Driving. A good way to work out stress and anger is during times in the car, when you’re driving. It takes a tremendous amount of energy to drive anywhere that has a high concentration of people. Once again, we find ourselves in battle with our ego, because it can not entirely control the situation. You can control your vehicle, but the road, weather, and other drivers are not within your power to direct. This forces the ego to pull on your emotions. Now, emotions are true, they do not lie, but they can be manipulated. The ego has learned this and has become extremely proficient at using the emotions to manage situations to what it thinks is right. That is the key here, what it thinks is right. The ego has its inventory of information and that’s all, anything outside that inventory is going to be pushed aside or discarded. The only thing important to the ego is itself. So, when there is a challenge, such as a car pulling in front of you and slowing down, the ego has lost control of the event. Since it cannot control the event it takes control of what it can, you, through emotions. The survival instincts are alive and kicking in the ego, it is scared to lose control, scared to lose its importance, scared of no longer having a reason to exist. In essence, the ego is scared of death. It doesn’t know why, just like a cat chasing a mouse, the mouse is going to run until its legs can no longer move or else the cat will destroy it. The mouse doesn’t view the scenario of its impending death in its mind; it just runs and tries to get away from the cat. The ego reacts the same; it protects itself through the use of your emotions. It lives to control, taking the control away takes away its meaning to live.
Try this. Start to see the other cars on the road as rocks. I like to visualize asteroids floating in space. Using the laws of relativity, an object continues on a straight path until that path is impeded by something else. So there is no thought process to a traveling asteroid making its way through the solar system. If you were on your way to Saturn and an asteroid crosses in front of you slowing you down or sending you on a detour you can’t blame the rock. Sure, you can be mad and you can even allow your ego to take it as a personal attack, but again, there is no conscious being to express your anger and frustration at. The ego is forced to reevaluate and, eventually, it understands there are things outside its control. This takes a lot of time and work. In most cases it will not be accomplished in one life time. The ego has to become aware for it to take full advantage of the world around it.