New European 3 Doors Academy and Pre-Academy Retreat

Meet New 3 Doors Teacher Nicolas Gounaropoulos

The 3 Doors is happy to announce a new European 3 Doors Academy and Pre-Academy retreat and introduce you to one of the four teachers for these retreats, Nicolas Gounaropoulos. This is the third European Academy to be offered, and it will begin in September 2023. A Pre-Academy retreat for those new to The 3 Doors will be held March 22-26, 2023, near Budapest, Hungary. Both retreats are open to all. Registration for the Academy will open soon.

The 3 Doors was founded by Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche with the aim of offering the heart essence of the Bon teachings and practices for the benefit of a wider circle of practitioners. A signature program of The 3 Doors, the Academy is a series of retreats taking place over two-and-a-half years, with individual and online group work throughout the period. It guides participants to explore the power of meditation and community to support self-discovery and personal transformation, and to manifest actions that benefit others.

The Pre-Academy retreat, titled Finding Peace in Turbulent Times: Embodying the Wisdom of The 3 Doors, is designed for those new to The 3 Doors and serves as an opportunity to meet the teachers for the upcoming European Academy that starts in September 2023. It also will benefit long-term practitioners who wish to deepen their practice. This retreat will take place March 22-23 in Hungary at the Three Treasures Valley, a beautiful retreat center in the countryside. It will be held in English.

The Pre-Academy retreat and the European Academy will be led by Raven Lee, senior 3 Doors teacher, along with newly authorized European teachers Walter Hofmann, Karolina Seltenheim and Nicolas Gounaropoulos.

Learn more and register for Pre-Academy retreat
Learn more about European Academy/sign up for registration updates

3 Doors Teacher Nicolas Gounaropoulos Shares Experience Teaching Inner Refuge

Nicolas is an authorized teacher for The 3 Doors based in Belgium. Along with preparing to teach at the upcoming European Pre-Academy and Academy, he recently finished teaching a new 3 Doors course, Discovering Refuge Within. Nicolas has been teaching meditation for 25 years, but this was his first time officially teaching a course for The 3 Doors. Here he shares his experience:

I began teaching The 3 Doors eight-week course Discovering Refuge Within some weeks ago in French, and I was surprised that all the participants were practitioners in Ligmincha. Most of them were longtime students, and some lead practice groups too. This was a really wonderful experience for me.

The inner refuge is our space of unity, within which we and our experience are complete, without any effort. In this space we have access to an infinite potential of joy, creativity, love, compassion. From there we can live our life fully in the present moment. We can experience peace and freedom. It is not outside of us; it is the essence of our being.

How interesting it is to start with the inner refuge and to take time to experiment with each aspect of it. Longtime practitioners often think I know when listening to teachings. But I realized how this course and The 3 Doors view is to go beyond I know, to live it from inside and to embody it and express it. This is totally different and changes the experience and the consequences of the experience.

Here with the inner refuge, we start at the end, the fruition. It is so simple that we can think that it's not enough, but the refuge is complete and is our ultimate liberation. And taking eight weeks during this course was the best way to increase our faith in the infinite healing potential of our refuge, our deep nature, already here and accessible.

Sometimes we want so much to become buddha, a realized being, that we forget that we are human, and we repress or reject our human tendencies and experiences. I realize how The 3 Doors vision acknowledges the infinite power of the refuge to host all the aspects of our experience, even those aspects we don't want to see or don't like. As we become intimate with our fears and pain, all our conditioned existence, we discover how we are human and bring love and openness to those tendencies.

Opening our heart space to all the aspects of our being, without judgment or bias, we host our pain identities and discover they are simply not the truth of who we are. We realize our full potential, complete and free as we are. There is nothing to lose and nobody who can lose something. This is the most beautiful gift of our practice, and this is a gift for the world.

There are so many more things to say, but to conclude I just can say that we have to go beyond the one who observes or discovers the refuge. We are the refuge, and we can have a deep, deep trust in it, turn toward it in any given moment and embody it. Everything is here. In doing this we manifest our full potential as realized human beings.

Learn more about Nicolas and other Pre-Academy/Academy teachers

For a full list of upcoming programs from The 3 Doors, visit The 3 Doors website.