How vulnerability and surrender create the pathway for true collaboration by Tanya Paluso (Excerpt from WE Magazine for Women Fall Success Alchemy)

I felt sick to my stomach. I felt like an absolute failure. It felt like everything was falling apart.

I had lost two of my tribe leaders and I wasn’t sure how I was going to pay our overhead that month. I was in total avoidance of dealing with all of it. I was sitting in a restaurant in Goa, India with Sunil, who was telling me that the reason I was constantly sick was because I thought I wasn’t strong enough to fulfill my mission.

I thought I was too weak to be a global leader. I thought I didn’t have what it took.

I was here in India to get away, to have a spiritual awakening. To find myself again.

Six months earlier, I thought I had it all. I created a successful business that I loved, I was in my dream relationship, I lived at the beach and I was surrounded by an amazing community. I had the freedom to do whatever I wanted.

But that was all on the surface. Deep down I felt unfulfilled, like something was missing and that none of it was good enough. I wasn’t good enough. I wanted something else, something more.

From that moment, as Sunil told me I had to take responsibility for what I created and look at it for what it was, I came face to face with the truth.

I realized that the name of my organization – Tribal Truth – was a lie for me.

I wasn’t embodying what I was creating. I wasn’t in alignment. I avoided the truth. I hated the truth. I ran away from the truth to India.

And yet here I was, facing the truth because there was nowhere else to go. I couldn’t hide any longer.

And when I looked really closely, I realized that what was missing in my life was not truth, but tribe.

When I came back home, things continued to disintegrate. I realized I literally had to get to nothing to then create real, authentic tribe of the 21st century.

Real, authentic tribe is about co-creation. It’s about partnership and collaboration. It’s about sharing. It’s about openness and surrender.

What I had been doing is pretending to be in community while in fact I was doing everything by myself. I did Tribal Truth by myself. Nothing was sustainable. No one was in it for the long haul. No one was invested. No one frickin’ cared. Or so it seemed.

My ego kicked and screamed as it felt like everything I had created up to that point was falling away. It felt like I had no tribe left. Two years of work – gone. Down the drain. Part of history. The past.

But I knew something deep in my heart – I craved community and so did other women. There was a reason why so many people were attracted to the name and energy of Tribal Truth: we all want intimacy, connection ,love and support. We want to feel like we are part of something greater than ourselves. Our soul aches for it. Our ego tries to keep us separate, alone and afraid, but our soul knows that tribe is home.

I called an angel into my life: Cara Cadwallader, the San Diego Queen of Sustainability who has embodied tribe for years. She was a yes to my vision. She got it. And she pushed me to my edge to start really looking at what tribe is – how do I personally embody collaboration, partnership and sustainable community building. It was in our “dance,” as she calls it, that I found my success alchemy.

To read the entire article check out WE Magazine for Women PDF Version