Healing the mind and soul through meditation pilgrimage: Understanding recreation specialization, attention restoration, and emotion regulation

Meditation has largely been associated with its religious connotation in the tourism literature. The present research steers away from that tradition to focus on meditative practices as a leisure activity. It addresses the literature void by conducting a survey study on meditation tourists who participated in a 7-day meditation excursion. Based on attention restoration theory and the two-factor theory of emotion, this research contributes to the literature by underscoring a theoretical synthesis of the transformative potential of meditation on tourists' psychological and emotional wellness. It moves beyond the religiously grounded meditation retreat to offer a more generalizable travel phenomenon for body–soul self-improvement. It opens a new avenue for meditation travel by attention restoration through an arousal–cognition perspective. This wellness-related tourism has great potential to gain further popularity for those who have suffered mental and physical stress from the pandemic and other life adversities.