Making Time for Leisure Means Making Time for Your Health

Making Time for Leisure Means Making Time for Your Health

Between the hustle and bustle of daily life, how many of us make time for leisure? Be it walking, meditating, reading, playing games, or participating in sports, leisure is a way that we can take time for ourselves and relax.

Research has shown the benefits of engaging in meaningful leisure for one’s holistic health. This includes intellectual, emotional, environmental, physical, spiritual, and social needs. Recreation Therapists use a variety of modalities to support purposeful and meaningful interventions based on individual strengths and values.

Recreation Therapists are allied health professionals who work in various settings, including but not limited to older adults, children and youth, community, rehabilitation, mental health, addictions, and education. Recreation Therapists look at an individual's motivation to engage in an activity as it differs from person to person. They focus on person-centred care and ensure therapy is based on who they are to ensure successful outcomes.

Therapeutic recreation can also work in partnership with other healthcare practitioners such as Physiotherapists, Occupational Therapists, Social Workers, Speech-Language Pathologists, Psychologists, and more, all based on the person’s therapeutic goals, making it an important part of a wellrounded health practice.

The Canadian Therapeutic Recreation Association (CTRA) represents the interests and needs of all Recreation Therapists across the country. The CTRA believes in the vision to have therapeutic recreation accessible for all Canadians and works to promote and advance public awareness and understanding of what therapeutic recreation means and how they can make time for it in their health practice and throughout their lives.

At their core, Recreation Therapists look at reducing barriers to wellness, both by making adaptations and adjustments where needed and by using the strengths of the individual to produce a care and treatment plan that is reasonable and impactful. During the pandemic, Recreation Therapists played a vital role in supporting thousands of Canadians' physical and mental care, ensuring that their wellness needs continued to be met no matter what.

Last July, The Canadian Journal of Recreation Therapy (CJRT) Vol. 1 No. 1 (2022) was published by Sagamore-Venture Publishing LLC. CJRT is a semi-annual electronic publication devoted to publishing scholarly and substantive manuscripts in the field of therapeutic recreation/ recreation therapy (TR/RT). The journal works to support excellence and advancement in education and research by illustrating the translation of theory to practice in a variety of settings.

The CTRA’s first in-person national conference since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic will be taking place in Jasper, AB, this May 10-12, 2023, with the theme “Climb, Connect, Celebrate.”

To learn more about CTRA and its profession, please visit our website canadian-tr.org where you can learn about our history, get to know the board of directors, and more.