Hello, everybody. Welcome to the Sex, Love and SuperPowers Podcast Show. I’m your host, Tatiana Berindei. Today, I have with me Meagan Murphy. We’re going to be talking about her film, The Breast Archives, and women’s empowerment through body wisdom. Meagan Murphy is an award-winning director and producer with 25 years of experience in film and broadcast. During her 12 years with WGBH Educational Foundation, Meagan produced programs in various genres, including documentary, public affairs, cooking shows, news and children’s series. Her film repertoire includes Night Deposit, Fathers and Sons, and Victor’s Big Score.
Now after completing a two-year women’s mystery school and training as a youth mentor, Murphy launched Deliberate Healing Productions LLC to create The Breast Archives, a film about women’s body-based wisdom. This is definitely where you and I connect. I’m so excited to have you on the show. Welcome, Meagan.
Thank you so much. I’m so pleased to be here.
Absolutely. I’m really looking forward to this conversation today. I have a feeling we’re going to go into some deep and juicy and fun, exciting places. Before we launch into that, why don’t you go ahead and share with us what are your superpowers?
I have a raw power in my hands.
Superpowers. Well, I have a handful. One I wanted to mention is my hands. I have a raw power in my hands and it’s always been there. I have this capacity to heal in a slightly benign way. When I put my hands in space for healing, they are powerful. I’ve seen it many times. I’ve never put it into a specific and disciplined practice, but I’ve always had a deep awareness of my hands as something mysterious from when I was a small kid on the school bus. I always was looking at people’s hands, noticing the different types of hands, looking at my hands, comparing them to other people’s hands. I always noticed people’s hands in photographs and I’ve had this subtext silently paralleling my life. I’ve actually decided that that’s what my next film is going to be about.
Yeah. I was going to say it sounds like The Hands Archives.
Yeah. I am a closeted palm reader.
Oh, fun.
It’s a very interesting thing to do. I’ve read a lot of books about it. When I do do it, which isn’t very often, I sometimes feel like I’m channeling information because I get these details about people that wouldn’t necessarily be presented in the lines themselves, but there’s some global information that’s true for everyone that one can see in the hands. It really ends up being very reassuring for people. It’s very validating for people to have their palms read. I really enjoy it. I think it’s fascinating. That’s one of my superpowers. Slightly undeveloped. My other slightly more developed superpower would be my curiosity. It’s rather insatiable.
Awesome. I love it. That’s so fun. I’m guessing that it’s this curiosity that led to this film, The Breast Archives. I really want to hear how that film came into being. What was your journey with it?
Yeah. You’re going to love this story. I have long been a television producer journalist type person, asking questions. Therefore, the curiosity was always there. Always wanting to know what was the passion driving a person’s career or line of work. I did all my interviews with that sort of hypothesis. How is what you do for a living an expression of who you are? There was always a deep curiosity driving that. My curiosity has certain motives that I’ve … It’s taken time for me to fully understand because it’s not really what you would think on the surface as a simple curiosity. It’s more than that.
It is about accessing another person’s inner knowing or their inner wisdom. I’m always after that, but then there’s this desire that’s innate to have them discover something inside of that examination. It helped me get really rich content and when I would go out in the field with crews and conduct interviews with every type of person you can imagine when I was working at the PBS station and even before that, just in my work as a producer, doing different projects. Let’s move over to The Breast Archives.
I had done a women’s mystery school. Alisa Starkweather’s the Priestess Path. That had really opened my eyes to the fact that women were holding on to a lot of stories and there was a lot of reaches. There was a lot of wisdom and expertise that society doesn’t always easily embrace. Genomic type wisdom. Even a gender preference had been suppressed. A certain knowing had never really been able to be safely communicated. I discovered that, gosh, women had all of these stories. Here I am, a television producer, always looking and digging for stories. I started to become tuned in to the unique experience of women in our culture.
I also started to realize that women’s experiences were largely body-based experiences, but that the culture focused on the mind’s experience of the self and the mind’s journey in a career, whereas women are pregnant or they’re nursing or they’re bleeding or they’re bulging or they’re … They’re just expressing through the soft and squishy body that is a women’s reality. That context is so often not honored in the mainstream media, in the narrative stories that we’re fed since childhood. We just overlook this very important premise of a woman’s life, which is her body-based identity.
I started to realize that I was myself complicit in this storytelling technique that a woman was either pregnant or she wasn’t. She was either bleeding or she wasn’t. There wasn’t any nuance whatsoever. Here I am, this feminist in a women’s mystery school and working at PBS and traveling the world. I was supposed to be the type that was so open and insightful and whatnot. I realized I myself was complicit in this tendency to overlook the body-based experience of women. That’s the backdrop a little bit that led me to The Breast Archives.
The big thing that happened … Well, it was also a very breasty year. Everyone seemed to be either afraid of breast cancer or was being diagnosed with it or was having mammograms. I myself had been called back for a second mammogram. I had just been the dutiful citizen, going for my annual mammogram. Just doing what I was told around caring for my body and not really having ever developed a kind of an intuitive discourse with the body. I’m a yogi. Believe me. I do a lot of yoga. I’ve been practicing it for 25 years. I did it this morning. I really love it. Even though I had that you would say advantage, I still was embedded … My identity was embedded in my mind’s experience of myself for the most part.
I was in the Priestess Path.
Anyway, here I am, having another mammogram. Women were having double mastectomies because they had fibrous breasts. I had friends with babies who couldn’t nurse and who felt this incredible deep shape for not wanting to nurse or for not being able to do it for longer than two months or whatever. Then I was in this Priestess Path and we were doing … Occasionally we would do rituals where we would take off our tops. It was this big deal to do that with 22 women. Some women had no problem with it. Other women refused. I struggled with it. I was a newlywed. I was comfortable with my body, but still, there was this veil between being seen by women fully and totally. Somehow the breasts represented that totality of the self in some way, shape or form.
These were different things that were happening. Then I was in Egypt, Tatiana. I was actually traveling in Egypt and it was a unique trip because it happened … I went in 2011. I had been paying incrementally for this trip for many, many months. Suddenly, the country fell apart politically. There was this revolution and this man who had been in power for four years, Mubarak, stepped down.
I remember that.
The ministry of whatever was on fire. My parents and my husband and all my friends were like, “Don’t go.” I’m like, “I will lose all my money if I do not go. I am going.” I went and we ended up coming into the eye of the storm. A great calm had come over the country. It was very safe. There was not even a single issue. I never felt afraid, but the important piece here is that the country was emptied of tourists. There was no one else there, it seemed, but us. The group that I was with had been reduced from a group of 20 to a group of just seven. There were seven women and I didn’t know any of them.
We started to move around the country. We went to 12 different sites. Fast forward to one morning, it was pre-dawn and I was at a temple called Philae down near the Sudanese border. This temple is specifically dedicated to Isis, who was a great and grand goddess in time. Huge goddess on Earth. She was revered for thousands of years. There was no one there at this temple. While I was walking around and in my own thoughts, I got a gut feeling. A message. Some kind of cosmic download. The message was simple. It said, “Within the breasts, there is contained an ancient wisdom.”
It didn’t mean much to me at first. I filed it away as something interesting, but it was a visceral thing that came to me. Coursed through me in a rather visceral way. I’ve had that experience a handful of times in my life. I know enough to not poo poo it and ignore it. I know that it’s something that I have to process. I’ll never forget. I was on the plane ride home back to JFK or wherever I was going back to, and in my ear, there was this, “Breasts, ancient wisdom, breasts, breasts, breasts, ancient wisdom.” I’m like, “This is something I need to pursue. What does this mean? What is this ancient wisdom?”
Because I was interviewing people at least twice a week … I was a working producer interviewing people. I was very comfortable with the idea of sitting down and asking women, “What’s this? Do you have breast-based wisdom? If so, tell me what it is. What is this breast-based wisdom?” I decided that I would just gather women informally and ask them about it. It wasn’t initially intended to be a project, a documentary. It was like an experimental inquiry, but I got these women to agree to come. I passed my net out to my little community here, which was a fairly sizable community because of some important people with lots of girlfriends and connections and whatnot. Plus, I was in the Priestess Path. I just knew a lot of people. I’m a fairly social person.
I only ended up getting nine women. Well, a couple people canceled on the day of the interviews. They backed out for different reasons, but I ended up with nine women over the course of two series of interviews. I knew right away as I started asking them about their childhood and when their breasts first came in. Every producer knows to go back in time and get a biographical backdrop. I stumbled into a cache of the story that had never had an outlet. I knew from my experience with the Priestess Path that there was all this suppressed story and feelings and experience that had never had a forum in this culture.
Here I was, tapping into a place where it was like a portal. It came flowing out. They were retelling with the greatest detail experiences in middle school and 6th grade when they were 11, 10, 9. All of those adventures and misadventures that a teenage girl goes through once her body starts to change when she’s pre-sexual. She doesn’t have a sexual bone in her body, and yet here is this emerging sensual body. Well, a body that’s perceived as sensual by the patriarchy, the men, the uncles, the fathers, the garbage men, the mailmen. Everyone. The boys in the classrooms now will be treating most of the time a girl differently. Girls oftentimes don’t know how to navigate, so they suppress a lot of those mixed feelings.
Here I am sitting with my makeup artists, my camera operator, and my production assistant. We’re just watching wide-eyed as these women are just pummeling me with all of these stories. I knew I had stumbled into something completely unique. With all of my experience, I was just dumbfounded that I had stumbled into this portal of access to all of this rich and textured story. I was deeply moved by the revelations. Then, of course, everyone had agreed to take off their tops in these interviews. I had arranged for that in advance. It seemed ridiculous to talk about a women’s breast wisdom and not see her breasts. These nine brave souls had said, “Okay. I’ll do it.”
Some of them had required some coddling. Others just were like, “I’m in.” I thought the juxtaposition of this honest storytelling and this recounting of their experiences as girls and then the influences of those experiences as they grew and had to navigate through the pitfalls that women struggled with. You’re damned if you do, damned if you don’t. Everyone knows the contradictions and the duplicity of living as a woman in the patriarchy. You’re a virgin or you’re a whore. You know what I mean? Then it follows from there.
I am really excited to dive deeper into some of the pearls of wisdom that you took out of this experience. We do have to go to a quick break. I’m just so taken by this story and I’m very excited. I’m sure some of our listeners are as well. It’s a very powerful story and I want to hear more about it. If you do too, you would do well to stay tuned after our break, but before we go to break, can you please tell our listeners where they can find out more about you, where they can find out more about the film? I know you have some exciting things coming down the pipeline about how people can have access to this film, but you can just tell them where they can get more information.
Sure. The film’s website is thebreastarchives.org. I have a YouTube channel as well. The Breast Archives channel.
Beautiful. We’ve been talking with Meagan Murphy about her film, The Breast Archives, and women’s empowerment through body wisdom. We’re going to take a quick break, but stay tuned because when we get back, she’s going to share with us some just real pearls of this experience. Stay tuned.
To listen to the entire show click on the player above or go to the SuperPower Up! podcast on iTunes.
Music Credit: All instruments played by Amanda Turk. Engineered and produced by Tatiana Berindei and Daniel Plane reelcello.com
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