Learning to feel auras and energy fields with your hands is one of the most fundamental skills to acquire when learning to do any work with energy.
Learning to feel an aura with your hands involves calming yourself down and quieting yourself enough to pay attention to the subtle changes you feel in your hands as you pass them several inches over a person.
Different people feel different things; some people feel the energy thermally, as changes in temperature. For these folks, different areas of the aura will feel warmer or cooler, depending on what they are detecting. I know one person who feels heat as her hands pass over an injury or sickness in part of the body, while another friend feels cold when passing over the same location. They are detecting the same energy imbalance, but perceiving it in different ways.
Some people might feel a tingling sensation, or a buzzing, or numbing. Some people feel the aura as either "slick" or "sticky", some people feel the energy as clean or dirty. *shrug* How the energy is perceived is individual, but the energy that is being felt is real, tangible, and verifiable.
To improve your skills in this, you can’t learn it by reading. The best thing is to find a partner to work with. What you and your partner should do is to practice feeling each other's aura, and reporting the sensations you feel as you pass your hands a few inches above your partner. You should eventually be able to "map out" your partner's aura. The aura changes shape, and it's feel changes from day to day. If you have a bruise or other such trivial injury, have your partner practice by trying to find it.
One suggestion: as you practice this, you will be picking up energy from each other, because you are both practicing being deliberately receptive. This is a great time to get in the habit of good spiritual hygiene: Ground and Cleanse yourself after doing this kind of working. You don't need anyone else's psychic clutter clinging to you for the rest of the day. A brief cleansing and grounding simply makes good common sense.
Once you become familiar with feeling the energy surrounding another, you will be able to do many other things with energy, such as magickal workings and healings.
~Flame RavenHawk