Jenna Lee’s debut novel, “Heavenly Creatures,” is a retelling of the Buddhist legend of Avalokitesvara and Mahasthamaprapta, influenced by eastern and western spiritual traditions. The legend tells how, thousands of years ago, Tara and her brother were eaten by wolves after their mother abandoned them in the forest. However, Tara doesn’t remember that until she meets Sun Wukong, the heavenly Monkey King. Tara begins having dreams of her past lives, and Sun Wukong persuades Tara to embark on a spiritual quest to discover the meaning behind her present-day traumas by exploring her past lives.
Jenna Lee has been studying spirituality since she attended Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire 13 years ago. She’s taught meditation at UC Berkeley and has studied in Nepal to further her education in healing her ancestral patterns to then help others.
It wasn’t until her time living in South Korea learning about Korean and Chinese philosophy, history, and culture that she became academically invested in generational patterns. “As a Korean-American, I had only grown up learning about American and European history,” Lee shares, “and learning about eastern philosophy helped me to think differently about the world and my place in it.”
After some soul-searching, Lee decided to quit graduate school in South Korea at the end of 2021. “I was feeling pretty lost,” she admits. “I began writing for 30 minutes to 6 hours a day, and the book finished itself in two months.” She says she took her life’s experiences in spirituality to retell the Buddhist legend of the two bodhisattvas. It was around this time she went to Nepal for 38 days of intensive meditation. She cites her teacher in Nepal as her inspiration to finish the book: “He is basically the Buddhist shopkeeper in the story.”
For the past decade, modern psychology has been exploring generational trauma and how it relates to the present individual. But eastern philosophy and psychology already have generated extensive texts on this topic for centuries — if not longer.
According to the American Psychological Association dictionary, generational trauma is a psychological and physiological event in which the descendants of a person that experienced a traumatic event show adverse emotional and behavioral reactions to that event as if the descendants experienced it themselves. Essentially, it means that an individual can inherit trauma from their ancestors. “It’s like inheriting your parents’ habits,” Lee says. “When you go to the doctor, they ask if heart disease runs in the family — all this is part of generational trauma or generational patterns.”
There are different types of generational trauma, but an important one related to Koreans and which has informed “Heavenly Creatures” is han, an emotion related to grief or resentment. According to John M. Glionna, han is “intensely personal, yet carried around collectively, a national torch, a badge of suffering tempered by a sense of resiliency.”
Most Korean literature has a happy ending, but more recently there has been a touch of sadness in some classic, beloved stories. It is through that national suffering, as well as her own personal life experiences, that Lee felt propelled to write “Heavenly Creatures.”
“The main theme of the book,” recites Lee, “is forgiveness and acceptance. The [difficult] secret to healing generational trauma is coming to a place of complete and loving acceptance of the past.”
Lee says that it’s not about pointing fingers and washing your hands clean of accountability. Rather, it’s about recognizing that trauma is there, acknowledging it, and healing from it. “That process can be difficult,” Lee concedes, “but the rules are simple.”
Through meditation, people can recognize where their hardships come from. When a person gets deep enough into their meditation, their subconscious can bring awareness to patterns — generational patterns — which offer ways to change or improve them. Meditation provides the opportunity to analyze how one’s character is molded by ancestral habits.
It is through Tara’s spiritual quest that Lee hopes to bring more happiness into the world. As an expert in healing generational patterns, improving confidence, and enhancing relationship emotional intelligence, she hopes everyone can learn something from “Heavenly Creatures.” Not only is it a good fantasy, but it holds valuable eastern teachings that may shed some light on one’s own healing journey. “This book,” reassures Lee, “is for anyone who’s ever felt alone in life. You’re not as alone as you think.”
Jenna Lee believes that all people are enlightened beings striving to embody their unique strengths in the world. She helps people heal generational patterns of self-sabotage to embrace the highest versions of themselves and follow their highest calling. Her goal is to provide a unique combination of spirituality and coaching to help people–especially women–achieve radical transformation in their lives. You can learn more at her website, The Consciousness Coach.
