Ishvara Pranidhana
īśvara-praṇidhānaSurrender, devotion, or offering the practice up: the fifth niyama, and the most openly religious phrase in the studio vocabulary.
The fifth observance is devotion to īśvara, the "special Self" the Sutras describe as untouched by trouble:
Ishvara (the Supreme Ruler) is a special Purusha, untouched by misery, actions, their results, and desires.
The original Sanskrit
kleśakarmavipākāśayair aparāmṛṣṭaḥ puruṣaviśeṣa īśvaraḥ
The Sutras offer this devotion twice: early on, as a direct route to concentration, and again in the observances, with its result stated flatly:
Or [concentration] is attained by devotion to the Igvara.
The original Sanskrit
īśvarapraṇidhānād vā
By sacrificing all the Ishvara comes Samadhi.
The original Sanskrit
samādhisiddhir īśvarapraṇidhānāt
How theistic you take this is between you and the text. What the text itself claims is the mechanism: giving the practice to something larger than the self settles the self.