A prostration is when you go all the way down to the floor in prayer. You kneel, touch your forehead and hands to the ground, then rise. It’s a physical act of repentance and worship that engages your whole body in what your heart is trying to say to God.
The word comes from the Greek metanoia, which means repentance. That tells you everything you need to know about what’s happening. You’re not just bending over. You’re showing with your body what repentance looks like, lowering yourself, acknowledging your need for mercy, turning away from sin and toward God.
Two Types of Bows
We actually use two different gestures, though people sometimes call both of them metanias.
A metania (or little bow) is when you bend from the waist and reach your right hand toward the floor. You make the Sign of the Cross before or after. This is what you’ll see people doing throughout most services.
A full prostration is the whole thing. Both knees on the ground, forehead and hands touching the floor. It’s the most complete form of bodily prayer we have. When the priest says “let us complete our evening prayer unto the Lord” during Great Lent and everyone goes down, that’s a prostration.
When We Do Them
You’ll see prostrations most during Great Lent. Weekday services in Lent are full of them, after certain petitions, during the Prayer of St. Ephraim the Syrian, at specific moments in Vespers and Compline. They mark the penitential character of the season. We’re fasting, we’re repenting, we’re preparing for Pascha. The prostrations make that visible.
But here’s the thing. We don’t do full prostrations on Sundays. Ever. Even during Lent.
Sundays are always a little Pascha, a celebration of the Resurrection. The Church has taught from ancient times that you don’t prostrate on the Lord’s Day because it’s a day of joy, not mourning. Same goes for the fifty days between Pascha and Pentecost. No prostrations during that whole festal period. We’re celebrating Christ’s victory over death. Stand up.
On those days, if the service calls for a reverent gesture, you’ll do a metania (the waist bow) instead.
What It Means
Fr. Alexander Schmemann wrote that in Orthodox worship, the body prays. Prostrations are proof of that. You can’t separate your soul from your body when you’re flat on the floor before God. The whole person, all of you, is involved in the act of repentance.
It’s also deeply humbling. If you’ve spent your life in churches where you sit in cushioned pews and maybe stand for a hymn, getting down on the floor feels strange at first. That strangeness is part of the point. You’re not in control. You’re not comfortable. You’re acknowledging that you’re a creature before the Creator, a sinner in need of mercy.
And then you get back up. That matters too. Prostrations aren’t just about falling down. They’re about rising again in Christ. You fall in repentance, you rise in hope. It’s a little icon of the whole Christian life.
If You’re New to This
Don’t panic if you can’t do a full prostration. Maybe your knees don’t work that way anymore after years in the plants. Maybe you’re pregnant. Maybe you’re just not sure you can get back up gracefully. Do a metania instead. Bow from the waist, reach toward the floor, make the Cross. That’s completely acceptable.
Watch the people around you. Follow what the priest and the chanters do. Every parish has its own rhythm, and you’ll pick it up. If the whole congregation goes down, you go down. If they’re doing waist bows, do that. Don’t overthink it.
And if you’re visiting for the first time and you freeze up because you don’t know what’s happening, just make the Sign of the Cross and bow your head. God sees your heart. The people around you aren’t judging you. We’ve all been new.
One more thing. If you’re coming from a Baptist or non-denominational background, this might feel like the most foreign thing you’ve encountered in Orthodoxy. You’re used to sitting and listening, maybe raising your hands during worship songs. Prostrations are different. They’re older. They go back to the Bible, David, Daniel, the apostles all prostrated before God. We’re just doing what the Church has always done, using our bodies to pray because we believe bodies matter. God became flesh. Flesh is good. So we use it to worship Him.
