Highlights

• Author of Beyond the Killing Fields: Voices of Nine Cambodian Survivors in America (Stanford University Press 1993, 1994)

• Mindfulness Meditation instructor and Memory coach offering classes throughout Santa Clara County.

• Domain expert for the Public Defender's Office of the City of San Jose.

• Anthropologist-At-Large columnist for the San Jose Mercury News.

• President of the Sri Lankan American Cultural Association (2000-2006)

• Vice-President of Cambodian American Resource Agency (1998-2001)

Dr. Usha Welaratna was a cultural anthropologist and university professor before becoming a mindfulness meditation instructor and memory trainer in her retirement. This website is an archive of her scholarly work.

Usha received her Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology from UC Berkeley in 1999 and her M.A. from San Jose State University in 1990. Her university teaching career included teaching courses at San Jose State University, UC Berkeley, Mills College, and Stanford University.  As an anthropologist, Usha had a multi-faceted career exploring numerous cultures and communities. Her scholarly interests and research took her into varied socio-economic and cultural settings to investigate:

• the resilience of Cambodian refugees who survived Pol Pot's holocaust to resettle and forge a new community in San Jose, CA;

• the rise and impact of multi-ethnic gangs operating in inner-city Long Beach on their communities in the mid to late 1990s;

• immigration and the changing face of Silicon Valley through a monthly dialogue-based column for the San Jose Mercury News; and

• the societal and psychological impacts of the 2004 tsunami in Sri Lanka as reflected in disaster recovery and relief efforts along the Southern coast.

Usha’s master’s thesis, which won first place in San Jose State University’s Outstanding Graduate Thesis Award in 1990, was published as Beyond the Killing Fields: Voices of Nine Cambodian Survivors in America by Stanford University Press in 1993, with a second edition in 1994. 

She later completed a full-length manuscript based on in-depth research conducted in Sri Lanka following the devastating 1994 tsunami. This unpublished manuscript, titled Coping With Losses Mindfully and Compassionately, documents her conversations with tsunami survivors along the Southern Coast in the months that followed and explores the short- and long-term effects of the tsunami disasters in Sri Lanka and Japan. It is available on this website in its entirety as a vital reference work for scholars working in the fields of disaster management, sustainability, grief, loss, and resiliency, and religious studies. It is currently undergoing a light editorial process.

Usha learned Mindfulness Meditation as a child growing up in Sri Lanka. Not knowing the enormous benefits of this style of meditation, she did not continue with the practice during much of her youth and adult life. She re-established her practice later in life, and, once she realized the priceless benefits of this living, experiential activity, she never looked back.  

It was this realization and her discovery of the exciting research by neuroscientists about the enormously beneficial impacts of Mindfulness Meditation on our brains that led Usha to start teaching Mindfulness Meditation with a neuroscience perspective in 2007. Her meditation and memory training classes were offered through the city of Los Altos Recreation and Community Services Department and the Phap Vuong Temple in Milpitas.  She also taught in clients’ homes and workplaces.

Usha loved meeting new people, traveling, taking care of the beautiful garden she has grown of flowers, fruits and vegetables, doing floral arrangements, and preparing meals with her home-grown produce for family and friends. For more about her life, please read her obituary.