Monica Basile, PhD (she/her) is a Certified Professional Midwife, Reiki Master-Teacher, Licensed Massage Therapist, and visual artist living in Iowa City.
With more than 25 years of experience as a healer, midwife, and educator, she is passionate about helping people to experience beauty, enchantment, connection to the earth, and inner peace through honoring the seasonal and cyclical transformations of life.
Drawing on her ongoing herbal studies and lifelong connection with plants, her art practice currently focuses on botanical illustrations as meditations on the spiritual-material interconnectedness between humans and ecosystems.
Monica is a mother and a longtime yoga and meditation practitioner. She believes in the power of gentle compassion, the wisdom of the body, and the light within all beings.
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As a child, I was never without pencils and paint, and I spent my youth taking every available art class.
As a teenager In the 1990s, as part of the feminist riot grrrl movement, I created zines and comics, and I studied printmaking and book arts as an undergraduate at the University of Nebraska-Omaha.
My subsequent work has explored childbirth, maternal embodiment, and the spiritual-material interconnectedness between humans and ecosystems.
My current art practice focuses on botanical illustrations, paintings, and linocut prints as meditations on the simple magic of nature.
More about my work
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My journey into birth work began with the home birth of my son in 1994. As a teen single mother, I was fortunate to receive excellent care from a skilled and sensitive midwife, whose respectful guidance allowed me to experience birth as a sacred, transformative event. This inspired me to help others in their journeys through pregnancy, birth, and parenthood.
I began as a childbirth educator and doula in 1995, specializing in inclusive support for nontraditional parents and families. I started formally studying midwifery in 2007. I’ve been a Certified Professional Midwife since 2012, and am an approved preceptor with the North American Registry of Midwives. I am no longer attending births as an on-call midwife, but I continue to offer childbirth education.
I believe that birth can be both safe and sacred, and that everyone deserves access to respectful, evidence-based, culturally congruent care.
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I’ve always been drawn to the power of caring touch. I’ve been working with Reiki since 1995, and have been a Reiki Master/Teacher since 2014. I am also a Licensed Massage Therapist, and have completed extensive training in Craniosacral Therapy for infants.
I am a certified prenatal yoga instructor, a dedicated practitioner and teacher of mindfulness meditation, and have been studying herbalism and working with plants for roughly 30 years.
I believe that people are for loving, not for fixing. I encourage self-acceptance as the foundation for growth and healing, rather than self-improvement.
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I hold a PhD in Gender, Women’s and Sexuality Studies from the University of Iowa, where I continue to teach. As an interdisciplinary scholar, my areas of interest include: feminist theory, the anthropology of childbirth and reproduction, women's health activism, postcolonialism and antiracism, and the history of medicine.
My 2012 doctoral dissertation, Reproductive Justice and Childbirth Reform: Doulas as Agents of Social Change, examines the roles of doulas as advocates for reproductive and social justice.
I am committed to engaged scholarship, and I’m happy to speak about doulas, midwifery, reproductive justice, or the history and politics of childbirth in classes, groups, or educational events.
Raven and Magnolia represents the non-dualism and interconnectedness of light and darkness, waxing and waning, ebb and flow.
Raven and Magnolia is a symbolic invitation to appreciate the simultaneous complexity and simplicity of a leaf or a petal. To take a breath and feel the same magic in your own body. To find self-acceptance and compassion in the dark and difficult seasons, resting in the knowledge that change is the nature of all things.
