Meet a Teacher: Matthew Hepburn

When he was in his mid-20s, Matthew Hepburn’s desire to move from Boston to Asia and take on robes was thwarted by a mountain of looming student loan debt. He pondered, “How can I practice that intensively, as if I were living in a monastery, in the midst of daily life, with a crazy job in a big city?” Keeping this guiding question in mind, he made a vow to say “yes” to any and all opportunities related to the dharma.

This vow initially found Matthew stuffing envelopes and cleaning the meditation hall of Cambridge Insight Meditation Center (CIMC), where he worked in exchange for program registration costs. But being in community with CIMC soon landed him one of his first proper teaching gigs: regular meditation sessions for inmates at Concord Prison. There, he met Joseph Kappel, formerly Ajahn Pabhakaro, who became a significant mentor. After going on to sit a number of long retreats at Insight Meditation Society (IMS) in Barre, Massachusetts, Matthew briefly served as a monastic attendant for Bhante Buddharakkhita.

He says his teaching style “tends to be oriented around no-nonsense, practical approaches like, ‘Hey, how are you going to deal with suffering in your life?’ ” In fact, contemplating suffering is one of the avenues that drew him to Buddhism in the first place. While attending Berklee College of Music, Matthew added reading Buddhist teachings to his busy schedule, which included competitive boxing. Shortly after seeing the Dalai Lama speak at Foxboro Stadium, he learned that his grandmother was dying. Matthew watched her die while holding hands with other family members. “Something about getting the teachings for the first time, and then being in the presence of that really shook me. . . . Shook me up in a good way,” he says. “I never set foot in the gym again.”

Matthew reflects on his appreciation for the lessons he learned through boxing, but it is his experience with his grandmother’s death that changed his perspective. “Seeing life leave the body made life in the body so much more obvious,” he says. “I realized I can’t spend hours every week slogging away at my friends and getting pummeled.” As he upped his meditation practice, he became a regular at CIMC, where, a handful of years later, he made his “yes” vow.

He was asked to join Spirit Rock’s Community Dharma Leaders’ two-year training program following his time as an attendant to Bhante Buddharakkhita. Upon completion of the program, Matthew was invited to apprentice at IMS with his longtime mentor Narayan Helen Liebenson. That opportunity opened the door to IMS’s four-year teacher training program, which he completed in 2021.

Today, Matthew is a retreat leader at IMS and one of three guiding teachers at CIMC, where he helps laypeople incorporate committed practice into daily life. His focus on accessibility also led him to Happier Meditation, formerly known as 10% Happier, where he managed content strategy and production for seven years.

“Seeing life leave the body made life in the body so much more obvious”

Despite his long-held enthusiasm for learning and teaching, Matthew faced a roadblock in 2021 that nearly stopped him in his tracks. “I went through a period where teaching was absolute anguish, and the worst part of my life was leading up to needing to teach,” he says. These feelings aroused a strong sense of shame, which led to silence. “I didn’t want to tell a soul that I was feeling this way,” he says. “It felt so inappropriate for a dharma teacher.”

When he opened up to Narayan about his struggles with teaching, she offered him a piece of advice that stuck: “You feel a tremendous amount of affection for the practitioners when you’re teaching. Know that you can rely on that.”

Matthew notes that this was one of the most important moments of his development as a teacher. “I realized that no matter how unskillful and unwise my mind was, I could—in the same way a little kid looks forward to eating ice cream because it’s just a pleasant experience—look forward to the mind-state of respect, affection, and gratitude for the practitioners.”

“I think as teachers,” he continues, “we don’t talk enough about ambivalence in teaching. There can be dukkha associated with the role, and the commitment, and the rest, and the fact that we can still be unenlightened and confused. But one of the beautiful things about this practice is that we don’t have to go inside the content and pick it all apart. We just have to practice skillfully and allow the conditions to undo and unmake themselves.”

♦

WHY I SAY “THANK YOU”

I’m a student 99 percent of the time and a teacher 1 percent of the time. Again and again, there are moments where I do decide to take on the role of dharma teacher—and those moments aren’t one but many.

I didn’t understand much about those moments until some time ago, when they became very difficult. It was a period during which on each occasion when it was time to choose to step into the role, I felt deeply ambivalent at best and painfully resistant at worst. I was plagued with doubt. Eventually, I confided in Narayan. She pointed out that, no matter the doubt, at any time when she saw or heard me teach, she could sense a clear and genuine quality of affection in me for those I was teaching. As I began to reflect and investigate, I found it was, in fact, affection that was mixed with admiration. This, I discovered, was the current moving me through these moments of making the choice to step into the teaching role. And ever since, it has become the thing I look forward to the most about teaching.

Not too long ago I was asked a simple and profound question that helps reveal where these currents of feeling come from. I was asked by a practitioner in a recent practice group: “Why, at the end of a class, a retreat, or a daylong, do so many teachers thank us for our practice?” My answer was an expression of the cause for that affection and admiration. I’d like to restate it here, and if you are reading this, it is addressed to you:

Why do we say thank you? Well, from what I’ve witnessed, wisdom and compassion are contagious. The reduction of greed, of reactive aversion, of volitional delusion are contagious. Generosity is contagious. The joy and empowerment that come from dissolving the causes of harm are contagious. And in this world, “with its devas and its Maras,” with its immense collective creativity, fear, destruction, confusion, and collaboration, I am so moved to see human beings do the noble and courageous work of becoming more and more contagious in just this way. So . . . THANK YOU! Thank you for your practice. Said with great depth and sincerity. Thank you for each moment of practicing.

–Matthew Hepburn 

Adapted from a Cambridge Insight Meditation Center newsletter entitled Answering Your Questions About Teaching.