The Tibetan Language Institute – Inspired Digital Makeover

Julie Thorner:
Okay. Welcome to Liquid Spark’s Adventure Spark Chat. I have with me, David and Deanna Curtis, the co-founders of the Tibetan Language Institute. I’m super excited to talk to you today about your institute, the project that we just finished with you, and the really cool project we are now… a program we’re going to start all because of the work that we’ve done with you all. You have been our inspiration. Welcome today.

Deanna Curtis:
Thank you.

David Curtis:
Thanks a lot, Julie. Delighted to be here.

Julie Thorner:
I would love to have you share, what is the Tibetan Language Institute? How did that come to be?

David Curtis:
It’s a crazy story.

Julie Thorner:
I know it’s a big question.

David Curtis:
Yes, that’s what I was going to say. It’s a good question. Well, one place we could start is Deanna and I were… When we were undergraduates at the University of Montana, we both were studying languages and philosophy. We had that kind of orientation from our early days.

David Curtis:
Then in 1984, we had the great, good fortune to see His Holiness, the Dalai Lama, give a series of teachings in Southern California. We traveled down there to see that. He was being translated by Jeffrey Hopkins. It was a life-changing, inspiring experience. At that event, we learned that the Dalai Lama was going to be in Switzerland the next summer, doing a 12-day program that was free, which was good news for us. Then we went to that. That 12-day event turned into living at a Buddhist center for about five years and doing a three-year meditation retreat. We kind of got immersed in the Tibetan Buddhist culture. Then-

Julie Thorner:
Oh, I was going to say, wow. Had you graduated from college by then? You finished.

David Curtis:
Yes.

Julie Thorner:
Then you went off on the short-term journey, and that turned into multiple years. That retreat… Isn’t that where you come out of it, and you become lamas? Do you get ordained out of a retreat?

David Curtis:
Yes, we’re each a lama. That was the result, you could say, of doing a three-year retreat. It’s like the Tibetan Buddhist seminary.

Julie Thorner:
Wow. Then what happened after that to get to the Tibetan Language Institute?

David Curtis:
Then after one finishes such a program, there’s a big question of, what are you going to do next? We didn’t have a real clear-cut plan. It turned out that we wound up living in Los Angeles, and Deanna was in graduate school. It came to me when I was in the retreat that I should teach Tibetan, but it didn’t seem like a very reasonable idea because I didn’t know very much Tibetan. I had this kind of internal dialogue going on all the time. Anyway, once Deanna got settled, and we had a little apartment and a little car in Los Angeles, then I just decided that I would try to do that and contacted a local Tibetan Buddhist center in L. A. They gave me permission to teach a class. Then they had a little newspaper that was typed up on a typewriter, I think, at the time, that they sent out to about 300 people saying that I was going to teach a class in about three weeks. Before the class started, people started calling me on the phone, asking if they could study with… They didn’t want to wait three weeks.

Julie Thorner:
Wow.

David Curtis:
Then I just started teaching them one by one, and that’s kind of how it started.

Julie Thorner:
Wow. I love that. That’s such a motivating story. For young people and anyone, listen to your intuition, if it came to you in retreat about teaching Tibetan. You learned Tibetan in this retreat, right? Was there anything you were doing in Tibetan in the retreat?

David Curtis:
We had taken a brief course, [inaudible 00:04:23] course, before we went in, but I wouldn’t say that we learned Tibetan. In fact, I always say I’m still learning English and definitely still learning Tibetan. Yeah, we had an introduction before we went into retreat. Then in retreat, we practiced with Tibetan texts, chanting rituals. We were kind of surrounded by-

Deanna Curtis:
Immersed.

David Curtis:
Tibetan, immersed. Yeah, immersed.

Julie Thorner:
You knew enough to agree to teach a class.

David Curtis:
Right, to start people out. My plan, originally, was that I thought we both had such a great experience in the three-year retreat that both of us just wanted to do more of that. That’s what we really wanted to do, but that’s a little bit hard to pull off in this world.

Julie Thorner:
Right.

David Curtis:
We didn’t have the good fortune to do that, but we did something else instead. We were both very interested in philosophy, and then language was always a part of our thing too. They came together in Tibetan. You’ve got a beautiful Buddhist philosophy and then this beautiful language. I don’t know. In a way, it felt, now looking back on it… That was ’92 when we came back to Los Angeles and 1993 when I first started teaching.

Julie Thorner:
This is a joint effort. I mean, you’re a partnership. You’re a husband-wife team. Deanna, you’re in there helping make the Tibetan Language Institute work from behind the scenes, right?

Deanna Curtis:
I am almost always behind the scenes. That’s my preferred comfort zone. It’s really kind of a joyful experience for me because I get to meet people such as yourself and people from all over the world who write with the most encouraging stories and inspirations. I kind of do more of the nuts and bolts part of the institute. One thing I wanted to mention that David didn’t mention was that we had both had the experience of not really knowing Tibetan as much as we would’ve liked to for our practice. Without ever really verbalizing it, we just kind of wanted to help other people who were interested in pursuing their Buddhist practice to really connect with their texts and not feel left out of the group or anything like that. That’s a doable project. With an excellent teacher, such as David, and really good motivation, people are finding success with that.

Julie Thorner:
Yeah, incredibly so. You’re not teaching, necessarily, modern or contemporary spoken Tibetan that you would find on the street, right? You’re teaching classical Tibetan, the written language and the language specific, really, to Buddhist texts and canons. Is that a fair way to say that?

David Curtis:
Yes, that’s good. That’s right. We call it classical Tibetan. Some people call it classical literary Tibetan. Tibetan… Like a lot of phenomena that’s found in a lot of different cultures, there’s a classical literary language. Then there’s a modern spoken language. In Italy, for instance, there’s Italian. When you order pizza or gelato, you’re speaking Italian in Italy, but then they have that ancient literary language, which is Latin.

Julie Thorner:
Right.

David Curtis:
Then in Greece, we have the same thing. There’s classical Greek, the language of Plato, and Aristophanes, and Sophocles, the great writers, but the modern Greek people… They can read those words, but they can’t really understand it. They have to study that language too. In Tibet, it’s the same. We have a colloquial spoken language that when you go there and meet people, and track, and whatnot, that’s the language that they’re speaking and then the literary language. Because our primary interest is the spiritual dimension, we were both drawn to this, to the classical literary language. You could say that’s Buddhist Tibetan.

Julie Thorner:
Right. Tibetan has a really interesting story in its language. It didn’t have a written language, originally. When Buddhism came to Tibet or the Tibetan leader at the time… You’re going to know the story better than me. Was interested in bringing Buddhism to Tibet. Didn’t they have to invent the written language for that?

David Curtis:
Yes, they did. Mm-hmm (affirmative). Of course, that’s what happened everywhere, all around the world, but with many different languages. In Tibet, they were some… Where we lived, there are a lot of Native American people. I always refer to the Native Americans. It’s quite similar to what we find, say, in the 19th century and before. Among the Native American people, they had a beautiful language, and they definitely communicated with each other. There were different dialects and different Native American languages, but they didn’t have a written language and a literature. Tibet was much the same. Then when Buddhism came, Buddhism came… Well, it came partly from China, partly from Central Asia, but primarily from India. In India, there were great monastic universities. The sacred Buddhist language of India is Sanskrit. It’s a highly developed literature, grammar, science of sound, and science of language. Then they translated everything. They wrote, rather, down everything in all these many different fields of study in the Sanskrit language.

When the Tibetans first met the great Buddhist masters, they kind of fell in love with them and that culture. They wanted that too. They began to bring the Buddhist scholars, saints to Tibet to teach the people there. They would send bright, young Tibetan people down to India to study there. This intercourse began, like a download of the classical learning and information into Tibet. Then as you say, the Tibetans didn’t have a language, so they didn’t have a science of grammar and whatnot.

Deanna Curtis:
They didn’t have a written language.

David Curtis:
They didn’t have a written language. Thanks. Right. Then they developed a written language based on the sacred Sanskrit language of India. The classical Tibetan that we teach is that language. I like to say that it’s a hybrid between the basic spoken language, which is really a cousin of Chinese, and then the literary language of India, which is Sanskrit. Those two melded together and made a beautiful new child, you could say, which is classical literary Tibetan.

Julie Thorner:
Yeah. It is a beautiful language with the characters and the writing as well.

Deanna Curtis:
I often get emails from people asking that specific question, people who perhaps want to talk with their lamas or listen to their lamas who will, of course, be speaking modern Tibetan.

Julie Thorner:
Right.

Deanna Curtis:
The question is, if they come to study with David, will that be of any use to them whatsoever? The answer to that question, we both really feel, is yes, because we can help them lay the foundation, teach them how to read, teach them how to look up things in the dictionary, teach them a very basic grammar structure, and with the basic Buddhist basic vocabulary, which is what they want to learn about. With that. Then they can take it to the next level with a native speaker, a lama, a Rinpoche, or other.

David Curtis:
Or, of course, from someone else. I don’t know if it’s still available, we should look into this. Sarah Harding’s course, Tibetan language correspondence course… That’s what we began with. She teaches the colloquial in her course as well.

Julie Thorner:
Oh, interesting.

David Curtis:
That’s a great bridge for people if they wanted. Then it’s very, very good when you’re learning a language, whether it’s a classical language or a modern spoken language, to have a live teacher that can explain it to you. They can answer questions. It’s really hard to learn a language from a book.

Julie Thorner:
Oh my gosh. I agree. Well, I’m learning Tibetan. That’s how I found you guys. We’ll go into that in just a moment. I learned Chinese and Spanish as a young person in college. The beauty of a language is it’s a window into how that culture thinks, why the culture is the way it is. It’s so much bigger than just being able to express words and a need. Where is the store, or the library, or what have you? It’s fascinating. It would make sense that then they could speak to their lamas if they’re interested in Buddhist culture and studying. I’ve been working with some Tibetans, which is part of how I found you. How I found you in 2015, I was part of a volunteer consulting group of teachers who went Tibet. It’s actually a program by Columbia University.

In 2015, I went Tibet for a couple of weeks to teach about marketing, specifically ecotourism. That’s what I do. I had lived in China a long time ago, 1984, for six months. Had studied Chinese very deeply. A lot of my Chinese came back. I was able to speak a little bit of Chinese to the Tibetans. I was shocked to find out that the Tibetans from the various cultural areas of Tibet, which is much bigger than the Tibet Autonomous Region, not that you would see on a map… Their spoken languages are almost unintelligible to each other, whether it’s Kham, or Amdo, or Jiarong, which is even more different. It’s apparently the oldest spoken version of dialect of Tibet. Then the Lhasa dialect, which might be more similar to classical Tibetan. They spoke Chinese to each other because they couldn’t understand each other and their dialects. I thought that was actually pretty fascinating.

David Curtis:
Right. When it comes to the written language, though, they all use the same written language. The words are spelled the same all over Tibetan. That’s absolutely true. There’s maybe hundreds of different dialects in Tibet, actually. Many, many of them are… They’re mutually unintelligible.

Julie Thorner:
Yeah, much more so than our New York accent versus our Southern accent, or maybe a West Coast accent. Then the Midwesterners, of course, think they have no accent. It’s pretty different.

David Curtis:
Then there’s Scottish.

Julie Thorner:
What’s that?

David Curtis:
I said, and then there’s Scottish and Welsh.

Julie Thorner:
Yeah, exactly.

Deanna Curtis:
It’s similar to someone who speaks in a rural Scottish brogue, as we call it. If they try and speak to someone who is perhaps from India, trained with an Indian accent, it’s going to be tough.

Julie Thorner:
Right.

Deanna Curtis:
That happens, I think, if you go over a hill in Tibet.

Julie Thorner:
Yeah, exactly. Well, let’s talk a little bit about how we are all in the same Zoom room together and how I found the Tibetan Language Institute. I got the opportunity in 2015 to go over to Tibet, which I had always wanted to do. I lived in China, in college, for six months in 1984 had not been back since. So I had this opportunity to go over there, and teach, and was there for two weeks. I went to a variety of places in Amdo, in Kham, Yunnan province, and went to Lhasa. Made some great friends. Was absolutely and totally moved by the Tibetan people. I did not understand how Buddhism permeates the (Tibetan) culture. Probably, a better way to say it is, Buddhism is the foundation of the Tibetan culture. There is almost nothing I ran into, in my experience, traveling across these cultural regions of Tibet, in addition to the TAR, that were just… They were built on all of these premises and philosophy of Buddhism.

I was stunned and then moved by the generosity, and the compassion, and the kindness of the Tibetans. It didn’t matter if they were wealthy Tibetans or the poorest of the poor Tibetans. I remember being in Lhasa and doing what was called Kora. You walk around the Jokhang Temple. Pilgrims come from all over China and Tibetan areas, et cetera, to go do this.

Seeing people that looked like they were in abject poverty, I mean, barely had enough on… They saw someone else worse off than them. They quickly reached into their pocket and gave a one Yuan, which is maybe about a penny. They gave that bill. I looked at them, and I thought about my experience in America. I’ve always been encouraged, “Look the other way. Don’t give people money,” and what have you. I thought, “Oh my gosh, if this is coming from their heart, I have a longways to go.”

It was a powerful role model for me. I came home with my own mantra to try to be more generous, be more kind, and be more compassionate. I thought that the Tibetan script, which I saw everywhere I went… It was on rocks. It was on mountains. We went to a lot of different temples, including the Bon temples, which look like Buddhist temples. It’s all been integrated. It’s just fascinating how those two religions were integrated, the early sort of nature-based religion of Tibetans, and the Bon tradition, and the Buddhism. I thought, “Well, this is really beautiful. I can read Chinese characters. Why don’t I learn Tibetan?” I must have done a web search, and y’all came up. I ended up taking your level one course via telephone. I think, Deanna… I tried to ask you over and over, “You must be wrong. It can’t be a phone conference. It can’t be a telephone course, right?”

I mean, this was 2016, the year after I got back from Tibet. I thought, “Oh, this can’t be.” She’s like, “No, no, it’s definitely phone. Don’t use Skype because Skype’s going to mess everything up.” I’m like, “Okay. Okay, I’m going to try this.” I took your level one course, and I thought it was amazing. It was a nine-week course. I got through the course, learning the alphabet, basic vocabulary, a lot of interesting things about Tibet.

As a busy professional, running a marketing company… I had children, et cetera. I still have children. They were in their teens. Now they’re in their 20s. I didn’t get to practice much. Your website was like, “Oh, no problem. You can take it again for a discounted rate.” I thought, “Okay.”

In 2017, I took it again via telephone. Then my son graduated from Missoula, University of Montana, Missoula. Y’all were in Missoula. I was actually out in Bozeman at the time. I thought, “Well, I’ll just call them up and meet them. I’m sure I can convince them to do an online course.” I look at your website. I thought, “Y’all need some help.” You had lots of-

David Curtis:
This was true.

Julie Thorner:
You had lots of good information. I could see where you were going with it, but it just wasn’t up to date, technically speaking. It was beautiful content. What y’all didn’t mention when we started is David has actually written all of these lessons. It’s some of the best content and only content out there where you’ve actually created the course books. You’re not using other people’s course books. You have designed courses for Westerners who really want to learn Tibetan. Anyway, we sat down in a coffee shop in Missoula on Mother’s Day, I remember, for what I thought would be a short conversation. About three hours later, I looked at my watch and said, “Oh my gosh, my kids. I need to go meet my kids for a late breakfast or early lunch.”

By then, I think you had agreed. I said, “We can help you.” Because of my experience in Tibet, I said, “I run a marketing company. I think, let’s just help you. I know you have no funds. This will be an awesome karma, karmic thing to do and a wonderful dharma gift to help your mission.” I thought, first, we’d do a little website. That developed into, you actually went online with your courses.

Let’s fast forward. You have a brand new website. It took us a little while. It launched July of this 2021. We paused in the midst of the build to put your level one and level two courses online to help you with the online piece of it. You, of course, had all the materials. Also, a common thing for nonprofits… You all don’t have a big set of staff. Really, it’s the two of you and maybe some volunteers. You had to run the institute, teach the courses, create new coursework, as well as help support a new website, and let web people know what to put on it. I mean, that is a ton of work, right? It took us a little longer to launch that, but we love what came out of that in a pretty robust site with all of your product in the store, able to be purchased internationally. I’ll pause there because I’m excited about this project. Let’s hear, how did this go for you?

David Curtis:
Well, I’ll just say it was a dream come true, the bringing us into the 21st century. We were almost not in the 20th century.

Julie Thorner:
You said it! I didn’t.

David Curtis:
It’s really been fantastic. Deanna can talk about this and the site a little bit more than I can, maybe. I’ll just say from the teaching side, then to be engaged with the students and then have that, which I’m talking about, as a slide on the screen, for instance, that people can see, and then they can do Q & A… Just to have it, to bring a visual component into it… I was saying earlier that it’s pretty difficult to learn a language without a teacher, but it’s also pretty difficult to learn a language just orally over the phone. Then there’s the Tibetan letter, ka, and then there’s the Tibetan letter ka. They’re pretty similar.

Julie Thorner:
Right.

David Curtis:
Then if it’s on the screen, and we can point to it, and talk about the differences, for instance, it’s just revolutionized my teaching and the interaction that I have with the students as well. I can just say that kind of as an intro to maybe some things that Deanna can say now.

Deanna Curtis:
Well, I actually thought a lot about this. Not being a super spontaneous person, I have some notes. I’m going to look at that a little bit. Just as a recap of what our website was like, I think you’re far too polite when you say it was outdated. That is putting it mildly. There was a lot of really good content, I feel, on it. It was helpful, but it was in… I think it’s called HTML frame.

Julie Thorner:
Yeah, that’s right.

Deanna Curtis:
It was originally put up, went live in 2007. By the time it was 2018, when we talked to you, I could no longer make very many changes to the website itself. I had to subcontract that work out to someone else because it was so complex on the backend that any small change could just bring the whole thing tumbling down. It wasn’t mobile-friendly. That was a big problem in reaching people. We didn’t have any way to track sales, or visits, or anything like that because of its outdated platform, I guess, is what it’s called.

All that really limited what we could do via the website and via outreach to other people who might be interested in this. David talked a little bit about how the courses were run. They were, what is called, teleconference courses. Someone would call in on the phone to a group chat area. David would spend part of his time begging people to mute the phones because there was no way to… They needed to be able to ask questions, but that also meant that he couldn’t globally mute and just sort of block them out. There was always a lot of noise, interference, trying to get people on the right page, that sort of thing. When Liquid Spark came to us, they said, “Well, we can help you with your website.” I think you recognized immediately that there were bigger problems that needed to be addressed.

It developed that you helped us implement Zoom courses, which is what David was talking about, where the students can see him, and see the page on the screen, and just be more engaged, and understand what’s going on, and be more enthusiastic about the whole project, rather than just feeling lost.

David Curtis:
People previously would… They wouldn’t know where we were in the book. They would have a book that I was teaching from, but it was just on the phone. They weren’t sure if they were on the right page or what page we were on. Then people are too shy to ask. Now, the way we’re teaching now with the Zoom course is we put the page on the screen, so even if they don’t have the book. No one’s getting lost anymore. Then they’re actually seeing it rather than just hearing it as well.

Julie Thorner:
Yeah. I did your level one via teleconference twice. I would be emailing Deanna because she said, “If you get stuck,” email her. I could email her, “What page is David on? I don’t know where he is,” because I would get lost or you’d move around.

Julie Thorner:
Then I took the Level one. We also did level two. Level one went online in 2020, and Level two went online in fall 2020, winter, 2021. We did that with Zoom. It was amazing how well it worked. It was just fantastic. I was never lost in terms of where you were. Sometimes I was lost in the material, but that would be a student issue.

Deanna Curtis:
Yeah. I think a lot of the reason that you weren’t lost was the kind of support that Liquid Spark gave our team to teach those courses. There was a lot of support as far as tutorials, and how to move from page to page, and what we are doing on Zoom, and how to do that, and what kind of Zoom program we needed to do, what David wanted to do.

You were on the class. You were in the class. Also, you had the Liquid Spark team, a really great woman there, who helped with the technical side of things as we were launching this program. It was really a pretty smooth transition. I think we’ve all seen Zoom classes that don’t have support people.

Julie Thorner:
Right.

Deanna Curtis:
That can be detrimental to what is trying to be taught.

Julie Thorner:
Yeah. It worked out well. Michelle, on our team… She actually moderated the first few or helped behind the scenes to teach you how to moderate, get Bente going, who’s a rockstar on your team, and then helped create your graphics in the beginning and ending, and trained how to let the students know how to use it.

We were really excited. We pulled a bunch of stats. We asked y’all about stats from just the students in terms of people in your courses and whether they filled up or not. Is there anything you want to share about how those courses went?

Deanna Curtis:
Yeah. Basically, from teleconference courses, like the level one course, to the transition to the level one course via Zoom webinar, we basically doubled our enrollment for level one and almost doubled it for level two. Part of the reason is not… Well, I think because David is really good at what he does, but also because we had the support staff, Bente, and Michelle, and you, to do that and because of the Zoom platform, opens up our potential student base to the world.

Julie Thorner:
Right.

Deanna Curtis:
For those students who cannot attend because it’s 3:00 AM in Australia, they can still learn Tibetan with David by watching the recordings. Another problem with teleconference courses was it was just a block recording. There was no way to fast forward, bookmark, rewind, nothing. That was not an option. You missed it. You’ve missed it. With what Bente has set up for the recordings, she segments that so a student can kind of zero in more, what they want to review, what they want to hear, if they’re just reviewing or if they’re watching the whole thing for the first time.

Julie Thorner:
That’s fantastic. The ability to sell your courses and serve students internationally… It increases your service work in the world, and it increases the success of TLI. You’re a very small nonprofit. Going from doubling your courses, and your students, and the number who go on to the next course… It’s meaningful. That’s what we love is because we knew we could actually help you with the size that you are, really make a difference in moving forward. It’s a wonderful thing to learn classical literary Tibetan and also transform your mind and your heart in the person.

Deanna Curtis:
I always describe us as-

Julie Thorner:
Then how about the website?

Deanna Curtis:
I’m sorry. I always describe us as a mom-and-pop nonprofit just to kind of give people the real idea of the size of our operation. What you guys did for our organization has… We’re still a mom-and-pop organization but with a much broader outreach, I guess.

Julie Thorner:
We’re thrilled for that.

David Curtis:
We’re in the process now of developing three different learning materials. We’re on sabbatical in terms of teaching the group classes now until the first of the year. Then when the first of the year launches, we’ll have new and better textbooks for the courses that we’ll teach. We’re excited about that, too, now that we’ve figured out how to teach on Zoom with your… That’s just natural the way that… Haven’t we always done it? Is kind of the feeling now.

Julie Thorner:
Right.

David Curtis:
Now with the new content and the new ability to reach more and more people, we, quarterly, do a intro talk just to introduce people to the language, to TLI, who we are, what we do, and kind of show people, you can actually do this. You kind of want to do it, but you might have doubts about whether you can or not. I teach them the alphabet, for instance, in that first course. Deanna can mention historically what it’s been like, but in the last course, we had over 90 people register for that lecture. Then they were from 16 countries and 22 states. Often there would be someone from Germany or South Africa but just one person. Maybe I’d give that talk, and there would be maybe two or three people from outside the U. S. Now they’re from 16 countries and 22 states, that came to the last talk.

It kind of encapsulates, a little example there, what the difference has been. I’m looking forward to, in the new year, with the new materials and this new outreach via the website, and that it’s just going to be fantastic.

Then when we were first in Buddhism and we’d trained for about a year in France, we came back home. A really small publication, interviewed us. I don’t remember too much about who that was or what the publication was, but I do remember they asked us one question.

I think Deanna said something that I think is really true, that we’re just kind of ordinary people from Montana, but we found something really beautiful, something really extraordinary in this Tibetan Buddhist teachings. You articulated that that manifests itself in the people of Tibetan. Anyone that’s ever met Tibetans or hung out with them, whether in Tibet or outside of Tibet, has the same kind of experience that you articulated. That is grounded in Buddhism. It is their Buddhist training that they were able to cultivate this spiritual tradition for 1,300 years and left alone by the external world because Tibet was so far away until the 1940s or 1950s, so mid-20th century.

Julie Thorner:
Right.

David Curtis:
That’s just a reflection of the essence and the beauty that’s found in the text. I like what you said, also, when we learn the language of a people, we’re really getting in tune with their heart and minds. The Buddhist tradition has brought the Tibetan. What the Tibetans have cultivated and are now sharing with the entire planet is very, very beautiful.

What we’re dedicated, basically, is just sharing that beautiful thing that we found way back then in the ’80s and sharing that with people. That makes us happy because we see… It’s like, the Native Americans in Montana had this expression, “Big medicine.” It’s an ailing world. There’s a lot of suffering, and there’s a lot of suffering being perpetuated in the modern world. The Tibetans stood apart from that and cultivated these beautiful spiritual qualities. Then now they’re sharing them with the world. Few people will want to go into the essence of that, and actually read those texts, and learn, what are these words in Tibetan? What do they actually mean?

When things get translated, even like Buddha, and in words like enlightenment, what does that mean? Then when you look at it in Tibetan, what it means, and learn what each of those syllables mean, it can be, well, mind-expanding and a wonderful, beautiful experience that’s freeing in the mind, and liberating the mind, and bringing joy to people’s lives.

Then like you said, when you came back, you were changed. You wanted to change yourself and become more compassionate. That’s a liberating process, liberating our noble qualities. That’s what the text, and the literature, and the whole teaching of Buddhism is all about.

Then when a person learns the language, they’re in direct contact with that. When we read a book, if we read Shakespeare, then we’re having direct contact, like a conversation, with this person that lived 500 years ago. The same thing is true when we read the Tibetan text. They have something very beautiful to share with us.

Julie Thorner:
Yeah. The interpretation, the translation… It’s always a little different. It might have been in level two. Had the Buddhist, the Tibetan word for enlightenment and those characters… Or, I call them characters, but they’re letters, in Tibetan. That’s pretty different. For me, I was struck by how awareness is such a key part of that term as opposed to enlightenment. Enlightenment can have… Maybe it’s just a modern sense that is a little bit different. For me, awareness was something that really resonated more deeply with what I was looking to try to get out of this. That was interesting.

I love that with this incredible 21st century upgrade, so to speak, that you felt you could take a sabbatical. I don’t know if they were related, thinking maybe you’ll have more students, and the ability to teach more, and then more income. I mean, you are a nonprofit institution, but you need revenue to continue your mission. I love that you took a sabbatical, and went, and finished the upgrades that you had wanted to do probably for over a decade with these new materials, and are relaunching with… I think you mentioned the courses. People are already chomping at the bit to sign up for these courses. Maybe they’re starting to get information on them.

Deanna Curtis:
When David took the sabbatical, it was unclear how we would really support ourselves, but that is a little bit David and Deanna. It’s like, well, let’s just see what happens because we need to do this. The interesting thing, we launched the website. Consistently, really, for the last three… September, October, November. For the last two and a half months, we have seen people buying a lot of our level one packages, our level two packages, even though they’re not ready because David’s working on them. We’ve seen an uptick in sales. We’re not, all of a sudden, a wash in funds or anything like that, but it has been sustaining. I credit that to the e-commerce site that you guys set up. E-commerce was a new concept to me. I think you patiently explained it about 20 times with me going, “Oh, that just sounds so complicated and hard.”

Julie Thorner:
It’s okay. We’ll do it for you.

Deanna Curtis:
You know what? It runs pretty darn smoothly. I’m able to check… There’s so many things that I’m able to do now that I couldn’t do when people simply bought through PayPal. I mean, they’re still using the PayPal as the way to pay for their purchases or their registrations, but there’s this other e-commerce component that’s on the backend that I can check.

I can look at addresses, and I have their right emails. If they have a note about, “Please send this right away,” they don’t have to do a separate email. It just comes in, and I can take care of it. I don’t have to say to anyone living in Canada, Mexico, or South America, “Oh, I’m sorry. You’ll have to wait until I can package something that you haven’t bought, take it to the post office, make sure that it’s the right price, and then I’ll send you an email, and then you can purchase it. By the way, I have too much work, and it’ll take about three or four weeks for me to get back to you.”

Julie Thorner:
Right.

Deanna Curtis:
With the e-commerce site, it does that for me. It calculates correctly, the shipping and handling. That takes off a whole level of layer of stuff that I have to do during the day.

Julie Thorner:
I love that.

David Curtis:
An increase in sales of the learning materials through different DVDs, and books, and things… Traditionally, it’s just been tied to the registration for classes. If we’re offering a class, then people are registering for the class. Then they’re buying the book.

Deanna was just mentioning there’s not a class happening right now, and people are still buying it. I’m quite optimistic when we do offer the course, then there’s going to be another increase in sales like that. It’s heartening and heartwarming, I guess, just to see that people all around the world now… What we try to do is serve the people that are interested and to teach in a way that’s accessible. There’s a dozen places or so in America where you can study Tibetan at a university level, but very few people have the opportunity to go to one of those 12 schools.

Julie Thorner:
Right.

David Curtis:
Even so, like at Harvard, they start introduction to Tibetan just every other year. I don’t know what to the numbers are recently, but they used to just have about five students in that class. Then some of them are graduate students or seniors. The next year, they don’t have a way to… Most of us don’t have access to that. What we’re doing now and what’s just multiplying our ability now is we’re teaching Tibetan for the rest of us, I like to say, the people that aren’t at one of those universities but then want to know. Then we try to teach in a way that’s accessible, and with the student in mind, and bring this beautiful teaching to people. Then people can be now, of course, anywhere and study at home and wherever that home happens to be, as long as they-

Julie Thorner:
Right.

David Curtis:
Are able to get a Zoom connection going. We’re in kind of an incubation period now until January, and then there’s going to be a blossoming.

Deanna Curtis:
I wanted to say something else about that. That is… I hope I remember what it is. Nope. Go on. I’ll have to catch you in a minute.

David Curtis:
Okay. It’ll come, right?

Julie Thorner:
I just want to add on to what you both have said. Now I’m realizing why when I looked for Tibetan language training information or learning information, I ended up choosing your TLI, because you’re specifically serving people who are on a life journey. One part of it is, let’s check out Tibetan and explore Tibetan, and Buddhism, and the dharma. I could be a mother, a single mother, an entrepreneur, running an agency, traveling, doing this, whatever. I could have all these other parts to me, and be your student, and be supported as your student, knowing that it’d be totally okay if I took the course several times.

It was a nine-week intensive immersion. The more I had time to study, the more I would get out of it. I actually told Deanna, “You’re not going to see homework from me because I’m going to be doing all these things. Trust me, I’m getting so much out of the course,” and I did. It was profound. I would walk around with my flashcards, taking walks out in Bozeman in the wintertime, going, “Ka, kha, ga, na.” It was just perfect. It was just at the right amount because for me to stop everything and go to school or even try to move to a place where there’s a school… I always live in rural areas. It’s not going to happen. I would never have had the chance to study.

David Curtis:
I think there’s people all over the world like that. Of course, we’re very busy people. Some of us are in our 20s and fortunate to be going to a fine university. Then there’s a lot of other people that are interested in the spiritual life, that is Tibetan Buddhism, and taking the teachings to heart, frankly, and involves… The Tibetans always stay study, reflection, and meditation, so study and learning. I believe that that’s part of our true human nature, is we love to learn. Aristotle said that. I think he was right. Human beings by nature reach out to know. We want to know, and we love learning new stuff, and go, “That’s cool.” Now here you can actually study this at home. You can take level one, level two, level three reading courses on beautiful Tibetan texts where we go through the text syllable by syllable and see what’s actually going on here syllable by syllable.

Then when we see it all put together, then it’s just often, wow, it’s beautiful. It’s illuminating, as one of our students said that we like to quote. She’s been chanting Tibetan things using phonetics. Now she’s looking at the actual Tibetan, and recognizing the words, and putting it all together. Now she says it’s a luminous experience for her.

Julie Thorner:
Oh. That sounds really good. I love that.

David Curtis:
I think a lot of people have that same kind of experience.

Deanna Curtis:
Well, I’m happy that you found us in 2015 or whatever. That probably wasn’t as straightforward as you make it sound because I used to just kind of monitor where we were when you looked up learn Tibetan, for instance. Often we were on page three, four, or five. Didn’t have our website. Didn’t have whatever it is that Google requires of website to make us more visible when someone was looking up that term. Since we’ve launched and after all that Liquid Spark did for the website, we’re now number one when you look up… That’s pretty neat.

Julie Thorner:
I’m very happy about that. Yeah, we monitor that pretty closely. You are. You’re now on the first page for almost all your terms. You’ve gone from either not being visible or at the bottom of one to you’re in the top three now. It’s very exciting.

This is a perfect segue to the fact that your project inspired me and my team so much because we were able to do deep work for one nonprofit in such a meaningful way. We thought, “This is something that we could do for someone else.”

We got together and thought through, what should we be doing here? As a result of our work with the Tibetan Language Institute, which, for everyone watching this… Of course, we’ll have it in the notes too. It’s Tibetanlanguage.org. Do I have that right? Deanna?

Deanna Curtis:
Www.tibetanlanguage.org. There you go.

Julie Thorner:
Tibetanlanguage.org. Or, you could just look up Tibetan Language Institute. We have created an entirely new program that we’re very excited about called the Spark Forward Non-Profit Program. It’s because of our work with the Tibetan Language Institute. We are launching it on Giving Tuesday, November 30th, 2021.

We are encouraging nonprofits to apply to Liquid Spark to get a similar kind of significant marketing project help to further their mission. These would be for nonprofits who, there’s no way they could afford the kind of services and work that, for example, our team was able to do for you. We will look through all of those applications. Then the team will vote on who we think we can best serve and whose mission is doing work that, what we call, is really important for people, place, and planet.

Liquid Spark is a 1% for the planet agency. We already give 1% of our revenue away to vetted nonprofits doing important work for people, place, and planet. We also started a foundation as a result of my travels to Tibet. We, in our foundation, also do good work for, or try to support different causes around the world, and especially education of young people abroad.

And, this is in addition to that. We think this is a meaningful way, through our own marketing knowledge and expertise, we can help transform a non-profit whose mission needs to get out there in a bigger way. Thank you for that impetus because you are our spark for this Spark Forward Non-Profit Program.

David Curtis:
Well, that’s wonderful.

Deanna Curtis:
Yeah, I would say to any, well, to nonprofits, small nonprofits who are struggling, who don’t have a modern website, who don’t know where to start even, and don’t have the administrative support to do the things that they know need to have happen, website teaching, whatnot, to go ahead and apply, that they’ll find a super friendly, very competent, very skilled group of people at Liquid Spark. I mean, it gave TLI a super boost in many ways, and it kind of sparked joy.

David Curtis:
That’s right.

Julie Thorner:
That’s true. That’s true. That’s wonderful.

David Curtis:
I’m glad you mentioned that part. It was a joy working with you, and Michelle, and the other members of the team.

Deanna Curtis:
You guys make it easy.

Julie Thorner:
Well, we love to hear that. That’s certainly our job and what we would love to have come out of it. Deanna and David, thank you so much for your time today. I am grateful to talk to you. I’m so glad I came across your website. I look forward to retaking level two because I’ve only taken it once and then moving forward in my own study with you.

Deanna Curtis:
Fantastic.

Julie Thorner:
Thank you again for being here. Tashi Delek!

David Curtis:
Yes, Tashi Delek!

Deanna Curtis:
Tashi Delek!

David Curtis:
We’re very happy to have shared this time with you, and completely delighted to have met you, and teamed up with you and Liquid Spark. It’s been an amazingly wonderful experience.

Julie Thorner:
Thank you so much.

David Curtis:
Onward joyfully.

Julie Thorner:
Yes, onward. Thank you.

David Curtis:
You’re very welcome. Bye-bye.

Deanna Curtis:
Thank you. Bye-bye.