Using your hands to feel energy is very easy to do.
The first thing is to pick a stone and put it into your non prominent hand, just place it in your palm, cup your prominent hand over the stone and close your eyes, closing your eyes is a good way to start as it removes distraction. Then allow yourself to feel whatever is there without any preconceptions, this is important because you need to be open to whatever you are picking up, it could be a cool breeze, a feeling of mountains. Do this often and use different objects stones leaves, it does not take long.
The next step is to practice with your eyes open, and then have some fun, pick a crystal or stone that you feel drawn to and have someone place other stones and crystal around a table with your chosen stone amongst them, and with your eyes closed (no peeking) use your hand to find your stone by sensing the energy. Once you have worked this way it can be used for just about everything.

An interesting thing is that you learn to trust the connection, one of the things that I do is cut stones, I wanted to repair damaged crystal that I had found and or bought, but I didn't want to redo them and have the energy in them damaged, so I Decided that I would feel a cold spot on my hand when I was over the axis, and so I started to play with some of my crystal putting my hand over the termination and it felt cold.
The next thing was to recut a damaged crystal and as I discovered when they are damaged the energy out of the termination was cool but not cold, as the cutting took place and each face was gently cut I would check with my hand and the cool went to cold, but not only that but the cold went from say a 1\2in.circle to a pin point the more I worked with it. Just love it when a good plan comes together.
A short while later a friend came to visit and while telling him about my adventure he picked up a crystal and put his hand  over the termination and happily said "Yes your right you can feel the coldness over the termination," but he had only heard that it could be felt, he didn't listen to me saying that I HAD DECIDED that it was what I would feel. So you can be told something is so and if you go along with that it is true for you - but  - you can also decide for yourself.

I have even had a stones tell me how they wanted to be cut, by not doing what I wanted and  refusing to be turned into something it did not want to be, one in particular, a piece of Lapis that didn't seem very good in color so I decided to turn it into a donut, it cut and polished into a circle but when I tried to drill a whole in the center the diamond drill would not do any more than make a mark on the surface, so I sat with it in my hands wondering what was going on, a couple of day later I picked it up again and had the idea to inlay an Eye of Horus in the center of it, now how would I do thins as I had never before inlayed anything, and the stone would not drill days before, so I polished up the marks made by the drill and drew an outline on the Lapis, and then took to it with a diamond bit again, and what do you know it cut perfectly, even the inlay worked, and so I finished it off with a piece of silver around the edge up to hold it. Every time that I wear that pendant people do not look at my face they look at it, also on the reverse side I had not noticed that there was an owl in pyrite.