I'm about to embark on a 6-month odyssey down the Americas. With two other eco advocates we plan to work in and visit a number of sustainable communities and organic farms to enhance our understanding of what's best for the earth from the ground roots up from the cultures of the Americas.

Avoiding air travel where possible (CO2 emissions alert) we'll be travelling extremely light but we'll need all the tips and advice we can get to fit 6 months worth of luggage into our wee backpacks.

Doing a little wondering today I stumbled across this great little eco travel blog called One Bag, which was voted best blog in the Tripbase eco travel awards category.

One Bag is the perfect resource for all travellers who want to have minimum impact on the environment on their journeys. ‘Overpacking tops the list of biggest travel mistakes' says One Bag. Travelling light is an art and science, one of the best travel skill one can obtain. It can make for a much more relaxed, productive and stress-free experience the blog points out.

The site aims to help convert more people to expert one-bag traveller status. They do this by giving tips on what to pack, what to pack it in and how to pack it (wrinkles are avoidable even in a backpack). One good tip I noted which may be useful given me and my travel partners are covering two continents and 8 countries is to split our luggage up ie half my stuff and half my friends stuff in my bag in case one does get lost in transition.

One Bag also has a Travel Letters page with comments from people who have put its ideas into action (which will hopefully convince even the biggest luggage travellers to slim down.

If you're keen to hear updates of my eco experiences I'll be posting blogs of right here on the So Organic site from September onwards.

To some it's an easy feat, keeping the mind still, maintaining balance and some sense of quietness even amidst a global economic recession and warming planet. For others it's a moment to moment effort to find a purposeful peace with and in each thing they do.

We all need to take breath every now and then; take a break from the activities and mind habits we occupy in the constant turning wheel of daily life. Some break with a beer at the pub, a run in the park or a holiday in sunshine. But these simply pause or distract the mind for temporarily relief.

It is not often we delve deeper or question why we feel the need to ‘break' at all. To give ourselves half a chance to feel real peace and happiness we must give ourselves the space and time to allow it.

Meditation is one of the most effective ways to find your own peace. The art of sitting quietly is not the easiest to master as I recently found out. I recently attended a 10-day Vipassana meditation course and learnt that peace of mind involves a lot of work - but work that's without doubt worth it's while with no pleasure in the world matching peace within yourself.

The Vipassana meditation technique requires noble silence, diligence, strong determination and patience with your own learning. It's better not to have a preconceived idea of what to expect (especially what you'll learn about yourself). Everybody has different experiences, this you will find out on the last day when silence is lifted.

Anyone can do the course; people from all walks of life travel from afar. I shared a room with a chemical engineer from Israel, and talked to a girl from Mongolia studying nutrition, a French Senegale child immigration lawyer, a technology artist from London, a Viennese English teacher and a mother of two from Scotland. All ages, all races, all seeking a more focused and balanced mind.

Courses are free. Facilities at the Darma Dipa centre I attended were simple but clean and tranquil. Hot water, a warm bed, delicious vegetarian food and woodland to wonder in. But a take caution: a Vipassana course is no holiday. It is work. Working solely on eradicating the mind of impurities that distract us from our own happiness - 4am wake-ups and an arduous day of meditation sits is what's on offer.

If us organic-ites really want to contribute positively to the health of our families and our planet we can only do it with genuine intention. The stronger the intention the stronger the effect; the more peaceful the mind, the stronger that intention will be.

If you would like do a Vipassana course in the UK visit www.dipa.dhamma.org

One more thing - the approach taught by teacher S.N.Goenka is non-sectarian so you can be assured no religious beliefs are pushed. It is simply a meditation course in learning the art of living.

I was shopping in earth-friendly organic clothes retailer Howies on Carnaby Street store and came across this small pocket sized fold out leaflet titled, in green, ‘DO Lectures'. That was enough to catch this eco blogger's eyes.

The DO Lectures, I read, work on the theory that ‘people don't forget stories, they forget facts' in the hope that hearing other's journeys of ‘doing good things' will give us the tools and desire to change the things we care about.

Environment, business, design, food, sport and technology - the lectures cover it all
The talks are given away free online at www.TheDoLectures.co.uk or you can book a place at the Do Lectures Event in West Wales, being held from the 3rd to the 7th of September. A £1,000 ticket will get you a place to stay at the magical Fforest farm, all your food and drink, accommodation, workshops, canoe rides and musical entertainments in the eves... oh and of course 20 talks given by 20 amazing doers.

This year's doers include Patrick Holden (director of Soil Association) Paul Deegan (moutaineer who brings people's rubbish back from Everest) Gregor MacLennan (Campaigner for Amazonian peoples' rights), and Gerald Miles (Organic Farmer & GM Activist).

The DO Word (a poem I thought you'd like, as featured on the DO Lectures leaflet)

It's short.
To the point.
Quick to say.
All it's letters do something.
IT loves a deadline.
Despises procrastination.
It's the rapids of a river.
The bubbles in a lemonade.
The kick in caffeine.
It's a small word but does more than almost any other word.
It means the same thing all over the world.
It's most effective when it's got a plan.
It's a word for getting things done.
It means action.
It's all verb.

Over the last six years six of the best national certification bodies have been working on creating a European standard for organic and natural beauty products. The UK's Soil Association, Germany's BDIH, France's COSMEBIO and ECOCERT, Belgium's BIOFORUM and Italy's ICEA make up the European Cosmetics Standard Working Group. They collectively certify over 10,000 products. They've joined forces to help us distinguish between the flimsy marketing claims and the authentic truths of brands that make and sell products in the EU.

Unlike the Soil Association seal of approval products certified by Cosmos will not have to have a minimum organic ingredients. Products certified natural by Cosmos will not be able to contain parabens, phthalates, GM ingredients, and most petrochemical-based ingredients. They will have to use cleaner methods that minimise waste and create fewer by-products. It is not as strict as the Soil Associations organic standard but it is a start and is focused on the beauty and health care industry.

‘What we hope is that as things progress, the "natural" certification should serve as a stepping-stone to companies becoming certified as organic. Any sensible cosmetic company is looking at natural and organic cosmetics now - if they aren't they are getting behind the times,' said Francis Blake, director of Soil Association standards to the Ecologist recently.

The good thing about Cosmos is that it presents a unified EU body that looks specifically at natural skin care products. As more people begin to recognise and understand its significance, they will be able to make a more educated choice between fake natural products and truly natural products.

Look for beauty and health products with the seal of approval - from lipstick to cleansers to homeopathic remedies and essential oils.

For more information about the Cosmos standard click here.

Some of you may have noticed that your favourite natural sunscreen brands like Lavera have changed their sun care packaging and SPF ratings. This is because a new sunscreen labelling regime is being phased in across the EU to give us clearer information on the sunscreen products we buy.

The first thing you should know about the SPF rating on your sunscreen tube is that it is only an indication of the level of protection against Ultraviolet B rays not Ultraviolet A. Both are harmful to your health: UVB radiation is what provokes sun burn and skin cancer, UVA is responsible for ageing, impacts the immune system and contributes to skin cancer. A good sunscreen should provide coverage against both.

Sunscreen packaging labels with ‘broad spectrum' and ‘contains UVA filters' on them have made it difficult for us to know whether a product also protects adequately against both UVA as well as UVB radiation.

A sun protection factor (SPF) is a score that measures the strength of the cream against UVB radiation not UVA. So in order to help consumers choose the sunscreen with the most truly broad protection the European Commission and Colipa (The European Cosmetics Association) have proposed that the level of UVA protection provided by a product is at least 1/3 ratio of its SPF. Manufacturers must show their products meet the SPF/UVAPF ratio by displaying UVA in a circle on their packaging.

This is why some of your favourite sunscreens appear to be unavailable. Lavera's Sun Neutral SPF40 Sun Cream has new packaging and new name to SPF20 Sun Cream. The actual product formulations and ingredients are very similar - the difference being they also contain zinc oxide (highly effective product to block UV).