Sarah Chambers

Sally Jo "Sarah" (McCord) Chambers (1937-1998) was an American teacher who wrote the body of work now known as the Michael Teachings.
Biography
Sarah Chambers was born Sally Jo McCord on November 30, 1937, in Cincinnati, Ohio to Elmer Ernest McCord and Dorothy Lee Clark. She died in Santa Fe, New Mexico, on December 8, 1998. As a teenager, Sarah lived in Michigan, then later lived for a time in Orange County, CA. In 1961, she married her first husband, Walter James Polhemus, in Kansas; they divorced in Solano County, California in 1968.
In 1972, Sarah married Richard "Dick" Chambers in Oakland, CA. Together, they were involved in early groups studying the self-understanding work of George Ivanovich Gurdjieff in Oakland, California. .
Starting in the early 1970s, Sarah had been meeting in a small study group along with Alice Hannah, their husbands (both named Richard) and other close friends who were interested in more advanced spiritual study. Friends invited friends to the groups. Some stayed for a time and many others just passed through. Over the years the group existed, the core of what has become known today as "the Michael Teachings" was revealed. Alice Hannah, "secretary" for the original Michael study group in the early 1970s, kept the group's records and created transcripts of their sessions. The information they brought forth provides the foundation of the body of knowledge, which has now expanded as more teachers are trained and students develop more advanced skills. As advanced students progress in their awareness and needs, new levels of information are being revealed that deepen and broaden the original work. and More Messages from Michael. . Yarbro's book Michael's People describes the fictionalized people involved in the early study groups.
Public Domain transcripts of Sarah's early groups have been published by the non-profit Center for Michael Teachings in three volumes in a series called The Legacy of Sarah Chambers.
From those early beginnings, there are now more than 40 books published about the body of work that came to be known called the Michael Teachings.
About 20 years later, Sarah came back to channeling and the Michael Teachings until her death in 1998; at that time, she allowed her name to be used..
The Michael Teachings
The name "Michael" is simply one way to name a system of personality understanding (or "teaching"). It has no real significance other than to make it known in some definitive way. Modern schools of philosophy and psychology represent facets of this system. Readers of Maslow, Jun, Eric Erikson and Freud, as well as others, will find a ring of familiarity here. Elements of this system were being taught in the 1920s by Gurdjieff, Ouspensky and later Rodney Collin.
Professor Jon Klimo researched channeling and writes in the introduction to his book Channeling,"I intended for this book to be a balanced and objective treatment of the phenomenon of channeling so that you the reader can make your own judgements." He goes on to say "Although, as we shall see, channeling has been around since the beginning of recorded history, it is enjoying a remarkable resurgence today."
An expert on new religious movements, Olav Hammer, describes the Michael Teachings as a "fairly well-structured set of doctrines, expressed in a distinct vocabulary". According to Hammer, Michael is described by believers as a "group soul, a collective consciousness of 1050 essences". Hammer states that the channelers of Michael study the earlier "transmissions" and use similar terminology, making it easier for readers to accept the new material as part of a doctrines.
Nancy Piatkowski, writing in the Journal of American Folklore, reviewed the book The Channeling Zone: American Spirituality in an Anxious Age by Michael F. Brown. Nancy writes that "He uses as prime examples The Seth Material and Michael Teachings, which have been copyrighted and published." ... "In The Channeling Zone, Michael Brown has provided us with a lively, easy to read, yet scholarly look into a spiritual movement whose critics see it as Satanic and evil but whose followers are among the best-educated people in the country. Those who seek the guidance of channels are those who have found dissatisfaction with organized religion yet feel the need for the spiritual in a complex and changing society."
Michael Brown didn't set out to study channeling. An anthropology and Latin American studies professor at Williams College, he was living in Santa Fe temporarily and working on a book about a Peruvian guerrilla movement when he became interested in some drumming from his next door neighbors. Assuming that was an American Indian ceremony, he wanted to learn more. Eventually, he spent five years of research where he tried to make sense of channeling "an an anthropological sense." That research eventually became his book, The Channeling Zone. Brown said the experiences he underwent in his research didn't change his own beliefs. In 2014, Brown was named president of the School for Advanced Research, after shifting into emeritus status as Lambert Professor of Anthropology and Latin American studies at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts.
Mary Meeker Alber, in her Ph.D. dissertation, compared several different methods of conscious development that included: Sri Aurobinda's Integral Yoga, Tibetan Buddhism and Reincarnation, Essence and Personality Systems, The Fourth Way system (George Gurdjieff), The Atica System, The Michael system and Personnesssence (from Dr. Jose Stevens). She writes, "“To test the appeal of the Michael system approach to self-understanding in my community, I developed and taught a workshop at a regional conference that I entitled The Keys to Self-Mastery in which I gave the revised I-MAP introductory presentation to a group of twenty individuals. I also invited José Stevens to conduct an introductory weekend workshop to a group of ten individuals in my community. From these experiences, I have direct awareness of the important insights that this system offers to individuals beyond the integral paradigm originally embodied by the IMAP. Years after these events, participants have expressed an enduring appreciation for the insights they gained about themselves and others, and ask when and how I intend to continue the work.” (pp 373-374). She goes on to compare - in great detail - the Michael Teachings to aspects of the various systems that she reviewed.
The Legacy of Sarah Chambers books
*Center for Michael Teachings (2013). Michael Speaks: The Legacy of Sarah Chambers (Volume 1), ISBN: 978-1300-487241.
*Center for Michael Teachings (2013). Michael Speaks: The Legacy of Sarah Chambers (Volume 2), ISBN: 978-1300-515203.
*Center for Michael Teachings (2016). Michael Speaks: The Legacy of Sarah Chambers (Volume 3), ISBN: 978-1329-165663.

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