Tourism theory frequently represents travel as an individualized project of escape, self-discovery, authenticity, and personal transformation. Although these accounts have generated durable insights, their underlying image of the tourist as an autonomous subject may obscure forms of well-being constituted through shared presence, obligation, care, and return. This conceptual article develops *ginhawa*, a Filipino idea encompassing embodied ease, relational continuity, and relief from constriction, as an alternative framework for interpreting tourist experience. It argues that tourism may facilitate movement from *sikip*, or embodied, temporal, material, and relational constriction, toward *luwag*, an opening of capacity, through the interdependent processes of *pahinga*, or embodied-temporal restoration, and *pakikipagkapwa*, or relational recognition and shared personhood. The article contributes to critical tourism studies by showing how concepts developed outside Euro-American theoretical traditions can revise, rather than merely diversify, accounts of tourist well-being.

SSP2 course UNIL