Mindfullives.co is Back Online
My mother Usha Welaratna was a cultural anthropologist. She described herself as a Western-trained Sri Lankan Buddhist anthropologist, and from her very first class in the subject at San Jose State University to when she retired all of her research was framed through that lens. It was and remains a powerful analytical lens, one which enabled her to study a variety of communities and unearth insights that simply wouldn’t have occurred to an anthropologist from any other background.
Her award-winning master’s thesis research took her inside the homes of Cambodians immigrants living in San Jose who had survived the Holocaust in their homeland. It enabled her to hear facets of their stories that related to how they were able to survive the horrors and devastation of a genocide that took the lives of nearly 8 million people, or about 25% of Cambodia's population in 1975. That study resulted in a book published by Stanford University Press in 1993 called Beyond the Killing Fields: Voices of Nine Cambodian Survivors in America, which is now part of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum collection.
My mother passed away in Spring of 2022. It was a devastating loss, one I have struggled to move on from. Recently, I realized that part of that struggle is that her work has been so powerful and transformative in the world. Her book was a genuine moment of opening up in the world of cultural anthropology. Hers was one of the first non-Western voices in the field, and that status was not without struggles and setbacks. Her Ph.D. thesis project, which took her to Long Beach California to study inter-ethnic gang violence between several of the area’s most notorious gangs operating in the mid- to late-90s, was presented at conferences but never published.
She also began and nearly completed a comparative study of South Asian religions including Hinduism, Jainism, and Buddhism, but the writing was cut short when the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami devastated her home country of Sri Lanka. She flew there just two days later to conduct an in-depth study of its impacts on the country. Coping With Losses Mindfully and Compassionately was the result: a full-length manuscript which documents her conversations with tsunami survivors along the Southern Coast of Sri Lanka in the months that followed and explores the short- and long-term effects of the tsunami disasters in Sri Lanka and Japan.
Coping with Losses was accepted for publication by an academic press. But her editor retired before the manuscript was complete, and I was there the day she received a letter from the new editor who had been assigned to her book informing her that they were no longer interested in publishing the work. She kept working on the manuscript, made drastic revisions, and strategized on how to get the work out into the world with its many vital insights. Following years of revisions, she ultimately shelved the project, and to the best of my knowledge, never actually shopped it around to other publishers.
I first became my mother’s design consultant back in 1995 or so, when she created a new consulting business called Focal Point, and I created her logo using Adobe Photoshop — a series of cupped hands that unfolded in three layers to imitate the leaves of a lotus flower — based on her description. She knew exactly what she wanted it to look like, and I, as an awkward teen, didn’t appreciate until much later how beautiful the design was, both visually and conceptually.
I created her first website the following year using a laminated cheat sheet of HTML tags I bought at community college, and I maintained her website up until her passing, as she went from a blend of research, teaching, and part-time consulting to retirement to teaching mindfulness meditation under a new name she had come up with: Mindful Lives. It was so difficult to keep her website going for the year after she passed away, to inform people of the funeral details and the three-month and one-year memorial services that are customary in our culture.
It was even harder when the day came that there was no real need to keep the website going. I took it offline, based on our family decision, but I couldn’t bring myself to delete it, or even to let the domain expire. Today, I invite you to return to mindfullives.co, which I have relaunched as an archive of Dr. Usha Welaratna’s scholarly work. You’ll find her writing, links to buy her book, descriptions of her work, and articles written by her as well as about her there. I am working on sharing some of her work that went unpublished but remain truly vital contributions to the fields of disaster management, sustainability, grief, loss, and resiliency, and religious studies.
A note about preserving her work during a time when non-white history is under attack and violence is being used to prolong colonization: I want to do my part to preserve ancestral knowledge — knowledge, I might add, that was built using tools and methods developed by Western cultures for the benefit of all. Race remains a social construct wielded by those in power to otherize as many as possible in the quest for domination and control.
