The word Patanjali actually used
Patanjali introduces Ishvara Pranidhana three times across the Yoga Sutras, in the Niyamas of Sadhana Pada, and twice more in the context of samadhi. The repetition is deliberate. Pranidhana comes from the Sanskrit root ni-dhana, meaning to place down, to deposit, to lay something at a specific location with intention. Ishvara, in Patanjali's framing, is not a personal god in the devotional sense of the Puranas. The sutras describe Ishvara as a special kind of purusha, consciousness untouched by the kleshas, by karma, by the fluctuations of time. What Pranidhana asks you to do is place your actions, your will, your fruits of effort, at that, not in the sense of throwing them away, but in the sense of orienting them toward something that does not distort them.
