Consciousness Continuing: Many Lives in One

This is the opening chapter of Consciousness Continuing, the second book in the Consciousness Series. The first book of the series, Consciousness Rising, was published in October 2025. This chapter explores the experience of living many lives within one lifetime.

Consciousness does not improve itself over time. It relocates into realities where different versions of itself are viable.

Chapter 1: Many Lives in One

I have long felt that I’ve lived many lifetimes inside one life. I felt it before I ever heard words like parallel realities or shifting timelines, long before I encountered teachings about reality shifts. It is a lived experience. Entire worlds have closed behind me, and new ones opened — sometimes abruptly, sometimes over the space of several years — but always completely. 

My life feels less like a single story and more like a series of distinct realities, each with its own version of me. Perhaps you feel this way too, even if you don’t yet have the language for it.

I’ll describe my major shifts here, as they may help you recognise your own.

Shopping Spree

I grew up in a conventional family with conventional problems — rural-based, Australian, doing their best, with limited internal and external resources to cope with five children, one income, marital disharmony, and life’s general problems. 

Then, in my early twenties, I entered a reality that was entirely new and unexpected. I met my future husband at a prayer meeting, so we shared a spiritual interest. Almost nothing else was common between us. Through that relationship, I stepped into a world of high income, sophistication, international travel, and material ease. It wasn’t just more money; it was a completely different way of thinking, living, and relating to the world.

His parents understood that I came from a very different background and, in their own way, tried to help me adjust. I went through a stage of having long conversations with my mother-in-law about clothes. If there had been another way for them to help, I think they would have taken it, but it came through clothes — something my mother-in-law loved, and something I knew nothing about but needed to learn.

What is evening wear? I would ask. 
What is day wear? 
How many outfits do you own? 
What do you wear to this, or to that? 
What is appropriate? 
Why can’t I wear such-and-such?

We spent many hours in these conversations, and I spent many more shopping and experimenting with said clothes. I wasn’t trying to dress like her — she was fifty years older than me. Her wardrobe was carefully put together with tailored suits in different colours, structured skirts and jackets, silk blouses — clothes chosen to look polished and sophisticated in a very American, self-made, socially aspirational way. But I needed to understand the reality I was living in so I could hopefully inhabit it in my own way. 

For a young woman who had never had any money for clothes (or anything else), who shopped almost entirely in second-hand stores, wore hand-me-downs, and didn’t take an interest in what she wore, suddenly being able to walk into any shop and pay any price for any item was, at the very least, an odd situation to find oneself in.

It was a complete and dramatic relocation into another universe. 

Sliding into a Different Reality

About ten years later, in my early thirties, that relationship ended. Along the way, I had grown — not just spiritually, but personally. I had grown up. I had a stronger sense of who I was, how I wanted to live, and what mattered to me. I no longer had access to that kind of money, but it didn’t matter.

I chose a reality aligned with my evolving way of seeing — intentional, authentic, meaningful, spiritually connected. I lived on an ordinary income, but I was no longer adapting to someone else’s world. I was shaping my own.

At the same time, I made another leap — seemingly unrelated, but nothing is accidental. I took up ice skating. The ice skating world was completely new to me. I entered spaces filled with people who had lived in their bodies their whole lives, who understood physicality, coordination, and material existence in ways I never had. It brought me into an intensified relationship with my own body. I had to connect with it, learn its language, and cooperate with it to achieve my goals. It could no longer be treated as inconsequential, “unspiritual” or secondary. 

It was through ice skating that I met my second husband, who was an ice-skating coach — my ice skating coach. He embodied physical prowess on and off the ice, and helped me connect with my own body not only as an ice skater, but also in personal ways. I learned to inhabit, respond to, and listen to my body as an ally and advocate. 

This process deepened this major reality shift by anchoring it in physical awareness.

Public Path

By the time I reached my mid-forties, that relationship had come to an end, opening a different kind of shift. I began working as a spiritual healer and counsellor. I advertised, put a sign on my house, and did not dilute what I was doing to make it more palatable. At the same time, I began my writing career. I was very clear about who I was and where I was going. Another reality had locked in.

Alongside these changes, my long-standing focus on ice skating gave way to an equally strong — and eventually stronger — commitment to ballroom dancing. As so often happens during a reality shift, several central elements of life reorganise simultaneously. On the surface, they may appear unrelated, but they are different expressions of the same internal movement.

Within the context of this new life, I formed a third relationship with someone who understood my spiritual direction and was willing to work on himself inwardly, even if he did not wish to live it outwardly in the way I did.

Into the Inner City

That third relationship, too, had its own timing. In my mid-fifties, I moved (without partner) from the suburban home I had lived in for twenty-five years — where I had raised my three children — into inner-city Northcote. It was a gentrified, layered, vibrant place: culturally and politically aware, spiritually diverse, and creative. 

As my, by now, ex-partner said of my new environment, “She is as happy as a pig in mud.”

Two of my children were grown, and the youngest was in his final years of school. The last of our many dogs was getting older and would soon pass. I was less and less organising my life around family needs. 

My inner work was intensifying.

Returning to Country

In my early sixties, the next major shift arrived. Once my youngest was ready to live independently, I moved to the country. This had been a long-held desire, but life logistics and timing had kept me in the city.

The immediate reason for the move was practical: my granddaughter, who lived in the country, needed support. While that was the visible catalyst, reality shifts arise from many turning wheels, synchronising their movements until a change becomes inevitable.

While it was true that I had been “as happy as a pig in mud” with my previous move from outer suburbia to inner-city life, I was even more muddily happy with my rural move.

Many spiritual seekers — and, just as often, people who would not describe themselves as spiritual — find rural life highly conducive to their wellbeing. This is largely due to nature: trees, open space, rivers and creeks, fresh air, moon and stars, and shifting light. These elements are innately enlivening and regulating. They allow the body to synchronise more easily with natural rhythms, resulting in a calmer nervous system, a more robust body, and a more settled state of mind.

The Roads Not Taken

I have told you the beginning and ending of five of my major life shifts. Now imagine that there had been no ending to any of those lives.

Imagine that I stayed in each reality and carried it right through to the end of my life. 

1. Imagine I continued in that first marriage, fully inhabiting the world of wealth, social expectation, and material ease. 
2. Or imagine I remained within the ice-skating world and the identity I held there. 
3. Or imagine I never left my suburban home of twenty-five years and ended up living there for fifty years. 
4. Or imagine I never left the inner city for the country. 

When we do this, it becomes clear that each of these phases is not merely a section within the same continuous life, but a complete life in its own right. Each could easily have continued, carrying its own patterns, identity, relationships, routines, and eventual ending. 

To make this more vivid, you can ask yourself: What is that person doing now? 

• What is the version who never left that first marriage doing today? 
• What about the one who stayed in the ice-skating world?
• Or the one who never left the family home?
• Or the one who remained in the inner city and never moved to the country? 

A Different Configuration

When you allow these lives to unfold in your imagination, you can see that each is complete. And yet — they are not us. Not the “us” that exists now. They are realities we no longer inhabit.

We are living from a different place, as a different person. And for all we know, those previous selves may be continuing along their own timelines, doing just fine — or not.

The ‘me’ that exists now is not an accumulation of past selves, but the result of having moved. Consciousness does not merely change its circumstances. It changes its energetic location. 

Location here does not mean place, but the experiential field from which life is generated. It is the field you’re standing in, the context that responds to you.

It is not the same me, in the same world, now with different conditions. It is a different world responding to a different configuration of me.

Take my move from suburban family life to inner-city Northcote. Superficially, this looks like the same person with a different address. But energetically, it wasn’t. 

In the suburban reality:

• certain conversations happened
• certain futures were likely
• certain rhythms dominated
• certain versions of me were activated
• and very importantly, certain possibilities were not available

In the inner-city reality:

• a different field existed
• different identities were possible and increasingly likely
• a different culture and inner permission came online
• a different Donna could exist without effort

I did not change myself to fit the new environment. I moved into a reality where a different self already fit.

Consciousness does not improve itself over time. It relocates into realities where different versions of itself are viable.

When change is understood as reconfiguration or relocation rather than self-improvement, alignment matters more than force, and leaving matters as much as arriving. You don’t become the next self. You move into the world where that self already exists.

Consciousness moves into different experiential worlds. Each world generates a different self. The present “you” is not downstream from the past — it is elsewhere. 

That’s why those past lives are not you.

What This Changes

If consciousness relocates into different experiential worlds — and if each world calls forth a different self — then change is not something that happens to us within a single life. It is movement between realities, each complete in its own way.

Seen this way, change no longer requires loyalty to continuity. You are not obliged to preserve past worlds simply because you once lived there. Movement does not mean failure, inconsistency, or avoidance. It means relocating into a different field.

This understanding brings a powerful freedom. It allows direction changes without justification. It allows experiments without guarantees. It allows you to trust impulses toward change even when the full reason is not yet visible.

When you move into a different reality, the pieces reorganise on their own. Relationships rearrange or fall away. Problems lose their grip. New capacities become natural rather than effortful. Not because you have improved yourself, but because you are standing in a different field.

Further, when you shift realities, you are not only changing your present and future, but your past as well. Each reality carries its own history and its own trajectory forward. Although this idea may seem peculiar at first, it can be profoundly liberating to work with. Hold the idea, consider it as an experiment, and notice what it opens in your thinking.

And with that in mind, let’s turn to your life and map your reality shifts.

Practice: Mapping Your Reality Shifts

Set aside some quiet time for this practice. You may want to write things down, but you can also simply reflect. There is no need to do this all at once.

Begin by looking back over your life and identifying your major shifts, the moments where your reality radically changed. Times when life before and life after were no longer the same.

Start with the most significant ones. For each major shift, consider the following:

• What changed externally? (Work, relationships, location, income, lifestyle, identity, roles.)
• What changed internally? (Values, priorities, sense of self, direction, or meaning.)
• Did this shift come suddenly, or unfold over time?
• Did you consciously choose it, or did it seem to be thrust upon you?
• How did other people respond to this change? Who adjusted easily, and who did not?
• At the time, did it feel positive, negative, destabilising, liberating, or inevitable?
• Looking back now, what did this shift give you, even if it was difficult or unwelcome at the time?

Your Roads Not Taken

Now, choose one of your realities and imagine that it never changed.

Picture yourself continuing in the same relationship, the same work, or the same way of living — carried all the way to the end of your life. Notice what that life would have looked like. What remained the same? What unfolded differently? How does it feel to imagine that alternate timeline?

If you wish, repeat the process with another reality, imagining it never ended.

Through this, you will feel just how distinct the realities you moved through truly were.

Read More of Consciousness Continuing (Book 2 of Consciousness Series)

Learn more about Consciousness Rising (Book 1 of Consciousness Series)