Craft of Zen · Chapter Three
The Three Worlds
Buddhism describes three worlds of experience rather than one: personal identity, the feeling body, and formless presence. Over three months with Nicole, we explore these three worlds and the ways they inform, limit and open one another.
$199 one-time; supported and supporter prices from $159. No prior chapters or meditation experience needed.
The premise
We tend to assume that we live in one world, and that our task is simply to navigate it more skillfully. Buddhism offers a different view. Instead, it invites us into three distinct worlds of experience, each with its own logic, its own subjectivity, its own sense of what is possible. This is the teaching of the Three Worlds, or Tridhatu, and it is far more practical than it first appears.
A world, in this teaching, is not a physical place. It is the complete pattern of how we perceive, what we take to be real, and what we become within it.
Our experience of ourselves and our experience of the world arise together, the way a fish is shaped by the water it swims in. When experience shifts, new responses become available, and with them, new forms of freedom emerge.
Tridhatu
None of the three worlds is more true than the others. Each offers its own intelligence and its own limitation.
The familiar external world: the realm of personal identity, where “I” meets “other,” where roles, stories, and self-concept organize experience. This is the world most of us live in daily, and the one most available to direct investigation.
A living, sensate dimension that opens once perception is no longer filtered primarily through concepts. Here, experience is felt before it is named. We explore what becomes available when the body is met on its own terms.
Presence without form, awareness without a fixed object. The subtlest of the three worlds and, in a sense, the most ordinary. This is not an escape from the other two worlds, but their ground.
Three months
A journey into the Three Worlds, exploring how our experience of self and world changes depending on where, and how, we perceive from. In the final weeks, we ask what all of this means on an ordinary day.
Entering the Teaching of Tridhatu
The teaching of the Three Worlds is ancient and precise.
This month we will explore how each world works, what holds it together, and how to shift between them. We’ll begin with our ordinary reality: a personal identity in an external world. We'll understand the dynamics of our experience more deeply and explore how experience opens once its grip loosens. By the end of the month, the Three Worlds will no longer be merely a diagram we’ve glanced at, but circuits we can feel ourselves plugging into.
Shifting Your Main Residence
The second world is where the practice actually unfolds.
Perception here is no longer filtered through concept: things are met before they are named, and the situation reveals itself as something we are part of rather than something we face. This month is about moving in — not visiting this world in meditation and leaving it afterwards, but shifting our main residence there. We work with grounding, with the body's center as a new point of reference, and with what becomes possible when the feeling body, rather than the personal identity, is where we live from.
Bringing the Three Worlds Home
Everything depends on whether our understanding persists beyond Monday morning.
In the final month we work in the places where life actually happens — conversations, work, conflict, waiting, tiredness. We do this not by holding on to a state, but by recognizing which world we are in and finding, again and again, that another one is available. Nothing about our circumstances needs to change for this to make a difference.
The calendar
All meetings take place on Sundays at 18:00 CET / 10:00 MT. Live sessions are recorded, with lifetime access. The audio practices are released in the weeks between.
September 27 to December 20. The course ends before the holidays. Registration stays open until the course begins.
What you receive
One live lecture each month. Live lectures are recorded, so you have lifelong access.
Live sessions with Nicole in months one and two, guiding you into the territory of the Three Worlds. In December, a closing session brings the three worlds together.
Short, repeatable audio practices for the time between live sessions, designed to carry that month's teaching into daily life.
A structured guide to go deeper into the teachings between the live sessions.
Online zendos, streamed daily from the centers.
Connect with other participants, share experiences, and start your own practice groups.
Your teacher
A Dharma successor of Zentatsu Richard Baker Roshi, practicing with the Dharma Sangha since 2001.
She studied psychology at the University of Oldenburg until 2009, while simultaneously training in the somatic therapeutic method Body-Mind Centering©. Following her studies, she spent four years at the Crestone Mountain Zen Center in Colorado, USA. Since 2013, she has been active at the Zen Buddhist Center Schwarzwald, moving fluidly between the two centers as part of her ongoing practice and teaching.
Nicole is also the founder and guiding teacher of the Dharma Academy, bringing her vision and experience to its development. In September 2024, she officially succeeded Richard Baker Roshi and has since been serving as Abbot, guiding the spiritual direction of the Dharma Sangha.
Before you decide
Chapter Three works with what happens when perception is no longer filtered through concepts: through this study, the sense of a separate self, an assumption most of us live inside every day, loosens. Practicing in this way can bring about a number of different experiences, states that carry their own momentum and may be hard to step out of. For some people this is freeing. For others it may be frightening, and for someone whose ground is currently unsteady it can be destabilizing.
We want to support you in taking this course at the right time for you. Perhaps that is now, perhaps it is at a later point. There will be options for both.
You don't need experience, you don't need to have taken the earlier chapters, and you don't need to be good at meditating. There is no application. The course asks for reasonably solid ground under your feet at the moment, because it deliberately loosens the usual sense of who you are.
You are in an acute crisis; you are in the middle of therapeutic work that needs you steady; intensive meditation has previously left you in states that were hard to come back from; or you come to this hoping the practice will resolve something that would be better addressed in therapy.
Unsure whether this is the right time? Please reach out. We are happy to help you decide.
Contact supportSometimes you can only tell whether it's the right time once you're inside the work. If you take part and, over the three months, Nicole feels that this is not the right format for you at this time, she may ask you to step out, with support in finding what would serve you better.
This is a course in Zen practice and so is not a therapeutic offering, nor a suitable replacement for one. We can neither treat nor accompany psychiatric illness, and no one working on this course is trained to do so.
Another place to start
Chapter Three is open to everyone, and you do not need to have taken the earlier chapters. But if you are uncertain whether this is where to begin, start with Chapter One · Essential Attitudes, which covers the same practice on steadier ground. Join the list below and we will let you know as soon as it opens.
From earlier courses
When I first heard Nicole speak, I felt an immediate sense of trust and connection. I was drawn into what she later called ‘shared aliveness.’
The virtual experience and material organization provided by the Dharma Academy online platform made the learning experience smooth and straightforward. I appreciated the blend of participating in live virtual sessions and having the recordings accessible after the event. The written PDF summaries from each session were exceptionally well done.
A deep sense of gratitude for sharing so much guidance and wisdom. Thank you!
The offering
The full course, everything included. Choose this if the price fits your situation.
Support our work. This option also supports a fellow practitioner to take the course.
If the standard price is out of reach right now. We trust your self-assessment; no proof required.
One-time payment, secure checkout via Stripe. Registration closes when the course begins on September 27. Questions before you decide? See the FAQ below or email Zuzu.
Crestone Mountain Zen Center, Colorado
Craft of Zen · Chapter Three
Three months of lectures, practice and live sessions with Nicole, and throughout, the question of what all of it means on an ordinary day. If that is the kind of work you are looking for, we would be glad to have you with us.
18:00 CET / 10:00 MT · live online · registration open until the course begins
One-time payment, secure checkout via Stripe.