Listening to the Muses: Awakening in the Poppy Fields
When I listen the heart, I never know who will arrive. Sometimes it is a goddess, sometimes a historical feminine figure, sometimes a mythical presence. And sometimes—more and more lately—it is the stories themselves. The ones we watch on our screens, the ones we read in books. Characters, especially feminine heroines, can arrive like muses. They move through the heart’s channel of listening as guides, carrying pieces of wisdom for awakening.
Recently, as I was listening, I was brought to a scene from The Wizard of Oz. Dorothy and her companions enter the poppy fields, lulled into a deep, enchanted sleep. This image, once I leaned into it, began to unfold as a teaching about trauma, fragmentation, and the path of returning home.
Dorothy & the Inner Council
Dorothy does not journey alone. She is accompanied by a circle of companions, each representing a vital aspect of our inner life:
The Scarecrow (Mind/Brain): longing for a brain, he mirrors our hunger for clarity, understanding, and discernment.
The Tin Man (Heart): longing for a heart, he embodies our capacity to feel, to open, to love.
The Cowardly Lion (Gut/Will): longing for courage, he represents instinct, power, and embodied strength.
Dorothy (Feminine Self): she is the integrator, the seeker who must weave these parts into wholeness.
And then, always at her side, is Toto—the loyal dog. It’s easy to overlook him, but his presence is profound. In Latin, toto means “in whole, all, everything.” Toto is the reminder of wholeness, the companion that reflects back the truth that home is never truly lost. He is loyalty, friendship, belonging in embodied form. He is the “all” that walks beside us.
Together, they form a kind of inner council: the head, the heart, the gut, the feminine, and the instinctual whole.
The Descent into the Poppies
When the Wicked Witch lures them into the poppy fields, it is not only Dorothy who falls—it is all of them. The mind, the heart, the gut, and even the feminine self are overcome.
This is what happens in trauma, in great life events, in awakenings that shake us from belonging. We can feel fragmented, as if the parts of us have been scattered into a dream. The mind can’t think, the heart can’t feel, the body can’t move forward. We lay down, unconscious, in fields too heavy to rise from.
The Witch here can be seen not only as a villain but as the archetype of the shadow or dark goddess. She is oppression, yes—the structures of power that silence and separate. But she is also the initiator, the one who forces descent. She reminds us that we cannot bypass the underworld. We must pass through the sleep of forgetting before we can awaken.
Sleep, Death, and the Liminal
The poppy itself has long been linked to Hypnos (Sleep) and Thanatos (Death). Its opiate power brings forgetfulness, numbness, the dissolving of consciousness. But this is not only danger—it is initiation.
The poppy is liminal: between waking and sleeping, life and death, memory and forgetting. To enter its field is to descend into the unconscious. To fall into its spell is to step into the mystery of transformation.
For the highly sensitive, this descent is familiar. Many of us have unplugged from our bodies when sensation or experience was too much. We know the numbness of survival. We know what it means to go under.
But in the wisdom of the story, the sleep is not permanent. The descent prepares the way for awakening.
Awakening and Return
Dorothy and her companions do not remain asleep forever. They rise again, remembering their journey and their shared devotion to return home. The poppy field, then, is not their end—it is their initiation.
This is the truth of the heart’s awakening:
We are lured away from belonging by forces too great to bear.
We descend into survival sleep, fragmented and disconnected.
And then, in time, we are called to rise, to awaken, to gather the scattered parts of ourselves and walk on.
Awakening is not a bypass of the descent. It is born of the descent. Belonging is not granted from the outside world—it is remembered in the heart, as we return to the living sanctuary within.
Listening to Stories as Guides
This is why I trust the muses when they arrive..
They remind us that every tale, every character, can become a guide if we listen with heart.
Dorothy, her companions, the Witch, the poppies—they are more than characters on a screen. They are medicine for our awakening. They teach us that even when we lay down in the fields of forgetfulness, even when we fall unconscious, the heart will always call us back.
To listen is to awaken.
To awaken is to return.
To return is to remember—we belong.
✨ If you are awakening from your own poppy fields and longing to return home to your body and heart, I walk beside you as a Heart Doula. Through one-on-one sessions and Heart Breath immersions, I help sensitive souls remember the freedom of belonging.
