Power, Truth, and Beauty in the Hard Spots — Tray Schlarb

In this episode, designer, business owner, mother, and beauty creator Tray Schlarb offer us her wisdom for navigating life’s difficult initiations. We cover divorce, single mothering, soul callings, and ritual, to name a few.

Hailing from a simple idyllic childhood by the ocean and amongst the sugar cane in South Africa, Tray studied Interior Design at the White House School of Interior Design, winning a textile award. Tray spent the next five years in London working at Europe's largest publishing house while backpacking throughout India, South East Asia, Europe & South America, bringing a plethora of color, vibrancy, and a deep worldview. Tray eventually made her way Stateside where her staging company, Green Couch, was birthed alongside her greatest joy — motherhood.  

Tray resides in the Bay Area with her two daughters & CEO of the family, Poppy, the cat. In her spare time, Tray communes with nature — hiking, dunking in the ocean, and harvesting spring water cliffside. With love for tea ceremonies,  poetry musings, cooking to mantras, bird watching, and tending to family, Tray creates beauty with precision and detail wherever she goes. 

In this conversation, Tray and Catherine discuss:

  • The influence of our homeland and the practice of honoring home.  
  • The ability to be with truth and move with truth.
  • The potent protection of the mother as medicine for the world. 
  • How to access truth by listening and accessing intuition found in stillness.
  • Being in nature, having rituals and ceremonies to bring stillness/Listening. 
  • Turing into the womb — fire in the belly — a knowing and ancient wisdom.
  • Teaching our children to know the truth through our embodiment as mothers
  • Divorce as an initiation to the deeper self - dropping away of something untrue.
  • Returning to self.
  • The importance of Ritual — Tea as a teacher.
  • Being with what is and trusting.
  • Sobriety on all levels.
  • The soul’s song and the meaning of that in Tray’s life as a creator of beauty.
  • The challenge of single mothering.
  • What lights you up is your path.
  • Navigating the unknown and not knowing and allowing versus forcing.

I hope you enjoy this lively, fun, spirited, and heartwarming conversation with the one and only Tray Schlarb!

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Song Credit: All Related, by Nessi Gomes