About Holistic Sanctuary: Fifteen Years of Doing This the Hard Way — On Purpose
A licensed, physician-supervised healing center on the coast of Mexico, built around a single idea that almost no one else in this industry is willing to operate on: three to five clients at a time, every session one-on-one, for as long as it actually takes.
Written by Johnny Tabaie, Founder & Director of Operations · Medically reviewed by Dr. Jose A. Jimenez, MD, Medical Director
Published · Last medically reviewed
What This Place Actually Is
Holistic Sanctuary is a licensed healing center in Mexico. We also fund an annual student scholarship for degrees in health-related fields. Dr. Jose A. Jimenez, MD, our Medical Director, medically clears every client before treatment begins and approves the protocol they are placed on. That sentence is deliberately boring, and it is the most important thing on this page.
The plant-medicine field is full of operations that are none of those things — unlicensed retreats in jungles and villas, weekend ceremonies with no physician present, no cardiac screening, no way to intervene if something goes wrong. Ceremony nights follow the format in The Ayahuasca Ceremony, Explained. We built the opposite of that on purpose, and we have been running it since 2011.
The programs here run four to twelve weeks. We do not run a five-to-seven-day detox and we never have. A week is long enough to get someone through acute withdrawal and send them home fragile. It is not long enough to change anything.
The Standard We Refused to Lower
Fifteen years is long enough for almost every operator in this field to quietly loosen something — put more clients in the building than it should hold, shorten the stay, add a group session because it is cheaper than one-to-one staffing. The entire idea behind this facility is that we did not.
Here is what that looks like in practice, and each of these is a cost we chose to carry rather than a feature we invented for a brochure:
- Three to five clients, never more. The facility is 10,000 square feet and holds a maximum of three to five clients at any one time on the Gold Package. The Platinum Package takes the building down to a single client. On either one, every ceremony and every therapy session is delivered one-on-one.
- No groups, no 12-step, no talk therapy as the spine of the program. Those models work for some people in some settings. They are not what we do, and pretending otherwise to widen our market would make us like everyone else.
- Medication-free as the destination. We do not move people from one prescription onto another and call it recovery.
- In-house, medically supervised tapers. Where someone arrives on benzodiazepines, opioids, or psychiatric medication, the taper happens here, under medical supervision, on a schedule set by the body in front of us — not outsourced to a detox facility down the road.
- Ceremony last, never first. Plant medicine sits at the end of a sequence, not the beginning of one.
Why the Sequence Matters More Than the Substance
The question we get asked most often is about ibogaine, or ayahuasca, or 5-MeO-DMT — which one, how much, how soon. It is the wrong question, and the answer we give disappoints people who came looking for a shortcut.
Nothing happens on day one. The first phase is medical: bloodwork, EKG, cardiac evaluation, a full picture of what is in someone’s system and what their heart can tolerate. Then stabilization, nutrition, sleep, and where necessary a supervised taper that can take weeks on its own. Only after all of that does a ceremony happen — and ibogaine, the compound with the most serious cardiac profile of anything we work with, always comes last in the sequence.
That ordering is not caution for its own sake. Published outcome data on ibogaine for opioid dependence comes from settings with medical screening and supervision.2 The screening is not the boring part before the treatment. It is part of the treatment.
The Record, Stated Plainly
These are the facility’s own operational figures. We report them as our record, because that is what they are — they have not been independently audited, and we are not going to dress them up as something they are not.
More than 5,000 supervised ceremonies since 2011. Every one of them one-on-one, with a medically cleared client and nursing cover on site.
More than 30,000 hands-on clinical hours accumulated by the founder across the life of the facility.
Zero serious incidents. In a field where the serious incidents that do occur almost always trace back to the absence of screening or supervision, this is the number the whole model exists to protect.
What Runs Alongside the Ceremonies
Most of a guest’s time here is not spent in ceremony. It is spent in the unglamorous work that makes the ceremony worth anything: nutrition, sleep repair, IV protocols, hyperbaric oxygen sessions, red light, movement, and one-to-one time with staff.
Hyperbaric oxygen therapy is a good example of how we talk about all of this. HBOT has a defined list of indications approved by the Undersea and Hyperbaric Medical Society, and addiction is not on that list.3 We use it here as a supportive therapy, and we say so. The full component-by-component breakdown lives on the Pouyan Method page.
Who Is Actually in the Building
A licensed facility is a staffing decision before it is anything else. The building is 10,000 square feet and never holds more than three to five clients at a time, and the people working in it outnumber the people being treated in it. That ratio is the single most expensive commitment described on this page.
Dr. Jose A. Jimenez, MD is our Medical Director, and his role is oversight and review rather than day-to-day treatment. He is a visiting physician rather than a full-time in-house doctor, and he does not perform procedures on site. What he does is the part that decides whether anything happens at all: he reviews the cardiology workup, the stress test, the EKG, the X-rays, the bloodwork and the analysis, he approves stem cell work, and he medically clears — or declines to clear — each client for ibogaine, ayahuasca and DMT.
Day-to-day care is delivered in-house by our own clinical team. Nursing cover runs 24 hours a day across a morning shift, an evening shift and two to three night shifts, with at least four nurses on duty across a 24-hour period. Three ER doctors rotate through the facility, reviewing bloodwork, medically supervising the ibogaine treatment, and signing off on protocols involving stem cells, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, cholesterol and tapering off prescribed medication. An ER doctor is also brought in for other plant-medicine sessions whenever a client is frail, medically compromised, or otherwise needs critical-care cover present in the room. Around them sit the practitioners who run the IV, hyperbaric, light and bodywork sessions; a kitchen that cooks to a nutritional plan rather than a menu; and the facilitators who sit with a client through a ceremony and, more importantly, through the hours afterward when the actual processing happens.
Nobody here is running a caseload. There is no rotation of counselors and no shared curriculum, because with three to five clients in the building each one has their own schedule rather than a place in somebody else’s. When we say one-to-one, we do not mean an hour of individual attention bolted onto a group day. We mean every ceremony and every therapy session delivered one-on-one, in a private room with a private bathroom, on a plan built for that person.
Johnny Tabaie, who founded the facility and directs operations, is still personally involved in every admission. He is not a physician and makes no clinical decisions; that separation is set out in full on his professional profile.
The Week Before You Arrive
Admission here begins with the review most facilities carry out after a deposit clears. We do it before.
We ask for a complete medication list — doses, durations, and every prescriber involved — along with recent bloodwork, cardiac history, and any psychiatric diagnoses already on file. Where the picture is incomplete we arrange the missing tests rather than guess at them. Cardiac screening in particular is not negotiable, because the sequence ends in compounds that require a heart somebody has actually looked at, and because the published outcome literature on ibogaine comes from screened, supervised settings rather than improvised ones.2
That review settles three things: whether the model fits at all, how long the program needs to run inside the four-to-twelve-week range, and what the taper looks like on day one. Someone arriving on a high benzodiazepine dose and someone arriving on alcohol alone are not on the same program, and the difference is worked out before either of them books a flight.
Then there is the unromantic half of it: travel, documents, arrival timing, what to bring and what to leave behind. We handle that end directly, because a person in the state most people are in when they first call should not also be managing logistics.
What Happens After You Leave
Four to twelve weeks is long enough to change a physiology. It is not long enough to change a life on its own, and we would rather say that plainly than sell a departure date as a finish line.
Before anyone leaves, the closing phase of the program is spent on the return itself: what the first month at home looks like, which routines and relationships are load-bearing, and what to do on the day the old solution starts making sense again. Where continued support is needed we help arrange it locally, rather than pretend that distance care from Mexico is the same thing as care.
We stay reachable afterward. Guests contact the facility months and years later, and that line does not close at discharge. What we will not do is promise permanence. Outcomes differ from person to person, not everyone responds, and any program that offers you the rest of your life in advance has stopped being honest with you.
What We Do Not Claim
This section exists on every serious page we publish, and it is the part we would ask you to read twice.
We do not cure anything. Nothing we do has been evaluated by the FDA. We are not a pharmaceutical trial, our protocol has not been through randomized controlled testing, and the published research we cite — on ibogaine, ayahuasca, psilocybin, 5-MeO-DMT — is research into individual compounds, not into our program. Some of it is preliminary by the authors’ own description.
When Eli Lilly agreed in July 2026 to acquire AtaiBeckley for up to $3.8 billion, with a synthetic 5-MeO-DMT nasal spray at the center of the deal,1 that told us the direction of institutional research had caught up with a hypothesis formed here in 2007. It did not tell us our protocol had been validated. Those are different sentences, and we intend to keep them different. The long version of that argument, with every study cited, is in The Two-Decade Head Start.
Individual results vary. Some people do not respond. We would rather say that here than have you find it out later.
Where to Go From Here
If you want the method itself, component by component, start with the Pouyan Method.
If you are dealing with a specific dependency, the condition pages go deeper than this one can: benzodiazepine recovery, ibogaine treatment, and luxury alcohol rehab.
And if you want to know who built this and why, that story is not on this page by design. It belongs to the person who lived it: meet Johnny Tabaie, or read his full professional record.
Admissions open 24/7
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References
- Eli Lilly to acquire AtaiBeckley for up to $3.8 billion — Psychedelic Alpha, July 2026. https://psychedelicalpha.com/news/breaking-worlds-largest-pharmaceutical-company-eli-lilly-acquires-5-meo-dmt-developer-ataibeckley-for-up-to-3-8-billion/
- Noller GE, Frampton CM, Yazar-Klosinski B. Ibogaine treatment outcomes for opioid dependence from a twelve-month follow-up observational study. Am J Drug Alcohol Abuse. 2018. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28402682/
- Undersea and Hyperbaric Medical Society — approved indications for hyperbaric oxygen therapy, including clostridial myonecrosis, necrotizing soft-tissue infections, and delayed radiation injury. https://www.uhms.org/resources/hbo-indications.html
Medical disclaimer: This article describes published research findings and the facility’s reported operational history. It does not constitute medical advice, and nothing herein has been evaluated by the FDA. Holistic Sanctuary does not diagnose, treat, or cure disease. Individual results vary. All ceremonies and medical procedures are conducted under licensed medical supervision in Mexico.