Born in Rangoon, Burma, she was strongly influenced by her grandmothers, one who was Catholic and the other Buddhist. In 1965, she immigrated to Montreal, Canada, with her parents and brother and grew up as one of a handful of Burmese families in Canada. Moving away from the religious influences of her childhood, she found herself retaining the meditative practices of Buddhism that she learned in childhood and which seemed to surface as coping strategies in stressful situations. Through her work as a Zen practitioner and psychologist, Lynette also came to understand the intricate link between physiology and emotional states as she explored what it meant to grow up in a violent dictatorship and experience being uprooted from family and friends as a child.