Parikrama: Sacred Circling as a Framework for Healing-Focused Critical Qualitative Inquiry

In this article, I propose a healing-focused, presence-rooted reconfiguration of critical qualitative inquiry through parikrama , the practice of sacred circling. Drawing on a contemplative experience at a Buddhist-Hindu temple in Darjeeling, India, I argue that critical inquiry need not be driven solely by opposition. When researchers remain locked in oppositional consciousness, defining themselves exclusively in relation to what oppresses them, they feed the very systems that drain their spirit. I introduce three moves toward healing-focused inquiry: parikrama as metaphor and methodology, which generates research questions from gaps in beingness rather than gaps in literature; internal resource discernment, which tracks where energy flows and reclaims it from depleting systems; and remembering ancestral knowledge of repair, which looks beyond academic gatekeepers to poets, artists, and elders who have always known how to heal. I conclude with a framework for sacred circling applicable across wisdom traditions and cultural contexts.