MY STORY

Sharing stories that surprise and unify people has always been my passion.

Meagan’s Story

For 20+ years I worked creatively across broadcast news, video & film, and publishing in Boston, before pivoting toward education and wellness media through a start-up in Western Mass. I next joined PBS and began a Northampton-based life that was immersed in farm share provisioning, creme de la creme cultural offerings, potlucks, married life, yoga, and women’s circles.

As a staff producer, I spent 12 years working at a fast-paced television station, where I honed my skills as an interviewer and a storyteller. Outside of work, I continued to pursue a variety of healing arts, including homeopathy, qi gong and purified water acquisition. My husband and I were childless, but the proud caretakers of no less than 4 noble cats and dogs.

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But then came Egypt.

An unexpected experience in the King’s Chamber set my life on a singular and unforeseen course. Within six months of returning from Egypt, I had stepped away from my career and begun the difficult process of consciously uncoupling from my then-husband.

MY CALLING

My calling now was to create a documentary called The Breast Archives. After nearly 6 years it was finished, and in 2018 was picked up by First Run Features, who continue to represent the title in North America.

Nothing was easy, and I cried a lot.

I sensed from the beginning that The Breast Archives was a bellwether—that the stories women told me were pointing to something much larger. But I wasn’t yet ready to own my own breast story, so I turned outward, questioning the institutions and cultural assumptions my generation had inherited without much thought.

As the film evolved into something closer to memoir, I began looking more deeply at the world that had shaped us: medicine, religion, media, beauty culture, sexuality—and all the messages women had quietly absorbed about their bodies.

It was a project that demanded patience and care. Promoting a high-concept film about our deeply human—and quietly alive—relationship with our breasts became, unexpectedly, an education in cultural anthropology, American style. I began to wonder whether some of what we dismiss, conceal, or simply fail to notice about the human experience might actually be hidden fruit: overlooked sources of meaning capable of expanding our awareness of ourselves.

I started connecting dots—exploring the toroidal field, the ankh, the yoni, and the women leaders and feminine archetypes so often diminished or erased from the historical record. One question opened into another, and before long I found myself tumbling down some surprisingly sticky passages, where shame, power, commerce, sexuality, symbolism, and the female body have been entangled for generations.

Between 2013-18, I immersed myself in a range of transformational field work and curricula, including yoga teacher training, International School of Temple Arts (Level I), Mama Gena’s School of Womanly Arts (Mastery), and ALysa Starkweather’s Mystery School (2 years). Travel in the Galapagos, Mexico, and England included esoteric pursuits, including Silbury Hill, Teotihuacán and Adam’s Calendar in South Africa.

In 2019, I bid farewell to my beloved Western Mass and relocated to Atlanta, Ga. Warmer weather beckoned, and I had known the terrestrial aromas and birdsong of the Piedmont Plateau since I was a child. The city was also buzzing with film, TV, and sports production, and I was hungry to return to the set and start fresh after my divorce from LJF, and the inscrutable process of completing my film.

Slowly I learned to absorb Atlanta—and eventually to love her. She is a beautifully complicated and gracious city, layered with history, contradiction, creativity and re-invention. It was here that another chapter of my own creative life began to emerge. During the surreal lock-downs I became a portraitist and studio artist, and became immersed in the mythology of ancient Kemet. In 2022 I began offering workshops about the ancient gods & goddesses’ archetypal wisdom.

I also returned to The Breast Archives, creating a Director’s Cut and continuing to follow the deeper cultural questions the film had awakened in me. The project gradually became a portal into an ever-widening investigation into the body, memory, symbolism, sensuality, fascia, and the largely uncharted territory of the breast plateau.

Along the way a handful of experiences with plant medicine added a next-level dimension to that inquiry. I was struck by the many meaningful insights it prompted and gently offered—not as answers, but as invitations to watch, listen and focus on a realm of gently guiding energies. Maternal and benign, the experience of Patcha Mama within the body is extraordinary and unmistakable, and not an experience I would choose to have regularly. It's important work and has taught me to discern ways of knowing myself more deliberately.

Looking back, there is a thread running through all of it. I have spent a lifetime in the pursuit of beauty, creative hospitality, storytelling and education—bringing people together around ideas and experiences that move something within them.

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Gallery

Meagan Murphy’s Creative History