Meditation is a fine line. You have to value yourself enough to give yourself what you need. But you also have to let go of all the assumptions and wants and simply be in the moment. This is one of the many paradoxes of meditation: meditate to calm the self while realizing there is no self.

I’ll be explaining some paradoxes in Buddhism and Zen. They seem counterintuitive, but they are profound when you truly grasp them.

1. Breathe until you are being breathed.

If you’ve ever had a deep meditation, you’ll know that there comes a point where everything falls away. Whether your eyes are closed or open, you break through the barrier of identifying with your surroundings, and you suddenly exist in nothing. “You” is the wrong word here, but like so much in meditation, language fails to describe the true breadth of the experience. There are no thoughts or feelings. You can turn on these feelings like turning on water from a garden hose, but it’s like you’re watching the water gush out from across the room. When we meditate, we shut down our brain’s prefrontal cortex, the center of thoughts and actions. We shut down our sense of self, and all that’s left is whatever is left without our thoughts.

The feeling goes from a conscious attempt to focus on the breath to an effortless breathing that feels like something is breathing through you–like you are the bellows that the holy hand is activating. When you’re in deep meditation, you merge with the space beyond your thoughts. Because it feels more like a merging and less like a conscious action of staying there, it feels like you are no longer choosing conscious action and instead are becoming part of something bigger.

Plain English translation: “Breathing until you lose sense of yourself and you merge with that which is greater than you.”

2. Chase the goalless goal.

Zen can be inaccessible when you don’t know what the hell people are talking about. The paradox goes something like this: our thoughts are the cause of our suffering. Only the meaning we put on things makes us suffer. The reactions we have, from winning the lottery to watching a jaguar tear apart its dinner, are just that: reactions. We don’t see the world’s events from a place of open acceptance–we see the world as our emotions see them.

Because our thoughts create our suffering, we need to step out of the mind entirely. Zen asks us to step out of our preconceived notions and exist without labeling things. This is a goal. The action you take, however, is not labeling anything. Once again, language fails us, and we have to resort to paradox.

Plain English translation: “Don’t label, anything including your goals, and make that your goal.”

3. Resist with non-resistance.

We love to run away from our problems. We don’t want to feel our pain, because it’s “common sense” that we want to feel good all the time. The chaos in your life is so much harder when you can’t accept the difficult things happening to you. When you’re barely keeping your head above water, it helps to acknowledge that so you don’t drown.

You can transcend the chaos by becoming it. Transcending means seeing your problems as only tied to the relative world, not the absolute world. Your problems have more in common with your mom’s problems than with a rock’s problems. A rock doesn’t even have problems. Becoming the chaos means you surrender completely to your situation. You accept what is happening to you totally. You don’t say, “I’m doing fine.” You say “I’m really struggling.”

When you accept that things are hard, you can resist it with non-resistance. The easiest way to fight something is to go along with it. If you can surrender completely to the moment and accept it, you can go along with it. And going along with it means you don’t resist it. And when you don’t resist things, that’s non-resistance. You don’t want to go along with life’s difficulties. However, the easiest choice is to accept it, even if you’re accepting that you don’t accept it.

Plain English translation: “The easiest thing to do is to accept what’s happening to you, even if you don’t like it.”

4. The path is not the path.

This idea is that as soon as you label something as the path, it disappears. This is because living without labels and detaching from wants is ideal in the Zen tradition. Zen monks are human who have wants, but they hold those wants lightly. If things change, that’s fine.

When we label our experience, we come back to the lens of the ego. The ego always labels things: wanting pizza, not having enough money, feeling heartbroken, feeling inferior to a certain person. When we label our experience as “being on the meditative path,” it’s no longer the meditative path because that path exists only without labels. Once you label it, you no longer have it. This kind of awareness forces us to be present. If we really want spiritual growth, we will have to be present without labeling things.

Plain English translation: “As soon as you label that you are on the meditative path, you are no longer on it, because being on it requires detaching from labels.”

5. To find Buddha, you must kill Buddha.

This one is a shock. How in the hell am I supposed to kill Buddha? What this actually means is that spiritual enlightenment does not come from wanting spiritual enlightenment. If detaching from outcomes, goals, and labels is part of the path, then you must first learn how to release your attachments to labels. If you want to find the joy beyond the world you live in–the relative world of comparisons–you need to release your attachments to that world.

Detach from wanting to become enlightened. Instead of thinking that you want to be enlightened, become okay with any outcome. In doing that, you live in the way that enlightened people live, without wanting it. That brings you closer to enlightenment. Pretty cool, huh?

Plain English translation: If you want to become enlightened, detach from the idea of becoming enlightened because detaching from wants is what makes an enlightened person.

These paradoxes, if applied to your life, hold the keys to changing your relationship with everything. I invite you to live them as best you can. These paradoxes help us see that in the thick of contradiction, there can be clarity.