching bridges intellect, imagination, and embodiment — making her work deeply resonant with the Dharma Academy’s vision of learning as shared inquiry.
Meet the Core Team
The people behind the scenes, helping to bring the teachings to you.
Zuzu
Zuzu Myers holds a degree in Religious Studies from Reed College. Having lived and practiced at San Francisco Zen Center, she received jukai from Jiryu Rutschman-Baylor in 2022 and joined the Dharma Sangha in 2025.
Micha
Michaela Schultz is a Leipzig-based designer and educational architect working at the intersection of digital media, contemplative practice, and community building. At the Dharma Academy, she shapes spaces, content, and structures for meaningful learning and shared inquiry.
Lea
Lea Dinger graduated with a BA Intermedia in 2020 and has been working in the field of film and media education for several years. She is currently studying “Media Arts” at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne. Lea has been practicing with the Dharma Sangha since 2020 and has been working in media production and online course support for three years.
Valerian
Kosan Valerian Hauffe began practicing Zen in 2003 and practiced at the San Francisco Zen Center for about ten years. In Göttingen, he studied Indology and Religious Studies with a focus on Buddhism and Hinduism. In March 2021, he was ordained as a Zen priest by Tenshin Reb Anderson Roshi. Since 2024 he is practicing and working with the Dharma Sangha.
Jonas
Web Designer & Marketing Mind behind the Dharma Academy.
Jonas turns vision into a clear, beautiful, and aligned online presence. With a feel for design, language, and strategy, he brings the essence of the Dharma Academy into the digital space – authentic, high-quality, and approachable. His goal: to let people feel what this is truly about from the very first moment.
Connecting with living tradition
Dharma Sangha
Practice Centers
The Dharma Academy works with the two established Zen Buddhist practice centers of the Dharma Sangha.
All three centers - ZBZS, CMZC and the Dharma Academy - are deeply rooted in Zen Buddhism and make this path accessible to practitioners around the world - whether in a physical location or in the digital space.
Crestone Mountain
Zen Center
The Crestone Mountain Zen Center (CMZC) is the center of the Dharma Sangha in the USA, located in Crestone, Colorado. As a monastic place of silence, like ZBZS, it offers traditional formats, seminars, individual retreats and live online lectures to deepen the practice and integrate it into everyday life.
Zen Buddhist Center
Black Forest
The Zen Buddhist Center Black Forest (ZBZS) is the European practice center of the Dharma Sangha in Germany. Meditation, mindfulness, wisdom and compassion are lived and taught here in a practice that can be both suitable for everyday life and monastic. ZBZS is open to everyone, regardless of experience or qualifications.
