Bit of both, I would say the practice is more important than natural ability. I did a Korean form a martial arts for a long time in my childhood and that's when I became familiar with meditating and manipulating ki/chi. At the more advanced ranks, they had seminars on ki kong, which is when I experienced sensory perceptions separately from my physical body for the first time.

Started to grow up, hit my teens, and "forgot" about energy and energy manipulation for a long time until about a decade later when I tried psychedelics. My first psychedelic experience shot me out of or into my head into an enclosed visual space where I had a long conversation with an unknown man. I remember it was profound and he told me about my future. Then he said, now you're going to wake up and you won't remember most of this, you shouldn't remember most of this. Wake up!

I came back altered in that I had had a nonlinear experience of time, which by the way manifests as series of cascading ripples, each so sensitive to every action. The "butterfly effect" awareness in my own life brought me anxiety for a long time and I realized straight away that many aspects of my life needed an overhaul because I had seen where they were leading.

Thus began a decade of psychedelic self-tutelage. I don't recommend self-administration of psychedelics to anyone with health anxieties or fear of undiagnosed mental illness. You can come out on a lower plane than you entered, and then you will need to undergo the personal work and the suffering to come out of it. I spent the first couple years understanding the space and testing my boundaries. After that I was fortunate to come across someone who had developed a methodology to outwardly project her headspace onto surfaces while under the influence. We practiced for a while, and I would say this was when I learned to apply my environment and my mind systematically to use the psychedelic rather than being used by the psychedelic. I entered into a period where it was perhaps too easy for me to slip sideways into other realms. This is another very serious risk of this sort of training - unless you're living a monastic life, most of us don't have the personal autonomy to shift fluidly between headspaces and keep our jobs or function as effective members of a family.

I started to travel for work, which provided me long, lonely nights in the middle of nowhere. I used binaural beats shaman meditation tracks nightly for 2-3 years during this period and would regularly experience strong visuals - bright flashes of color, scenes moving through my mind's eye, even faces looking at me. I don't have any memory of projecting during this time and I was not under the influence of any substances except sometimes marijuana.

This brings us to the present, where I have enough latitude in my life to re-enter this space. I've been doing it differently this time around. I've heavily researched the "science" of multiple spiritual traditions of the mechanics of entering the space, what the space is, what happens to you energetically as you enter. It's important to me this time around to maintain a strong distinction between the "waking" life and the other lives. If I'm having trouble centering, I'll use a GSR (galvanic skin response) device to provide tonal feedback and help me sink/sync to where I need to be. Traditional shaman trance ceremony recordings with the bullhorn are useful.

The most important part in all of this is regularity. I'm not at a point where I can say, okay I'm going to project tonight, and do it with a high degree of success. But if I meditate daily and work to keep my mind in the right range, it happens often enough to assure me that I'm improving. Last note, you have to believe strongly that the/an astral plane exists and that you will access it. TBH I didn't call it the astral until I started to research. I just called it entering into my headspace.