Abbot
Tatsudo Nicole Baden is the Abbot of the international non-profit organization Dharma Sangha and its two Zen Practice Centers, the Crestone Mountain Zen Center in Colorado, USA and the Zen Buddhist Center in the Black Forest, Germany. Nicole is a Dharma Successor of Zentatsu Baker Roshi in the Soto Zen Lineage. She has been practicing Zen since 2001 and received Dharma Transmission in 2017. Nicole graduated as a psychologist from the University of Oldenburg in 2008. She also trained at the ‘School for Body Mind Centering’ for four years. She was a member of the council of the German Buddhist Union from 2013-2019 and is currently serving on the advisory council of the mindfulness oriented MBSR Association. She has been living and practicing either at the Crestone Mountain Zen Center or at the Zen Buddhist Center Schwarzwald (ZBZS) in Germany since 2009.
Fouder and Former Abbot
Zentatsu Richard Baker Roshi is the founder of Dharma Sangha and its Zen Practice Centers in the United States and Europe. After serving as Abbot until 2024, he entrusted the leadership of the Sangha to his Dharma Successor, Tatsudo Nicole Baden Roshi. He continues to teach regularly at both centers and online.
A Dharma Successor of Shunryu Suzuki Roshi, Baker Roshi was among the first generation of teachers to establish Soto Zen practice in the West. Together with Suzuki Roshi, he co-founded Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, the first traditional Zen monastery outside Asia, and later served as the second Abbot of San Francisco Zen Center. In 1983, he founded Dharma Sangha. His teaching continues to explore how the forms and
understanding of Zen can find expression within contemporary Western culture.
Guest Teacher
Ryuten Paul Rosenblum Roshi is a Dharma Successor of Zentatsu Baker Roshi and a lineage holder in the Soto Zen tradition of Dongshan and Dogen. He began practicing with Shunryu Suzuki Roshi at Tassajara Zen Mountain Center in 1968, making him part of the first generation of Western practitioners directly shaped by Suzuki Roshi's teaching.
After ten years of intensive practice at San Francisco Zen Center, Ryuten spent many years working in government, politics, and nonprofit leadership before returning to residential practice with Baker Roshi in 1995. He received Dharma Transmission in 1999. Today, Ryuten Roshi brings together decades of monastic training and lived experience in the wider world, offering a grounded and deeply human approach to Zen practice.
Resident Teacher
Seishin Laurie Nusbaum Sensei resides at Crestone Mountain Zen Center where she supports monastic life in a number of ways, filling the roles of Director and Head of Practice, among others. She began practice with a Rinzai Sangha in 1981. She found Baker Roshi and transitioned to practicing with the Dharma Sangha in 2008 and received Dharma Transmission from Baker Roshi in April of 2026. She is fortunate, and grateful, to be engaged in ensuring CMZC continues to be a welcoming location and place of practice for any and all.
Within Dharma Sangha, we recognize more than one path of lifelong Zen practice. Alongside the monastic path, the Lay-Adept Path is a committed way of embodying the teachings within the responsibilities and relationships of everyday life. Our Lay Entrusted Teachers are practitioners who have devoted themselves to this path and are entrusted to share the teachings from within their own lived experience.
Lay Entrusted Teacher
Sarabinh Levy-Brightman is an educator and curriculum developer who focuses on religious literacy, embodied pedagogy, and transformative education. Sarabinh has taught on the secondary through graduate levels and regularly works with in service teachers and administrators. From 2016 thru 2023 she was closely affiliated with Harvard Divinity School’s Program in Religion and Public Life (previously the RPL), and served as the Education Fellow there from 2020-2024.Sarabinh’s teaching bridges intellect, imagination, and embodiment—making her work deeply resonant with the Dharma Academy’s vision of learning as shared inquiry.
Lay Entrusted Teacher
Amy Robertson first arrived at Crestone Mountain Zen Center as a young social worker at age twenty-eight. During that first decade of practice, she experienced the Dharma as a precious gift that she has spent the ensuing decades unfolding and enfolding into every aspect of her life. Over the next twenty years, while helping support the development of Boulder Zen Center and participating in a small koan study group of Richard Baker Roshi's longtime students, she steeped herself in the teachings of the lineage and the koans while navigating the rich and often-chaotic terrain of lay life—raising a family, practicing and teaching clinical social work and psychotherapy, and falling in love with creative practices like painting and poetry, deep engagement with the more than human world, and cultivating an ethical, embodied imagination for this moment.