What is the point of prostrations? Why does what I do with my body matter?

So what is a prostration? Man is a psychosomatic being. He's soul and body knit together. So the things that we do with our body are also a reflection of the state of our soul. That's why we make the sign of the cross. It is a real, tangible experience for us to do this, and it has an effect on our souls. Even to the point where you will have catechumens who are new to the church, they'll wake up and have a nightmare, or they'll sense an evil spirit or something is bothering them, they'll make the sign of the cross, and immediately it will vanish or disappear. So the sign of the cross is a tangible experience, but it doesn't mean that it doesn't have a spiritual implication. In our culture we have an underpinning of Neoplatonism, where the physical and the spiritual realms are divided. This is Platonism. In the Christian vision, God became a man. This is the gospel of St John, at the beginning of John's gospel, where he says, the word became flesh. Now, people in our culture, they talk about the word, they think it's the Bible became flesh, the word of God. That's not what that means. In Platonic philosophy, of which he was speaking to, the word was logos, which was the divine rational principle of the universe. That's how it was actually defined. So you have to be a little bit of a student of philosophy to understand that. But the reason that it was so strange to the Greeks is because they had a spiritual-physical divide, where the spiritual was greater than the physical. You often hear people say, my soul is trapped in my body. Real Christianity is the understanding that the soul and the body, the immaterial and the material, are knit together. They are one. So everything that we do with our body, the prostrations, these actions of humility, of bowing down, it has a spiritual implication and affects us spiritually as well, not just physically. The two of those things cannot be divided in any way, shape, or form. And so prostrations basically are an offering of worship to God by humbling ourselves and by causing ourselves a little bit of discomfort. They are a way of manifesting our faith and struggling and showing reverence to God, and they help us to temper our body, because our body's like, well, I don't want to do prostrations. So we actually are forcing our body into this mode of submission that also affects our soul and helps to humble us.