What do shamans "see" when they look at people?

I can give a description of the human onion.  When, in the shamanic sense, you see people in their totality as energetic beings, the picture isn't as easy to grasp as one might think because other human beings are made up of the same sorts of energy that the shaman is.

It can become very difficult to define exactly where they begin and the shaman ends.  Human beings are like an enormous ball of yarn, but it isn't a continuous filament of yarn, more like billions of tangles ends, areas of concentration, areas that are bright, dark, on in some cases even empty.  You can perceive differences in the way that yarn is gathered in every individual, and even though there are similarities, say in gall bladder energy, it really is different in each individual.  The shaman learns to identify those differences and locate the essence of a given type of energy and it's variations through human forms by experience.  But as we move inward, through the bubble of perception, we find ourselves in contact with energy that is too much for the rational mind to contemplate all at once.

How big is the human energy field, and does a bigger person have a bigger field?

Actually, if you stand up and reach your hands as high as you can, that's about the top of it.  Then outward, probably about six inches bigger than you can stretch your arms out.  What I look for is how they are put together, how intensely they glow.  On larger people, they do tend to extend further, but the outer shell is weaker, less dense.  Children have huge ones compared to their size.  They tend to grow into them.  But in general, they run about that way.

The shell is pretty unimportant; the truth is that we're only nuggets.  Inside, the essence of our consciousness is contained in a very small dense area.  It's a small differentiation, and as far as I can tell doesn't matter.  Who you are is contained in that small little area, it is the area through which you create and maintain your world.  It is connected to all your energy; all the creamy filling, all the sponge cake runs in little lines through it.  If you can't touch upon something with this point of awareness, then you can't access it.