Why do I keep facing the same obstacles even when I'm trying hard to change?

This is where Sor Juana's life becomes a mirror. She was brilliant, she studied endlessly, she fought for her intellectual rights—and the system kept blocking her anyway. Some obstacles aren't personal karma; they're structural. Sor Juana distinguished between what she could control (her learning, her integrity, her voice) and what she couldn't (the Church's rules, the patriarchy). In karmic terms: you can create perfect inner causes, but if you're pushing against a rigged system, you'll exhaust yourself. The insight isn't to blame yourself for systemic inequity. It's to get smart about where your effort matters. Which obstacles are about your own patterns? Which are about systems designed to keep people like you out? That's different work. One requires honest self-examination and new choices. The other requires strategy, community, sometimes accepting what you can't change alone and finding or building different structures. Sor Juana eventually made peace by writing in ways the system allowed while keeping her mind free. She found where she had agency and used it fully. Where are you actually stuck because of something you're doing, versus where are you hitting a wall that needs collective effort to move?