Moscardo, Gianna (2022) Eat pray love or total recall? Mindfulness and tourism. In: Singh, Tej Vir, Butler, Richard, and Fennell, David A., (eds.) Tourism as a Pathway to Hope and Happiness. Aspects of Tourism . Channel View Publications, Bristol, UK, pp. 32-48.

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Abstract

Eat, Pray Love and Total Recall are two popular movies, based on popular books, that present very different views on tourism. In Total Recall the future is bleak and many people can only travel through experiences implanted directly into their brains. The story explores what happens when such an implant goes wrong. Ultimately, the hero finds his true self through his travel experiences, whether imagined or real, defeating capitalist overlords and freeing the poor from the negative environmental consequences of unchecked development. Eat, Pray, Love is a romantic film of self-discovery through travel. The heroine of this story finds her true self by travelling through Italy to eat, through India to pray and through Indonesia where she finds true love. Both are stories about travel as transformation, albeit in very different ways. It could be suggested that this contrasting of good versus bad and transformation through challenge versus love in part drives the rationale for the present volume. Although I do not agree with all the arguments made for the necessity of this book, I do agree that tourism has the potential for good. This chapter will focus on the concept of mindfulness and how it could be used to achieve tourism’s potential for good. The chapter will begin by identifying and critically examining the different approaches to mindfulness The chapter will then focus on Langerian or socio-cognitive Mindfulness and map out where mindfulness fits into the tourism system describing what a mindful tourist and what mindful tourism might look like. This will be used to identify the various ways mindfulness could assist in improving the positive contributions that tourism could make to both tourists and hosts. A set of principles for encouraging both forms of mindfulness in tourism will then be described. Finally, the chapter will return to the two stories described at the start of the chapter noting that in good stories things don’t always go as expected. Although Total Recall is a dark story the hero triumphs in an uplifting ending. Eat, Pray Love is a light story where it appears the heroine triumphs. But Eat, Pray, love is a true story and in real life the love found while travelling doesn’t last so the final word on that story is a sad one. The dark approach turned out well and the light approach did not suggesting that we need to be cautious in encouraging more mindful tourists and a more mindful tourism as the consequences cannot always be predicted.

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